By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
September 21, 2021
Secretary of the Department of Homeland
Security Alejandro Mayorkas is indisputably good at one part of his job —
always referring to the migrant surge at the border as a “challenge” and never
a “crisis.”
He visited Del Rio, Texas, on Monday
and refused to use
the offending word about more than 10,000 Haitian
migrants huddled under a bridge, living amongst trash with insufficient food
and water in sweltering heat.
This, too, is merely a challenge.
If euphemism and spin constituted
competent, tough-minded governance, the Biden team wouldn’t be coping with a
historic surge of illegal crossings at the border that reached another level
with the nearly instantaneous creation of an enormous migrant camp in an
isolated Texas town.
The Haitian migrants had been crossing for
weeks before the flow exploded over a matter of days. The camp grew from 4,000
the middle of last week to more than 16,000 by the weekend, a stunningly large
and rapid concentration of migrants that is probably without precedent at the
southern border, certainly within memory.
The images of desperate Haitians wading
across the Rio Grande by the hundreds and thousands without anyone even
attempting to stop them will likely become an indelible symbol of Biden’s
border policy.
Empty words and excuses can’t obscure the
reality.
Administration officials constantly say
that the border is closed, but in important respects it is open.
They blame misinformation spreading among
migrants, and it’s true that unfounded rumors abound, but the basic perception
that our border enforcement has major, easily exploited holes is correct.
They blame circumstances, but it’s not as
though terrible conditions — poverty and rank misgovernment — are new in
countries to our south.
No, the new factor in the equation is
President Joe Biden and his determination to blow up Trump’s policies that had
gotten control of the border.
Border apprehensions remained at a 20-year
high in August. They only dipped slightly from July and otherwise have been on
an upward trajectory all year.
The fashionable explanation for the
initial rise in migration was that it was simply “seasonality,” the tendency of
migrants to come to the border in the spring and then drop off when it gets
hotter. Biden himself confidently asserted this was the dynamic. “It happens
every single, solitary year,” he said in March.
But his policies overcame this ingrained
pattern, enticing more migrants even during the summer months.
As long as people are convinced that they
have a good chance of getting into the United States to stay, which is
unquestionably the case with unaccompanied minors and family units, there is a
strong incentive to make the trek to the border.
Haitians got the message, too. Prior to
the latest influx at Del Rio, almost 30,000 Haitians had been apprehended this
fiscal year. The previous two years the number had been in the low thousands.
The Biden administration granted so-called
Temporary Protected Status, a protection from deportation to Haitians residing
in the United States as of May 21 of this year. Then, it extended it again to
include Haitians residing here since July 29, sending the message that new
arrivals might get the status on a rolling basis.
Haitians also knew family units have been
getting through.
The migrants at Del Rio haven’t been
coming directly from Haiti, but from South America, largely Chile and Brazil,
after tens of thousands fled there in the aftermath of the 2010 Haitian
earthquake. Dwindling economic opportunities and immigration restrictions sent
many migrants into Mexico, and when Mexican officials began to allow them to
travel farther north, they descended on Del Rio.
Caught off guard (as usual), the Biden
team has begun deporting migrants on flights back to Haiti. This has stanched
and even reversed the flow for now, although reports say that family units are
staying in the U.S.
Unless and until the Biden team realizes
that swift exclusion from the U.S. must apply to almost everyone, the “challenges”
at the border won’t let up.
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