The Vice President has been drawing no end of flak for the last two weeks. To start, the Vice President's trip to the border was poorly received. Take, for example, the reaction of Fox's Chris Wallace :
"Well, we did hear one solution. And that is that nobody is going to be able to ask Kamala Harris, 'why haven't you been to the border yet,'" Wallace said during a Fox News panel discussion about the border.
"She has now been to the border. So she took care of that. But on the question which I think most Americans are asking, which is how are we going to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from coming across the border illegally as they have since Joe Biden became president, there really were no answers there," Wallace said.
As an analyst who follows developments on the border, I am frankly baffled at the administration's approach. Is Kamala Harris avoiding the border because the administration's policy is to deliberately let migrants enter the US interior? Is this administration actually running an open borders policy? Read Todd Bensman's take on the issue. It's hard to avoid that conclusion. Therefore, is the issue Kamala Harris's lack of answers, or is it that the administration already has one? It seems the Biden administration is deliberately keeping the border unprotected and open.
This will not end well. The administration's own position is that it 'has no answers' and is impotent and intellectually bankrupt on illegal immigration, or alternatively, that it is actively anti-law enforcement, seen both in gun violence and at the border. This approach risks Jeremy Corbyning the Democratic Party. Corbyn was the leader of the Labor Party in Britain heading into the 2019 election and pegged as unelectable looney left. And, indeed, Boris Johnson trounced Labor on what was supposed to be a re-think of a rash decision on Brexit. Here's the BBC's commentary on election night last December:
On the night, the Conservatives won a big majority, sweeping aside Labour strongholds across northern England, the Midlands and Wales in areas which backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum. Some traditional Labour constituencies, such as Darlington, Sedgefield and Workington, in the north of England, will have a Conservative MP for the first time in decades - or in the case of Bishop Auckland and Blyth Valley - for the first time since the seat was created.
At 33%, Labour's share of the vote is down around eight points on the 2017 general election and is lower than that achieved by Neil Kinnock in 1992.
President Biden's big government policies are reminiscent of those of Neil Kinnock, another failed Labor leader, or say, US House Speaker Tip O'Neill (1977-1987). But communism has since fallen and working class whites have deserted Democrats to form the backbone of the modern Republican Party. It's not 1987 anymore, and the Democrats and British Labor Party have had success when they held the center. Today, the political center appears to run to the right of Mitt Romney, and perhaps even to the right of Liz Cheney. That's how much the world has changed. We can see these trends in, say, Hungary, where the right regularly commands 70% of the vote, or in historically tolerant Denmark, which has turned almost frighteningly anti-immigrant. Western society is aging rapidly, and an older society will be more conservative. The trend line is running against far left Democrats.
The Republicans, if they can get past Donald Trump (not a given) and keep their mouths shut (not a given), could do very well in the midterms, and the Republicans could become the natural party of governance again by highlighting Democrats' chosen policy of helplessness and unwillingness to provide public security, whether on the street or on the border. The Biden administration is painting the Democrats as a party unfit to govern, because they do not believe in governing.
For long-established, undocumented immigrants in the US, this is an unfolding disaster. True, the House passed the American Dream and Promise Act (H.R. 6), but it is going nowhere in the Senate. Meanwhile, the administration's border policy is discrediting the entire concept of amnesty. How should those of us looking for balanced and ordered policy respond to the objections of conservatives? Heritage has argued that any amnesty will encourage a new torrent of illegal immigration, just as it did after IRCA was passed in 1986. By contrast, CATO's analysts argued prior to the pandemic that the danger had passed, that illegal immigration was no longer a problem, and that therefore amnesty would not be an issue. With illegal immigration at twenty year highs, Heritage has won this debate for years to come. Nor will the Democrats have any credibility as negotiating partners. If the left is seen not only as accommodating on amnesty, but actively and surreptitiously undermining border security, will they be seen as acting in good faith for any policy initiative that conservatives might accept?
The left would do well to remember that US illegal immigrant policy is one of 'don't ask, don't tell'. ICE data shows us that, if migrants can successfully make it into the interior, they will enjoy amnesty as a statistical matter as long as they do not otherwise fall afoul of law enforcement. ICE's staffing levels are set to achieve this outcome. But add another 10,000 ICE agents, and the undocumented will be living in an entirely different world. It's not only the Democrats who can subvert the status quo. And should one think the public's tolerance is unlimited, check out events in Denmark.
In all this, where do the advocacy groups stand? What are the NILC or fwd.us doing? If their thinking ends at passing HR 6, they may well be condemning undocumented immigrants to another decade of living in the shadows. Windows to pass normalization for the undocumented are few and far between. The last occurred in 2012, now almost a decade ago. The Democrats have another year to pass legislation. After that, the left is unlikely to control both houses and the executive branch for many years to come. Should the advocacy groups be contemplating a Plan B? Do they need an approach which could work across the aisle, one that embodies problem-solving rather than winning or losing?
Meanwhile, VP Harris's weak performance at the border has metastasized into a full blown crisis engulfing her staff and perceptions of her character and competence. Failure in one policy area has called into question her capabilities more broadly. Could she use a better plan on border policy to shore up her disastrous political state?
One would certainly think so.