After three years of waving millions of illegal aliens into the United States, the White House on Friday issued a statement from the president finally calling the situation at the border a “crisis.” The statement is intended to support “negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators” on legislation to address the crisis. Those who follow this issue will know that “bipartisanship” in congressional immigration negotiations tracks the old joke about the Stupid Party and the Evil Party getting together to do something both stupid and evil. Although no actual legislative language has been released, the measures that have been leaked to the media wouldn’t solve anything and would likely make things worse.
But before addressing the shortcomings of a possible deal, we need to step back and ask a more basic question: Why does Congress need to act at all? The border crisis is entirely President Biden’s doing. It is an executive problem, not a legislative one, and requires a change in the administration’s policies, not new laws.
Candidate Joe Biden promised to roll back all of Donald Trump’s immigration measures, decrying them as “an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants.” Once in the Oval Office, he made good on those promises, starting just hours after he was sworn in.
Biden suspended Trump’s highly successful “Remain in Mexico” program, which required border-jumping asylum applicants to await their hearings on the other side of the US frontier. He repealed Trump’s rule requiring asylum-seekers to apply in countries they passed through before reaching the US border. He has dramatically slashed deportations of illegal and criminal aliens. He has abused the narrow emergency “parole” power to release (and give work permits to) more than 1 million illegal aliens. He has converted a border-traffic-management app into a tool for foreigners to schedule their illegal immigration through ports of entry. And more.
The result is precisely what the outgoing Team Trump warned the incoming Biden appointees about during the transition: an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration. . . .
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