Not long after President Joe Biden tasked Kamala Harris with addressing the migrant crisis unfolding on the southern border, the vice president decided to pay a visit to Guatemala and Mexico to study the “root causes” of the crisis. “We must,” she noted, “understand that there’s a reason people are arriving at our border and ask what is that reason and then identify the problem so we can fix it.”
The trip, and the rhetoric, were a transparent partisan effort to deflect attention from the chaos and link the migrant crisis to leftist preoccupations such as climate change. But, in fact, the reason hundreds of thousands gather their scant belongings and take the often-dangerous trek to the United States is the same now as it’s been for centuries: They are fleeing poverty, a lack of opportunity, and corrupt and incompetent governance. Some do it legally. Some do not. But the difference is that contemporary Democrats have incentivized lawlessness.
There was, not that long ago, political unanimity around the idea that border security mattered. In the mid-2000s, now-Senate leader Chuck Schumer and now-President Biden both supported an immigration bill that included funding for a border wall — a structure that Nancy Pelosi refers to as an “immorality” these days. Over the past two decades, the Democrats’ rhetoric has devolved from an attempt to balance legitimate, moral concerns regarding the lives of illegal newcomers and security concerns to adopting an untenable position that treats the very idea of a functioning border as if it were an authoritarian invention. After years of conflating illegal and legal immigration, Democrats increasingly sound like people who don’t believe that the idea of citizenship is worth defending.
The goal of migrants heading toward the border — and who can blame them? — is to enter the United States, either by sneaking in or seeking asylum, often failing to show up for a “notice to appear” in court. The Trump administration, attempting to stem the historic numbers of the latter, implemented — rather incompetently, at first — a “zero tolerance” policy. The fenced detention areas that caused so much media uproar, built during the Obama presidency, housed parents charged with entering the country illegally who also claimed asylum after being apprehended. Those adults who opted not to be deported after entering illegally had to wait for adjudication of their case. As tough as it may have been for them, it was a choice. While those cases made their way through the courts, the law prohibited children from being held in the same detention centers as adults, often for their own protection.
As a presidential candidate, Biden argued that any policy “that separates young children from their parents isn’t a deterrent, it’s unconscionable,” describing it as “abhorrent,” and one that threatened “to make us a pariah in the world.” The entire left-wing establishment deployed a similar tone, regularly comparing detention centers to Nazi concentration camps.
How’s it going under Biden? In the first month of the Biden administration, 80,000 people attempted to cross the southern border, more than twice as many as had in January 2020. Since then, the number of migrants has been astronomical. The United States now faces the largest surge of migrants in at least two decades.
The children? A couple of months into his presidency, Joe Biden had double the number of children separated from their parents, though you never would have known it from the media coverage. Lax policies have motivated hundreds of thousands of impoverished people to put their children in often life-threatening situations, not only at the border but in the hands of shady smugglers who exploit the anarchy. Children are now regularly abandoned by smugglers near the border in perilously remote sections of Texas and New Mexico hoping they will be picked up by American border guards. In one month, nearly 20,000 unaccompanied minors crossed the southern border into the United States (and none of this is to even mention the drug trafficking and other criminal enterprises associated with lax border control). Does anyone believe this is a moral improvement?
One of the first actions of the Biden administration was to shut down border wall construction. Biden then scrapped the “Remain in Mexico” policy that impelled migrants to wait in that country while their claims were being adjudicated in court (until finally, the administration was forced by a court to reinstate the policy). In the Migrant Protection Protocols agreement, which Biden also canceled, Mexican officials promised to keep Central American migrants inside their country while their refugee status was being decided, easing border pressure. Biden also left an agreement with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras that allowed the United States to send migrants to claim asylum if they passed through those nations on their way to the U.S.
Now, if illegal immigrants make it into the country undetected, Democrats are working to attain legal status for them — though millions of others around the world, who follow the prescribed process, wait years for such an honor. If illegal immigrants can make it to California, the state may soon cover their healthcare costs. If they can make it to cities such as Los Angeles, the police promise to refuse to cooperate with ICE officials. In New York City, they can now vote and participate in democracy. Every year, it seems, liberals are less interested in the concept of citizenship.
Democrats underestimate the anxiety, anger, and backlash porous borders trigger among the populace. It is not unreasonable to suggest that illegal immigration was a major reason Donald Trump was able to win office in 2016. And it took Trump, who made it a centerpiece of his campaign and presidency, three years to get the problem under some control.
