Some conservatives speculate that President Joe Biden wants an uncontrolled and, frankly, uncontrollable flood of illegal immigrants to cross the border, overwhelm our border controls, and spread throughout the country.
I prefer a simpler explanation that ascribes to the Biden administration less malice and more dumb partisanship: Biden created the border crisis because of the political forces of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Donald Trump, as a candidate and as president, said a lot of bad things about immigrants. He broadly painted immigrants from South and Central America as criminals and rapists. He characterized them as traitorous, lethal snakes.
Some of his policies were bad and inhumane, too. Understandably, Biden used Trump’s rhetoric and bad or questionable immigration policies against him. This mostly was about rallying the base and fundraising (corporate America hates restrictions on immigration) and secondarily about winning over upper-middle-class swing voters.
Fine, that’s normal politics. But having defined Trump as a xenophobic bigot on the campaign trail, Biden failed to adopt any semblance of nuance when he entered the White House.
“On the same afternoon he’s sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, Joe Biden will take executive actions that will undo several of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies,” the press reported.
Sure enough, on that first day, Biden placed a moratorium on deportations, halted wall construction, and, most importantly, scrapped Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
But “Remain in Mexico” was a good policy, and Biden should have known that.
The border crises of recent years have been caused by the fact that illegal immigrants who encounter Border Patrol upon entry are released into the United States while they await their deportation proceedings. This knowledge spread throughout Latin America, which served as an invitation to illegal immigration: Show up, don’t try to hide from Border Patrol, and just ignore your deportation court date.
Trump saw this, and so he negotiated with the Mexican government that immigrants who sought asylum should remain in Mexico until they could get a court date. The result: The wave of illegal immigrants went way down.
This proved to be a humanitarian measure because the long journey across Mexico, the crowding on both sides of the border, and the exploitation of immigrants all went down once the U.S. was no longer believed to have an open door.
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Biden then caused the border crisis by stupidly scrapping “Remain in Mexico.” He could end it by reinstating the Trump policy.
This makes it infuriating for Biden to claim “I’ve done all I can do” on the border. He quite easily could reverse his Day One executive actions that created this mess — but that would require admitting that Trump’s border policy was better than his. That would pierce Biden’s entire self-image along with the entire message of his 2024 campaign against Trump.