May 11: Deluge day for illegal immigration
Hugo Gurdon
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Too little is said of the moral component of immigration and border security. More precisely, while there is plenty of humanitarian hand-wringing by people who want all migrants admitted and cared for — think of the partisan guff about children in cages — much too little is said about the strong moral case for border security to keep illegal migrants out.
President Joe Biden will lift the COVID-19 emergency at least a year late on May 11, and out will go Title 42, a provision enabling U.S. border agents to oust illegal immigrants from the country for reasons related to the spread of disease and control of the pandemic.
It is a polite fiction, to put it kindly, that this has for a long time been anything other than a flimsy off-label use of a healthcare law to cover the administration’s hopeless lack of a coherent, effective, or defensible immigration policy.
Now, absent Title 42, migrants from all over the world know they’ll get in from Mexico to America whether or not they seek asylum by claiming fear of dangerous mistreatment in their home country, as smugglers advise them to do.
More than 22,000 migrants, on average, are in custody at any given time, more than 7,000 have recently been intercepted each day just in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, and upward of 35,000 migrants have camped on the border across from El Paso waiting to flood in when the May 11 starter gun goes bang.
In other words, there is chaos. U.S. border security forces are demoralized, frustrated, and don’t have any faith at all in Biden and his fellow Democrats, said an insider I recently talked to. It can be no surprise Republicans are 21 points ahead (53%-32%) in public trust on the issue of immigration, according to the latest survey of the Senate Opportunity Fund.
But although video footage of arriving crowds and various other data points of Biden’s crisis make a strong case for radical action and reform, these should not obscure the deeper moral underpinning of a proper immigration policy.
It is fundamental to democracy in a nation-state that citizens should have the right to decide whom they want to allow into their country. They will take humanitarian considerations into account. Americans, being a civilized and humane people, have always lent a hand and offered hospitality to foreigners genuinely suffering depredations in their less-civilized home nations.
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But democracy is government by consent, and that creates a moral imperative on officials to enforce laws enacted by the people’s representatives in government. Instead, the Biden administration is flouting immigration laws every day. Americans have not consented and do not consent to the erasure of the southern border or to the proposition that anyone who wishes to come here for any reason may do so. Polling data make it plain that they still regard this as a nation-state that should have its borders enforced.
The immigration non-policy of the Biden Democrats erases that state and is a rejection of American democracy. It’s about to get even uglier as deluge day arrives in our border states on May 11.