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Joe biden Shouldn’t want to start his administration with a new migrant crisis at the border, but that’s what his priorities risk creating.
After many false starts – including the zero tolerance policy that led to family separations – the Trump administration has succeeded in controlling the border through its “stay in Mexico” policy and “safe third country” agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
These initiatives filled a huge loophole in America’s asylum system – undeserving asylum seekers were able to gain access to our country, staying here for years as their claims made their way through courts failed. the ability (or the will) to follow and expel them. This current and de facto amnesty has been a powerful magnet for migrants from Central America.
But the Trump administration has been successful in getting Mexico to agree to the so-called migration protection protocols. This meant that asylum seekers from countries other than Mexico could be forced to stay in Mexico while their claims were judged in the United States. In addition, under the Safe Third Country Agreements, asylum seekers could be sent to Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras (regardless of their country of origin) to seek asylum there. The theory was that if they were genuinely persecuted in their own country instead of just seeking to come to the United States, they would be content to seek asylum in another neighboring country; as it turned out, unsurprisingly, most simply chose to return home when they realized that a refugee claim was not a ticket to enter the United States.
On top of all this, the Trump administration has started to tighten up on the lax way of interpreting asylum rules. According to the law, a person is supposed to be eligible for asylum only if they are the target of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion – a definition that should not apply to economic migrants or people who fear domestic violence or gangs.
Biden is committed to destroying all that architecture, and his staff told reporters that was exactly what he would do. The flashback will lead to yet another border crisis that even the most migrant-friendly administration will struggle to cope with (lots of photographs of border cages that have spread on social media to condemn Trump’s dating policies in fact of the Obama years). Biden could also bring the tens of thousands of asylum seekers currently waiting in Mexico to the United States, which, unless tightly checked, would likely cause them to stay here forever.
The first question Biden faces will be whether to reverse the alleged Title 42 treatment that the Trump administration used, citing public health grounds to quickly return migrants from Mexico. With the deals with Mexico and Central America in suspense during the pandemic, Title 42 is a necessary stopgap that Biden will come under heavy pressure from pro-immigration groups to reverse.
Biden’s immigration program doesn’t stop at the border, of course. He said he would impose a 100-day freeze on deportations, a reckless move that will prevent the ICE from deporting illegal immigrants upon their release from state and local prisons. Biden obviously intends to gut law enforcement inside the same way the Obama administration did.
He promised to restore the DACA, the de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants who were brought here or who came here as minors. It is a measure that President Obama imposed unilaterally in an abuse of his executive power and which President Trump has been absurdly prevented by the courts from overturning. If this is to be the policy of the United States, it should be passed by Congress.
Biden also promises to lift Trump’s travel restrictions to some predominantly Muslim countries, a largely symbolic move, and to increase the number of refugees admitted to the United States, which arguably was too low under Trump, though at 125,000 a year, Biden talks about admitting the most refugees in 30 years.
We were told constantly during the campaign that Joe Biden was a moderate. This has never been true and is clearly false when it comes to immigration. We can only hope that we don’t reap the whirlwind at the border.
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