By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
No, Mr. President, This Is Not the Usual Seasonal
Migration
I told you, back on April 19, that this month’s immigration numbers
were going to be high, and represent a blinking red light. On May 4, I reminded Jen Rubin that no, nothing “happened” to the
border crisis, the media just stopped discussing it. On Monday, I pointed out that the federal government’s official statistics
were undermining Biden’s argument that what Americans were seeing on the border
was just a routine seasonal pattern.
“The truth of the matter is, nothing has changed,”
President Biden insisted in his press conference on March 25. “It happens every
single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people
coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That
happens every year.”
I’m sorry, Mr. President, but that is a load of bull. It
is not a regular seasonal pattern to break a two-decade-old record two
months in a row. In the month of April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
caught 178,622 individuals attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border, one
month after they had caught an eye-popping 173,348 individuals.
The Biden administration is going to try to take a
victory lap over the fact that the number of unaccompanied minors dropped from
159 in March to 134 in April. (That’s what NBC News chose to spotlight in this headline.)
(Over at the Center for Immigration Studies, Andrew Arthur
wondered why it took until May 11 to release the numbers for April. No doubt it
takes time to check and collate all of the data, and as of now, there’s no
indication of any deliberate delay from CBP. But any time that new information
that makes the administration look bad takes a while to get released, some
people will fairly wonder if someone in the chain of command was dragging his
feet.)
On April 30, when asked about March’s numbers, Biden
insisted in an interview with NBC News, “Look, it’s way down now. We’ve now gotten control.” But the
April numbers are not way down; they’re up a bit over the previous month’s
record. At the time of that interview, did Biden genuinely believe that CBP
encounters at the border had dramatically declined? (The other day a commenter
on our site had a good observation: Biden’s usual reflexive denial of making a
mistake and his habitual fuzziness with the facts make it very tough to tell
when he’s lying, when he’s misinformed, and when he’s having any memory
issues.)
Biden told NBC News that he “inherited a Godawful mess”
from Trump at the border, but in January, CBP had only 78,443 encounters at the
southern border. The first big jump came in February when it rose to 101,120,
and then it continued rising into March. Hey, what happened in late January?
These are cold, hard numbers which prove that Biden’s
assessment of the situation in late March was completely wrong. Whether or not
Biden wanted to tell Central America that the border is open, his first moves
on immigration — halting construction of border fencing, new guidelines to ICE agents to sharply curb arrests
and deportations, an attempted moratorium on deportations, proposing a path to
citizenship — all sent a signal to migrants and human traffickers that the door
was wide open and everyone was welcome.
Recall this anecdote at the border, reported in the New
York Times in mid March:
Jenny Contreras, a 19-year-old
Guatemalan mother of a 3-year-old girl, collapsed in a seat as Mr. Valenzuela
handed out hand sanitizer.
“I did not make it,” she sobbed
into the phone as she spoke with her husband, a butcher in Chicago.
“Biden promised us!” wailed
another woman.
Many of the migrants said they had
spent their life savings and gone into debt to pay coyotes — human smugglers —
who had falsely promised them that the border was open after President Biden’s
election. [Emphasis added]
There is only one way that people in the poorest and most
isolated communities in Central America will disbelieve the false promises of
human smugglers and coyotes and understand that the border is not open. It
requires the U.S. president to send a clear signal, loudly, frequently, and
publicly, that U.S. immigration laws are still enforced, and that those caught
crossing the border illegally will be criminally charged and quickly deported.
I suspect that deep down, Biden and many other Democrats think those actions are
inherently mean and unjust. This is why half the Democratic presidential field supported a
repeal of the criminal statute for entering the country without permission.
Additionally, almost all Democrats believe illegal immigrants should be covered
by a government-run health-care plan, and they’re iffy at best on the use of
E-Verify.
Many Biden supporters will insist that a continuing wave
of migrants wasn’t the intended consequence of his early actions on
immigration, and many Biden foes will insist this was precisely the intended
consequence of his early actions on immigration. But that argument is almost
moot; the waves of migrants are coming — and still coming.
Usually, a Record Number of Job Openings Would Be Good
News
Yesterday, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of job openings across the
country had reached 8.1 million, the highest that the agency had ever
recorded.
On Monday, President Biden said, “Families — families who
are just trying to put food on the table, keep a roof over their head — they
aren’t the problem. We need to stay focused on the real problems in front of
us: beating this pandemic and creating jobs.”
But the BLS numbers show we’re already doing pretty darn
well at creating jobs, or at least creating job openings. An
economy in which there are a record number of job openings is not one that is
sluggish, or struggling, or that desperately needs another round of stimulus
spending. What it needs are the currently nonworking job applicants to walk
through the door. Right now, in Massachusetts, the maximum weekly unemployment-benefit
amount is $855 per week. In a 40-hour work week, that comes out to $21.37
per hour.
Meanwhile, Prices Keep Going Up . . .
The updated unfilled-jobs numbers released Tuesday
morning were bad. The updated immigration numbers released Tuesday evening were
bad. Guess how the updated inflation numbers released Wednesday morning look?
How about “an absolute disaster”?
The Consumer Price Index for All
Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.8 percent in April on a seasonally adjusted
basis after rising 0.6 percent in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 4.2
percent before seasonal adjustment. This is the largest 12-month increase since
a 4.9-percent increase for the period ending September 2008.
The index for used cars and trucks
rose 10.0 percent in April. This was the largest 1-month increase since the
series began in 1953, and it accounted for over a third of the seasonally
adjusted all items increase. The food index increased in April, rising 0.4
percent as the indexes for food at home and food away from home both increased.
The energy index decreased slightly, as a decline in the index for gasoline in
April more than offset increases in the indexes for electricity and natural
gas.
The index for all items less food
and energy rose 0.9 percent in April, its largest monthly increase since April
1982. Nearly all major component indexes increased in April. Along with the
index for used cars and trucks, the indexes for shelter, airline fares,
recreation, motor vehicle insurance, and household furnishings and operations
were among the indexes with a large impact on the overall increase.
The all-items index rose 4.2
percent for the 12 months ending April, a larger increase than the 2.6- percent
increase for the period ending March.
In other news: Jennifer Granholm, during a press
conference yesterday about the hack of the Colonial Pipeline, said, “We have
doubled down on ensuring that there’s an ability to truck oil in — gas in. But
it’s — the pipe is the best way to go. And so that’s why,
hopefully, this company, Colonial, will, in fact, be able to restore operations
by the end of the week as they have said.”
Oh, pipe is the best way to go, huh? Safer, more secure,
more efficient, less risk of accidents? Then maybe this administration
shouldn’t be canceling pipeline projects!
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