It’s funny how all the high-minded rhetoric and pretensions to the moral high ground tend to fall by the wayside amid the prospect of a lost election. And by “funny” I mean tragic.
Joe Biden’s all set to issue an executive order calling for the immediate deportation of immigrants from Latin America who cross the southern border illegally, regardless of their asylum claims.
Let me politely ask readers to put aside their personal views on immigration from Latin America for the purposes of this brief update. Because this isn’t actually about immigration, it’s about hypocrisy.
Biden will blame Republicans (and Donald Trump) for stymieing a legislative effort to accomplish the same general goal — i.e., stanching the flow of migrants — but that won’t change the simple fact that he’s effectively re-instituting Trump’s policy. Not only that, he’s using the same legal end-around Trump used for the Muslim Ban.
The order, expected to be signed Tuesday in the presence of mayors from border towns (Optics!), will bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum. That sounds “good” in theory, but as Trump learned, it’s illegal.
The American promise is simple. This country’s a beacon of hope. If you can make it here, you can make your case. If that case is compelling, you can stay. Importantly, it doesn’t matter how you got here if your asylum claim has merit. Whether you swim across a river, hide in a crate of avocados, cling to the undercarriage of an 18-wheeler or drop in on the side of a mountain riding an inflatable raft like Indiana Jones and Short Round, we’ll hear your claim and consider it. Because that’s the humanitarian (i.e., the “right”) thing to do.
Unless of course it’s an election year, border crossings are too high and the incumbent’s trailing, in which case you’re out of luck. “The [Biden] administration decided to move forward with the order after the collapse of a bipartisan Senate agreement, which would have allowed the government to ‘shut down’ the border and expel migrants if crossings surpassed a daily threshold of 4,000,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday, previewing the announcement and adding that the new ban “will be contingent upon a similar daily trigger as in the Senate bill.”
Given that this is manifestly illegal, Biden will have to justify it using Section 212(F), which the Journal helpfully notes is “the same section of immigration law Trump used to ban citizens of Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.”
Of course, this is all PR (i.e., it’s a stunt) and no substance. For one thing, border crossings are down, and apparently didn’t meet the 4,000 threshold last month anyway. More germane, it’s not enforceable. You can’t catch everybody, you can’t house the ones you can catch and then there’s the “small” matter of actually deporting people, an under-appreciated logistical challenge. It’s not as if some magistrate somewhere taps an immigrant on the head with a magic wand and then “POOF!” they disappear and reappear in Guatemala. Finally, asylum isn’t the only type of humanitarian claim.
In any case, political expediency trumps (get it?) the moral high ground every, single time. On Tuesday, Biden will try to explain this flagrantly ironic decision by way of Republican recalcitrance. He’ll be right. But that won’t make the order itself any less wrong.
If I may…
Our leaders have to work with us, the population and we’re morons. TBH, the only reason I like democracy is because we’ve got enough history to show the other systems are worse… therefore, them acting like hypocrites “for the greater good” is forgivable.
And I know you said this wasn’t about immigration but asylum laws seem entirely broken to me. Maybe they made sense long ago. Not anymore. Not when whole population are willing to up and move.
That inflatable raft ride was the best part of the movie.
My recent experience with immigrants: I spent the month of February in south Florida hospitals, recovering from a vacation accident. I don’t speak Spanish, but the hospital staff or myself could open any reasonable translator app on a cell phone and speak into the phone, et voila! (or: Y ahí lo tienes!) everyone could be understood. Sometimes technology is wonderful, just not wonderful enough to explain that immigration is not a bad thing at all.
I had my Arthur C. Clarke moment in spain. I knew Google lens could do translations, so I pulled it up to snap a picture of a menu and translate it. Before I could snap the shutter, the live camera started translating the menu on the fly, and superimposing English over the Spanish words. Like, you couldn’t see the Spanish words anymore, just English, even as you moved the camera around. And that was 2021.
At the same time, my wife speaks Spanish fluently, and serves a largely Spanish-speaking population (despite us living in Pennsylvania). Still, there are people for whom she has to call in a translator. Their accent is just too thick.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the above article. I just felt like sharing and response to your comment.