Even with a slew of other serious missteps dogging the Biden administration, its pitiful performance on the southern border has generated brutal poll numbers. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that only 35% approve of the administration’s handling of immigration. A Harvard-Harris poll found that 67% believe Biden was wrong to end “Remain in Mexico,” and 54% say his administration has created an “open border” rather than simply enforcing immigration laws more humanely. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 69% of Hispanics disapproved of Biden’s handling of immigration.
Can anyone imagine what polling would look like if Biden was covered with the same tenacity as Republican presidents? How many voters are aware that Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the DHS all knew that caravans of Haitian migrants were traveling through South and Central America toward the border last year and did nearly nothing to prepare? How many know that though the Biden administration promised that the 15,000 Haitian migrants who had built a shantytown under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, were being “swiftly” deported, large numbers were released into the United States? The Biden administration chartered 70 flights transporting Haitian migrants from the southern border to Jacksonville, Florida, in the middle of the night. In a single week late last year, border agents detained approximately 28,000 illegal migrants on the border but released 12,000 into the United States.
Imagine if more voters were aware that the Biden administration was considering (and perhaps still is) payments of $450,000 per person affected by the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance border policy. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Biden administration is in talks to pay hundreds of millions to families separated at the border through sue-and-settle policies that end up giving substantial taxpayer-funded payments to illegal immigrants and the leftist ACLU. This isn’t merely an abdication of duty; it is corruption.
Biden invited much of this, quite literally, on himself. “I would, in fact, make sure that there is, that we immediately surge to the border — all those people are seeking asylum,” Biden promised, somewhat confusingly, in 2019 while railing against Trump’s border crackdown. “They deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says, ‘If you want to flee and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.’” The problem is that the expansive definition of oppression now includes poverty. And destitution is not only a persistent feature in many Central American nations, but in many other places on Earth. Some refugees are lucky to be in closer proximity to our border. But do Nigerians or Indians or the Ukrainians not deserve to be heard, as well? True diversity doesn’t entail allowing only a few groups, groups that Democrats believe are their future voters, to dominate our immigration landscape.
It shouldn’t be forgotten either that Democrats have continued to undercut vital, meritocratic ideas that undergird healthy legal immigration. The lure of coming here to make your own way is both the mythos and reality of American immigration. The United States has a long-standing (in spirit, if not always enforcement) policy of refusing entry to any noncitizens who may become a “public charge,” denying them the ability to receive public assistance until they are citizens. When my parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s, they, like millions of others for decades to come, had to promise not to sponge off taxpayers.
When Biden won the presidency, he scrapped the Trump-era-reinstituted “public charge” policies that barred immigrants from participating in welfare programs. Democrats would rather disincentivize work and initiative and, consequently, undercut the dynamic that allows assimilation to work. And when the Supreme Court affirmed the legality of Trump’s policy in 2020, the legal correspondent for Slate magazine called the decision a “human catastrophe,” a columnist at the Washington Post likened it to Hitler-era policies, calling it “a weapon of racism and classism,” and a writer at the New Yorker claimed it was “a throwback to the darker days of rejecting the neediest immigrants, be they Irish, Jewish, queer — or nonwhite.” This was the tenor across most of the American Left.
The truth is that most nonwhite legal immigrants who came from impoverished backgrounds go on to attain higher levels of success than the native population and are never sucked into the generational dependency of the welfare state.
The contemporary Democratic Party, increasingly progressive and untethered from these traditional ideas of American life, even refuses to accept that any traversing of the border can be called “illegal.”
You can’t have a country without a functioning border. Poorly executed immigration policy, if we can even call the impotent attempts to secure the southern border a policy, is an existential threat to long-term security and national cohesiveness. To this point in history, we are the only country to have assimilated a wide range of immigrants successfully on such a massive scale. We are certainly the first to do it in a way that is beneficial for both newcomer and host. This wasn’t achieved by discarding the law or galvanizing people to break in or eliminating expectations that those who do come adopt our norms.
By encouraging people to enter illegally, and then allowing them to ignore court orders, we are not only creating barriers for newcomers, who will struggle to lift themselves out of poverty — we are corroding faith among the host population that immigration, even the legal kind, is working. Every year that we fail to get a handle on the problem, it becomes a bigger threat. There is nothing humane about lawlessness. And that is exactly what we have on our border.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review.
