By Rich
Lowry
Tuesday,
September 12, 2023
‘Worse than
Jimmy Carter” is an epithet Republicans often throw at Democratic presidents.
It’s a
label, though, that Joe Biden clearly deserves on immigration, an area where —
along with inflation and the Afghan debacle — there are echoes of the
Carter years.
Back in
1980, an overwhelmed Carter administration struggled to cope with the Mariel
boatlift, a rapid surge of Cubans into South Florida, just as the hapless Biden
White House is watching the current migrant crisis strain communities around
the country.
A
promising young Democratic governor, Bill Clinton, ended up as collateral
damage when boatlift migrants housed at a fort in Arkansas rioted. Clinton’s
predicament brings to mind the political agony of New York City’s Mayor Eric
Adams and other Democratic officeholders now paying the price for a failed
border policy outside their direct control.
Of
course, the two crises, separated by more than 40 years, aren’t the same. The
scale of the influx today, running into the millions, is much larger than the
boatlift of about 125,000 Cubans; the 1980 crisis largely involved just one
city, Miami; and no foreign leader is manipulating the situation with the
blatant cynicism of Fidel Castro.
No,
rather than a communist dictator flooding the U.S. with migrants out of spite,
it is Joe Biden doing it to himself and his country with his incompetence and
willful negligence at the border.
That’s
not to say that Jimmy Carter wasn’t indecisive and ineffectual. Embarrassed by
thousands of Cubans who crowded the Peruvian Embassy seeking asylum, Castro
said that anyone could leave the port of Mariel as long as someone came to pick
them up, catalyzing a mad dash of Cubans, in boats from Miami, who wanted to
pick up their compatriots.
Carter
equivocated. One day, he said the flow would be cut off; the next day, he said
that “ours is a country of refugees.” The day after those remarks, 4,500 Cubans
arrived, more in a single day than the total number that Carter had talked
about taking in at the outset.
Castro
didn’t literally empty out the jails, as is often said, but he did mix
prisoners and mental-health patients among the migrants. Nicholas Griffin,
author of The Year of Dangerous Days, a book about Miami in 1980,
estimates that no more than 4 percent of the Cubans who arrived were criminals.
Still, that created an unjustly negative impression of all the so-called
Marielitos.
Regardless,
tens of thousands of people showing up with nothing is going to be a burden at
any time and any place. Miami begged for federal aid and used the Orange Bowl
for temporary shelter. Cubans in the community were genuinely openhanded and
intent on helping the newcomers; Martha’s Vineyard, this was not.
But the
governor at the time, Democrat Bob Graham, sounded a lot like today’s Democrats
in areas struggling to cope with the mass arrival of illegal immigrants. Graham
warned of the threat that immigrants “pose in terms of jobs, pressure on
schools, and welfare support,” adding, “We are in a period where national
sympathy for refugees is at a low point.”
Just as
we’ve heard during the current crisis in places such as Chicago, African
Americans in Miami complained about so much focus and energy getting devoted to
people who had just arrived. “The feeling is that the black community was
waiting in line and now our time had come,” an influential black lawyer said. “Only
it hasn’t.”
The
boatlift wasn’t Jimmy Carter’s biggest political problem, but it added to the
sense of things being out of control. “It’s a mess,” Carter said at one point.
“But we’re doing the best we can.” To his credit, he did not add — as his
successor 40 years later might — “and now I’m going to bed.”
In the
fall of 1980, Castro ended the boatlift.
In 2023,
there’s no indication that the man most responsible for today’s crisis, a
president of the United States beholden to his party’s left, wants to stop the
ongoing debacle at the border.
No comments:
Post a Comment