An Exercise in Republican Control

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

 

The Biden administration reopened a Texas “tent facility” to hold migrant children. The election of a Democrat to the White House, accompanied by talk of various reforms and amnesties, has predictably resulted in an increase in the number of migrant children arriving at the border. You probably also noticed that instead of putting words such as “horrifying” or “cages” in their headlines, liberal journalists christened these reopened facilities “temporary shelters.” Which sounds comfortable.

 

There are two messages in this language of “temporary shelters.” First, to the Left, we’re doing it humanely, and it’s just temporary. The second is aimed at the Right: We’re enforcing the law. We swear. We’re enforcing it so hard.

 

You see: Democrats don’t do immigration control at the border. They do Republican control at the border.

 

A recent report in Politico about elected Democrats who want tough enforcement at the border had this as its second paragraph:

 

Biden has not yet implemented expansive policy changes. The vast majority of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are still being turned away. Deportations are still taking place and there’s still no pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

 

See?! See! We’re definitely not protesting too much. But, just to be sure, there’s no need to elect Republicans! It totally shouldn’t remind you of Bill Clinton’s strenuous messaging attempts in legislation, like the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” of 1996.

 

Barack Obama was labeled a “deporter in chief” by left-leaning activists who wanted comprehensive reform and liberalized immigration. News outlets and even think tanks burnished Obama’s credibility as a hard-line enforcer of immigration laws that he did not love. Look at the record number of deportations under Barack Obama! Look at those vicious charts! Oh, it’s awful. But how can Republicans possibly distrust the new commitments to enforce the law that would come along with amnesty? Even Obama is enforcing the law, and boy does he hate it.

 

It was a lie — and they all knew it. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2014 that the administration had juked the stats by defining deportation down:

 

The portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data.

 

Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.

 

Unfortunately, Republican voters didn’t take the bait, and a Republican Congress didn’t either — even though they wanted the issue settled. Not at the cost of their seats!

 

And this is how you can tell it was Republican control. Once Republicans proved non-manipulable, the enforcement was abandoned. The deporter-in-chief, who was actually decreasing deportations the whole time, picked up his pen and his phone and rewrote immigration-law enforcement by executive order.

 

The result: a humanitarian crisis on the border. Human smugglers, seeing their opportunity, promulgated rumors of a “permiso” at the border for children or those crossing with children. All the better for their business. Instead of sending Dad into danger to earn better pay and send the remainder in remissions, bring the whole family into the deserts of Arizona and Texas!

 

The pattern is still here. Politico and Vox are trumpeting the arrival of the Biden administration as a time of stepped-up enforcement. In fact, Biden’s executive orders affecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement “point to fewer arrests, deportations, and a more restrained agency.”

 

So, once again the great game of Republican control begins: The patterns of immigration enforcement noticeably slacken. Word gets out that it is easier to get into the United States, and migration flows pick up dramatically. That creates an opportunity to make it look like more enforcement overall is happening, even when it isn’t. And the media explains to Republicans that “the vast majority” are being turned away.

 

Now the argument will come that, though it pains the Biden administration, and it’s temporary and humane this time, moderate Democrats and Republicans have a duty to liberalize immigration law after all. The border is being enforced; Democrats really believe in it. Can’t you see how mad the pro-immigration groups are? C’mon man.