National Review Online
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Joe Biden shouldn’t want to begin his administration with
a renewed migrant crisis at the border, but that’s what his priorities risk
creating.
After many false starts — including the zero-tolerance
policy that drove family separations — the Trump administration got a handle on
the border thanks to its “remain in Mexico” policy and “safe third country”
agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
These initiatives closed an enormous loophole in the U.S.
asylum system — undeserving asylum-seekers were able to gain access to our
country, stay here for years while their claims worked their way through
overwhelmed immigration courts, and remain even after their claims were denied
because we lack the capacity (or will) to track and deport them. This running,
de facto amnesty served as a powerful magnet for migrants from Central America.
But the Trump administration managed to get Mexico to
agree to the so-called Migration Protection Protocols. This meant that
asylum-seekers from countries other than Mexico could be made to remain in
Mexico while their claims were adjudicated in the U.S. Also, under the
safe-third-country agreements, asylum-seekers could be sent to Guatemala, El
Salvador, or Honduras (whichever wasn’t their home country) to apply for asylum
there. The theory was that if they were genuinely persecuted in their own
country rather than simply seeking to come to the United States, they’d be
satisfied to apply for asylum in some other nearby country; as it turned out,
not surprisingly, most simply chose to go home when they realized an asylum
claim wasn’t a ticket into the United States.
On top of all of this, the Trump administration began to
tighten up on the lax way that asylum rules have been interpreted. Under the
law, someone is supposed to be eligible for asylum only if he is targeted for
persecution because of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a
particular social group, or political opinion — a definition that shouldn’t
apply to economic migrants or people who fear domestic or gang violence.
Biden is pledging to destroy this entire architecture,
and his
aides have been telling reporters that this is exactly what he will do. The
rollback will court another border crisis that even the most migrant-friendly
administration will be hard-pressed to manage (many of the photographs of cages
at the border that spread on social media to condemn Trump’s policies actually
dated from the Obama years). Biden also may bring into the U.S. the tens of
thousands of asylum-seekers currently waiting in Mexico, which, barring
stringent controls, would likely lead to them staying here forever.
The first question confronting Biden will be whether to
overturn the so-called Title 42 processing that the Trump administration has
been using, citing public-health grounds to quickly return migrants coming over
the border from Mexico. With the agreements with Mexico and Central American in
suspended animation during the pandemic, Title 42 is necessary stopgap that
Biden will come under intense pressure from pro-immigration groups to reverse.
Biden’s immigration agenda isn’t, of course, limited to
the border. He has said that he will issue a 100-day freeze on deportations, a
reckless measure that will stop ICE from deporting illegal immigrants upon
their release from state and local jails. Biden obviously has every intention
of gutting interior enforcement just the way the Obama administration did.
He has promised to restore DACA, the de facto amnesty for
illegal immigrants who were brought here or who came here as minors. This is a
measure that President Obama unilaterally imposed in an abuse of his executive
authority and that President Trump was absurdly prevented by the courts from
reversing. If it is to be the policy of the United States, it should be passed
by Congress.
Biden is also promising to reverse the Trump travel
restrictions on certain mostly Muslim countries, a measure that was largely
symbolic, and increase the number of refugees admitted to the U.S., which has
arguably been too low under Trump, although, at 125,000 a year, Biden is
talking about admitting the most refugees in 30 years.
We were told constantly during the campaign that Joe
Biden was a moderate. It was never true and is blatantly false on immigration.
We can only hope we don’t reap the whirlwind on the border.
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