Tear It Down, and They Will Come

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

 

The phrase “a borderless world” has long been a metaphorical way to speak of greater global interconnectedness, but the Biden administration must have taken it literally.

 

The southern border is emphatically not just for Spanish-speaking migrants anymore.

 

It was apparently too narrow-minded and exclusionary only to allow illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America to walk into the country. This shameful, implicit bias in favor of our own hemisphere has now been rectified.

 

The United States no longer simply has a border to its south with Mexico and, by extension, Central America; it has a border with the world, and is doing just as poor a job enforcing it.

 

Why have a multicultural border crisis when it can be a truly global one?

 

In a notable clip, Bill Melugin of Fox News asked a line of illegal immigrants near San Diego where they were from and came across one lonely migrant from Ecuador, while the rest were from places like Turkey and India, including one from Iran.

 

Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports, “More Chinese nationals are now crossing the Southwest border near San Diego than Mexican nationals.”

 

In fiscal 2024, according to Andrew Arthur of CIS, about 500,000 of the roughly 1.2 million aliens apprehended at the border have been from places besides Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua.

 

More than 160 countries have been represented in apprehensions at the southern border, raising the question, What’s wrong (or right) with the 30 or so countries that haven’t managed to send anyone?

 

It’s a basic matter of supply and demand. There’s endless demand to come into the United States, and — so long as people are making it in — there’s endless supply, too.

 

It was natural that Mexicans and Central Americans would be the first to take advantage of Biden’s laxness at the border, since they already had well-developed migration networks. As word has gotten out everywhere else that it’s easy to get in, other nationalities are showing up, too, and with time will build their own networks.

 

As we know, the perverseness of the current arrangement is that migrants typically don’t try to evade Border Patrol agents but seek them out so they can surrender and get processed into the country.

 

The Associated Press recently reported from the current migration hot spot of San Diego that groups of migrants gathered, “waiting hours for Border Patrol agents while volunteers deliver hot coffee, instant ramen and bandages for busted knees and swollen ankles.”

 

In one instance, polite Central American illegal immigrants were shouldered aside by pushy Chinese illegal immigrants. “Near Jacumba Hot Springs,” the AP related, “a town of less than 1,000 people, about a dozen people from Latin American countries arrived at a fork in a dirt road around 10 p.m. About 100 Chinese migrants came just before sunrise, many neatly dressed and playfully taking pictures on their phones. Some of the Latin Americans grumbled quietly when the Chinese lined up ahead of them as Border Patrol vehicles arrived.”

 

There are real complications when it comes to holding minors and so-called family units. Single men, though, should be easily transferable over to ICE for detention. Yet, we are releasing into the country single men from far-flung countries who don’t even have a pretense of being asylum-seekers.

 

Another factor here is that Mexico has been cracking down on migrants from Central America, helping Joe Biden by reducing the number of encounters at the border. But Mexico doesn’t appear as interested in keeping migrants from elsewhere from crossing the border. It’s hard for them to send someone back to, say, China, whereas blocked migrants from Central America — if they don’t simply come across the border in November or December after the U.S. presidential election — might eventually end up going home on their own.

 

Meanwhile, if Panamanian president-elect José Raúl Mulino follows through on his promise to close the Darién Gap, it would close off a major access point for migrants from all around the world.

 

As it is, Biden has created the most powerful magnet for migration imaginable by putting a giant “entry” sign on the southern border, and even people outside the continent have gotten the message and reacted accordingly.