More to the point,
Damsel in Distress: What’d he say?
Short Round: He say, Hang on lady, we going for a ride!
One problem — arguably the problem, and not just as it relates to immigration reform — is Republicans’ refusal to engage even on their terms. There’s a very real sense in which the GOP seems to believe the only path to political survival for the party is grievance politics and division (and the systematic curtailment of voting rights). Solving problems, even if the solutions are entirely compatible with Republican demands (and in some cases even when the solutions are their proposed solutions), is seen as in some ways detrimental to the cause to the extent solutions are inherently de-escalatory when they need to escalate constantly.
The Republican criticism of the Democrats back in the 90s and aughts was that for them, everything revolved around identity politics. It was very frustrating for Republicans since everyone has an identity, and so long as that identity isn’t upper middle class white male, you undoubtedly feel under represented. The Democratic party could claim to represent those complaints and it was effective.
The Republicans have finally hit on a counter to that strategy with grievance politics. Everyone… even upper middle class white males… has a grievance or three.
A grievance. As well as “dislike” of non-white immigrants, legal or not.
The GOP Southern Strategy has emerged from gestation to almost dominating the country.
George Wallace’s vision is being vindicated.
During the first two years of Trump’s term both the Senate and the House had a Republican majority- yet the Republicans frittered that away- accomplishing very little.
The one thing Republican politicians are clearly in favor and truly act on is less taxation and more subsidies for the ultra wealthy.
The rest is just a show to keep voters distracted. If the goal requires dismantling government, seizing rights, and pursuing a racist theocracy, so be it.
Dems always playing defensive like a bunch of morons
Such a deep comment. Keep them coming. Excellent exposition and handling of facts.
Plus very helpful. Clearly you want folks to vote republican because republicans are illustrious thinkers. Point well made. Bravo.
But WaveDash is right. Ignoring the legality of the order, what is the political benefit of it for Biden and Democrats in general? Is Biden going to get any voters, hard-core about the border, to change their minds from Trump to him? Of course not. H said it best in a comment above–it’s all grievance politics. If the border “issue” was “solved,” Republicans would find something else to complain about non-stop.
It’s not just bad policy, it’s bad politics in response to people who will NEVER vote for Biden or Democrats more generally.
See also: Democrats appointing Republican independent counsels to avoid accusations of partisan weaponinizing of the DOJ, which is exactly what happens anyway. So Republicans actually weaponize the DOJ (Barr), Democats bend over backwards to avoid following in their tracks, then get accused of weaponizing the DOJ anyway. One party would like to try playing fair and the other just wants to flip the board and claim the other side did it.
My question is, what makes this action politically expedient? If the administration believes they are handling the border situation better than the prior administration (e.g., ending remain in mexico), then why take an action in an election year that the prior admin would have done a long time ago?
I’m shocked to see Biden succumbing to political expediency.
But thank god he’s finally doing something about the border. As I sit here in my 14th month of being unable to find a job during our “record low unemployment”, my top priority is to starve to death knowing that impoverished migrants have no route to improving their lives, either.
I think Biden could assign some of the 30,000+ lawyers the Fed govt has to hear asylum claims in the US Embassy in Mexico City or at the 9 consular agencies spread throughout Mexico. Most claims now are rejected by only 500 admin law judges hearing claims. Could increase the 500 to several thousand.
Here’ a juxtaposition for everyone.
Donald Trump, a convicted felon, is walking around slandering everyone he can and the presumptive GOP candidate and is also likely to win the presidency based on current polling. He is unlikely to serve any jail time for his felonious conviction.
A brown person crossing the border can be accused of committing a misdemeanor based on the assumption that they are illegally immigrating to the United States and can now also be extra-judiciously deported based on an assumption of a crime that hasn’t been prosecuted that is again, a misdemeanor in the United States.
No, we don’t have a racism problem here at all. 😐
Of course that other side of the coin is what can be done to help people before they feel they have to leave their home country.