The Sinema-Tillis immigration farce
Washington Examiner
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There are three things that are certain in life: death, taxes, and naive Republicans trying to trade an immigration amnesty for false promises of future border security.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) continued this time-honored tradition last week when congressional aides circulated a plan that would give citizenship to approximately 2 million illegal immigrants in exchange for what proponents of the deal have the audacity to call “border security.”
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Tillis’s putative deal, reportedly struck with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), would create a path to citizenship for approximately 2 million immigrants who crossed the border illegally before their 18th birthdays. Note that this 2 million number is far higher than the 800,000 or so illegal immigrants who benefited from former President Barack Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The more than doubling of illegal immigrants being offered amnesty through this new program is no doubt due to the fact that Obama’s DACA program did nothing to stop child migrants from illegally crossing the border and appears to have made the problem significantly worse.
In exchange for this massive amnesty, Tillis has reportedly been given $25 billion for “beefed-up border security,” including more pay for Border Patrol agents, the creation of “regional processing centers” along the border, and “increased resources and personnel to accommodate arriving asylum-seekers.”
It would be nice if our overworked Border Patrol agents received a raise, but the rest of these so-called increases in border security will only make the border crisis worse. Regional processing centers have only one purpose — to increase the ability of the Biden administration to move as many illegal immigrants as possible into the United States as quickly as possible. The same is true for “resources and personnel to accommodate arriving asylum-seekers.” These resources are being spent not to secure the border but to “accommodate” the existing chaos at the border, perhaps even to create more of it.
Finally, we come to the most laughable security concession that Tillis supposedly secured: the extension of Title 42 for at least a year. For starters, Title 42 is not in danger of disappearing. It is a public health law first passed in 1944, and no one is trying to repeal it. What is about to end, however, is the questionable use of COVID-19 as a public health emergency and therefore an excuse that allows the federal government to turn away migrants at the border. A federal judge has decreed this emergency declaration must end by Dec. 21.
What are Sinema and Tillis going to do? Declare that COVID-19 is still a public health threat through 2023? This would be a lie — even President Joe Biden admits that the pandemic is over.
The other huge problem with the “extension of Title 42” is that the entire Biden border crisis has occurred with Title 42 in effect. Instead of applying his Title 42 powers equally at the southern border, Biden has applied them selectively. Before Biden became president, less than 75,000 immigrants were arrested for illegally crossing the southern border each month. By Biden’s first full month in office, that number jumped to 100,000, and by July 2021, it had reached 200,000. It has hung around 200,000 a month ever since. And that is with Title 42 in effect.
The U.S. has always welcomed a certain number of immigrants every year and should continue to do so. However, there are already over 10 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and Biden has released millions more into the country.
The immigration system is in need of reform. But that has to begin with border security. The public has no faith in officials who promise security later if they can only offer amnesty now. Until the border is demonstrated to be secure, any talk of granting legal status is premature.
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