Democrats need an immigration solution, not the public health policy of Title 42
Tiana Lowe
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After a year of more than 2 million immigrants flooding the southern border, President Joe Biden is complying with the court decision to let Title 42 expire this week. Oddly enough, it’s not Republicans making headlines for vociferously badgering the president about the unlawful migrant crisis — it’s Democrats.
Some, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have demanded more federal assistance in anticipation of an immigration influx, while others, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), have urged the president to defy the courts outright and extend Title 42.
THE BIDEN BORDER CRISIS EXPLAINED
These Democrats are simultaneously wrong and right. They’re right that the border has careened into catastrophe, but they’re wrong that Title 42 — fundamentally a public health policy grounding in a non-existing pandemic — is the solution to what is ultimately an immigration crisis.
Contrary to the claims of so-called public health bureaucrats aiming to bring back pandemic-era curtails on civil liberties, by definition the pandemic is over. Now, COVID is endemic, preventable, and treatable. It is no longer — and it might not have ever properly been — the government’s job to protect people from carriers of the coronavirus, especially now that we have multiple varieties of free vaccines and therapeutics. Just as conservatives recognize that the government lacks the legal and moral right to force private airline carriers to instate a mask mandate absent a pandemic, the president ought to lack the power to dictate border policy via executive fiat with a non-existent pandemic as a justification.
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The Supreme Court has long established that the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, plenary power over immigration. The president only has as much power over immigration as Congress gives it, however, and these days, Congress continues to abdicate its responsibility to secure our nation’s border. At least the Republicans begging Biden to reinstate Title 42 are attempting to pass legislation of their own to replace the temporary bandage of the public health emergency policy with a long-lasting solution. The Democrats blaming Biden are simply doing so to conceal their own dereliction of duty over the border.
There’s no question of the scale of the problem. Last year border crossings topped 2 million, and if crossings match those of the first month of this new fiscal year — October, when border crossings are theoretically supposed to ebb, while they usually surge in the summer — they will come close to 2 million. And that’s long before Title 42 expires. But if Democrats want to fix the crisis, it will require Congress and Biden to step up rather than rely on a state of emergency that misdiagnosis the problem.