Just 90 miles of water separate Cuban refugees from oppression under a communist dictatorship and the land of the free. Over 1,000 miles of Mexico separate Northern Triangle migrants and cartels. Yet, somehow, the Biden administration has decided to welcome only those from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with open arms.
With the Cuban dictatorship shutting down the nation’s internet, power, and water in response to historic protests from its people, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a warning for would-be refugees considering fleeing to the United States.
“Allow me to be clear. If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” Mayorkas stated. “Again, I repeat, do not risk your life attempting to enter the United States illegally. You will not come to the United States.”
If this is Joe Biden’s way of signaling that he’s not the immigration doormat the first six months of his presidency has proven, he sure picked an awfully odd time to it. Given the political realities at play, it’s hard to believe the collateral damage of his decision is purely coincidental.
Biden inherited a border secured not with a wall, but with his predecessor’s diplomatic deals, which successfully reversed the incentive structure that had attracted people to our border. Under President Donald Trump’s safe third country agreements, migrants seeking asylum from the three Northern Triangle nations had to apply for asylum in the first nation whose border they crossed. The administration’s Remain in Mexico policy prevented overflow in U.S. facilities for asylum-seekers waiting to be processed, obviating the need for the much-disparaged catch-and-release policy.
But Biden recklessly ripped up all of those deals. As a result, encounters along our southern border reported by Customs and Border Protection have more than doubled since Biden took office. He cannot blame this on seasonal trends either, given that crossings are actually up 675% from this point last year. Biden hasn’t signaled he’s trying to restore the safe third country or Remain in Mexico deals. His decision to send Vice President Kamala Harris to El Paso for a few hours doesn’t inspire much confidence that he takes the border crisis at all seriously.
So it’s rather curious that, amid the highest number of migrants flooding the southern borders in two decades, Biden would refuse a class of Cubans who obviously do fit the qualifications for seeking asylum under international law, in contrast to nearly all of the Northern Triangle migrants. And it’s galling as a historical precedent. For half a century, our wet foot-dry foot policy granted safe harbor to any Cuban refugee who made it to our shores, including Mayorkas himself!
Only under Barack Obama’s endless romancing of dictators did the U.S. revoke that policy, promising to repatriate refugees to a regime sure to persecute them.
So why recommit to barring Cubans from the safety of U.S. soil at the moment they need us the most? It’s a golden political opportunity to gain support from the Cuban Americans who overwhelmingly broke for Republicans in 2020. Then one can only conclude that Biden and his team have drawn a moral conclusion that victims of communism are not worthy of the salvation they would give to economic migrants, whom they perhaps see as victims of capitalism. For Biden, the immigration dilemma is not a matter of the number of immigrants but whether he welcomes the right ones.
