President
Joe Biden
went fishing in the Rio Grande this week but his line came up empty, without the plaudits he had hoped to hook.
His visit to the Mexican frontier drew attention to the biggest scandal of his two years in the White House. Until now, his media handmaidens acted like it didn’t exist, but once he had dragged TV cameras with him, it was impossible to ignore the policy implosion at the border. He has thus helped the public focus on record-smashing numbers — it’ll be millions again this year —of alien trespassers walking (or wading) unopposed onto American soil.
It’s odd that Biden
thought he’d look
sweetly reasonable by triangulating the crisis. Maybe it’ll play better as his reelection campaign rolls out. But his problem is that people know there is no good way to split the difference between securing and ignoring the border, enforcing and disregarding the law. It’s as though Biden expected praise for stealing a little because he didn’t steal a lot.
He has to make a virtue out of necessity because he needs to get ahead of his
2024 presidential election
rivals and go on offense on his weakest issue. Naturally, he wants Republicans to look bad, so he implies it’s extremist to demand that U.S. citizens decide immigration policy democratically via their duly enacted laws and then expect them to be enforced. Yet he can’t say that in so many words because most people tell pollsters he’s derelict on immigration. They flat-out disagree with his open border policy.
At the same time, Biden needs the Left, which regards the nation-state as an immoral entity — America in particular — and believes border enforcement of any sort violates immigrants’ human rights. Thus, Biden must make sure his base sees he is in favor of migration, and he wouldn’t dream of adding the word “legal” as a qualifier.
Thus, his administration arrives in cloud cuckoo land. His spokeswoman,
Karine Jean-Pierre
, actually said on Jan. 11 that Biden “has done more than any prior president to secure the border and build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”
Biden himself was just as fanciful in Mexico City on Jan. 10 when he said, “Both extremes are wrong. It [my policy] is a basic middle proposition.” By middle proposition he means helping illegal immigrants come here and conning ordinary Americans into thinking this is acceptable.
There is a parallel here with rogue Democratic prosecutors who claim they’re improving crime stats and reducing the number of people in prison merely by refusing to prosecute wrongdoing altogether. If people aren’t being prosecuted, ergo, there is less crime.
Likewise, if illegal immigrants get a two-year parole, they aren’t illegal anymore. But the problem is exactly the same as it was, maybe worse because more migrant waves are encouraged to come (just as non-prosecution encourages more crime).
What is Biden’s rationale? “People have to make it through jungles, and the long journey to the border, and many are victimized not only in terms of what they have to pay, but victimized physically in other ways,” he said. “We’re trying to make it easier for people to get here, opening up the capacity to get here, not have them go through that god-awful process.”
He couldn’t have put it more plainly: immigrants deserve help because there are hardships involved in breaking the law, so he’ll make it easier, less expensive, and less dangerous to do so. That is how Biden thinks he will fix the illegal immigration problem, by making it less illegal and less arduous for immigrants to flood into a country whose actual citizens must then house and care for them.
The optics of Biden’s three amigos meeting with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were bad too. Obrador and Trudeau are out-and-out leftists, so the amigos presented an unbalanced coalition against stanching illegal immigration.
Their rhetoric also struck a dissonant note, with Obrador thanking Biden for building not an inch of border wall, unlike even President Barack Obama, let alone President
Donald Trump
. He also criticized Texas and Florida Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, respectively, for their supposedly inhumane policy of busing immigrants to sanctuary cities.
It was one for all, and all for illegal immigration. If Biden thinks he will get a public relations boost for convening a confab of migrant enablers and yucking it up with them onstage for addressing a public grievance by making it easier, cheaper, and more plentiful, then he is just as out of touch as he appears to be.
