A caravan of 8,000 Central American migrants, which was halted last week in Guatemala, will pose the first big test of Joe Biden’s administration. It’s not a test of Biden’s immigration policy but rather of his resolve and determination to put public safety first.
Biden has promised to reverse most of President Trump’s immigration policy almost immediately. The question the caravan poses is not really about immigration but about whether Biden intends to permit lawlessness, disorder, and avoidable threats to public health amid a raging pandemic, merely in order to show just how pro-immigration he can be.
One of Trump’s underappreciated accomplishments in the area of immigration has been to work constructively with neighboring countries' governments in making it more orderly. As a result of diplomacy, rather than allow forceful, disorderly mobs of untraceable (and potentially infectious) wanderers to risk their children’s lives in dangerous border crossings, the Mexican and Guatemalan governments have started intercepting undocumented travelers and attempting to discourage their mass exodus northward.
The danger now is that migrants will see weakness in Biden’s approach — a willingness to return to the anarchy that existed during the Obama and especially the Bush era.
Biden has won the election and has the power to implement immigration policy. He has already said that he intends to loosen rules governing asylum, to extend the deferred action policy that President Barack Obama put into effect, and, if possible, to put 11 million illegal aliens on an eventual path to citizenship.
To the extent that they were voting on immigration issues, the voters had a chance to back a candidate who argued for the opposite policies — that the importation of cheap labor depresses wages and has other negative externalities, such as gang violence. They chose Biden instead.
But Biden must be careful what he does and says because the world is watching him right now for weaknesses. It will not be an act of compassion if he begins his term by creating additional incentives for people to risk their own and their children’s lives in a mad, chaotic scramble for the U.S. border, creating a humanitarian crisis.
He seems to understand this, at least in part.
“The last thing we need,” he said recently in a press conference, “is to say we’re going to stop immediately the, you know, the access to asylum the way it’s being run now and end up with 2 million people on our border.”
Even in this age of wokeness, law and order still matter. Much like the proposed abolition of the police, “Abolish ICE” is a mantra for extremists, not a sane or sound option for public policy. At a time of international threats to both health and security, Biden must make clear that U.S. immigration laws still apply and will be enforced, uniformly, fairly, and compassionately. He is certain to do immigration his way, and that isn’t Trump’s way. But he must not let it devolve back into the chaos that reigned at the end of Obama's term.
