In the days before the election, Washington Post “fact-checkers” claimed that President Donald Trump was mischaracterizing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s immigration agenda. The former vice president, they said, “does not support ‘open borders’” policies, such as dramatically increasing refugee admissions or ending deportations. It’s hard to know how factual the fact check was because the media never pressed him on what he would do after reversing the President Trump’s immigration reforms. So, which Biden is on course to inhabit the White House?
First, the Biden of today is not the same Biden who said walls were needed to stop border drug trafficking or who was part of an administration that actually backed Republicans’ call for granting more authority to expeditiously deport migrant children from Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador.
Perhaps Biden has been swept along with the radical insurgency that has swept the Democrat Party to the left. Even the liberal National Public Radio recognized that Democrats have “adopted a fundamentally more progressive attitude on immigration in a relatively short time” that views immigration as an abstract issue about “social justice” and not one about real world concerns like jobs, economic stability, public safety or national security.
For example, the 2020 Democratic Party platform asserts that “taxpayer dollars should never flow to employers who steal workers’ wages, violate labor laws, engage in union-busting, or exploit immigrant workers to depress working conditions for all workers,” while embracing the expansion of foreign worker visa programs and amnesties that will produce the opposite results.
Neither Joe Biden nor California Sen. Kamala Harris were asked whether there is a single reform adopted in the last four years they’d keep or were pressed on “what’s next” after they’ve “de-Trumped” our immigration system. While we heard little before the election about how far left Biden had moved since he was last in the White House, we are getting some uncomfortable clarity. He has named to his transition team Andrea Flores, the deputy director of immigration policy for the American Civil Liberties Union’s equality division, and intends walk away from agreements made with Central American nations regarding migration and asylum policy.
The Center for Migration Studies just released a 28-page “wish list” for the Biden administration that is not, the report notes, a “comprehensive list of reforms” but just some policies that can be “adopted through executive action” or through the settlement of lawsuits. The first year items include defunding construction of the border wall; deprioritize prosecutions for improper entry, forgoing prosecutions of fraudulent asylum-seekers, limiting the role of local and state authorities in immigration enforcement; preserving DACA, ending use of private detention centers and; making it easier to file complaints against immigration authorities.
I would hate to see their “comprehensive” list, but imagine that like the first list no approval from the people’s representatives in Congress would be needed. If CMS’s agenda is not full open borders, it is as close as one can get. And they are not the only organization publicly pushing for a “Katie unbar the doors” approach to immigration policy.
David Bier of the libertarian pro-mass immigration Cato Institute put forth a concise “compendium of 52 reform ideas” to correct what he sees as two main flaws in the U.S. immigration system. First, he says, “the system is too restrictive, which leads to violations of the law by immigrants who fail to qualify, lengthy wait times for immigrants who do qualify, and lost benefits to Americans who wish to interact with both.”
Translation: Our immigration system makes unqualified and impatient immigrations break the law and is unfair to Americans who want cheap labor.
Bier says the other flaw is that the immigration system is “too inflexible to adapt to new economic or social conditions,” which is nothing more than ceding to the demands of businesses who’ve become reliant upon a steady stream of labor.
Lastly, the anti-enforcement American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) went public with its own set of recommendations on immigration reform for the Biden-Harris administration. While they couch their demands in warmer rhetoric, it remains an unabashedly clear roadmap to a country with no borders to enforce.
Briefly, they propose protecting “people who are part of our communities but have no way of legalizing their status,” which is mass amnesty for illegal aliens in plain English. They want to issue a “proclamation welcoming immigrants and renouncing anti-immigrant bans and policies,” and “end the massive incarceration of immigrants by overhauling the detention system.” Both of those add up to amnesty and open borders.
The narrow margin of victory for Biden-Harris and the down-ballot results indicate a country hungry for competent government that will heal divisions and address crises, not radical agendas being pushed by fringe groups that will create new divisions and crises like those seeking to throw open the immigration floodgates.
