The chickens are coming home to roost at the southwest border. The president's open borders policy has now attracted migrants from a wide range of countries, including Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Haiti, up ten-fold under the Biden administration.
US Customs and Border Protection via The Wall Street Journal
Key among these is Haiti, with thousands of Haitian migrants in recent days holed up under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. As with the evacuation from Afghanistan, the media has conveyed riveting images of the crisis at the border, hammering home again the failure of administration policy.
It was to be expected, and even anticipated. An Open Borders policy will have takers by the millions. Of course, Haiti is a disaster on many levels. But it is also grindingly poor on its best days. The unskilled Haitian wage is $0.50 / hour, one-third that of Guatemala or Honduras, and one-seventh that of northern Mexico. If Haitians could earn $3 / hour in the US, they would think they had reached the promised land. And in a labor-starved US economy, they can earn many times that, as much in a day in the US as they would in a month back in Haiti. And add to that $30,000 / year in education, nutrition and healthcare support per child, and it's the deal of a lifetime. Why wouldn't they come?
But why now? Clearly, a smaller cadre of Haitians over the last few months tried their hand at entering the US -- and they were successful! They called their relatives who told their friends, and a few months later, 15,000 Haitians are camped out under a bridge in Del Rio. This is only to be expected with an Open Borders policy. As I have written elsewhere, migrants will continue to come until their expected US wages fall to their Relocation Wage. As I note above, that's about $3 / hour for Haitians. US wages would have to fall a long way to prevent vast numbers of Haitians from attempting a border crossing.
As with Afghanistan, the administration has reacted to the Del Rio debacle in knee-jerk fashion, notwithstanding warnings from Border Patrol months ago that this exact situation was in the cards. From Politico:
In sharply visceral terms, the national Border Patrol union blasted the White House on Tuesday, characterizing it as inept for failing to have a plan in place to deal with the influx of some 15,000 migrants that left agents overwhelmed. Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council provided text from emails he says the union had sent to the administration in June warning of an influx of migrants in Del Rio. In those texts, the union suggested a way to process the crowds more smoothly. But the response from management in the Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector, according to the union, was that “several other platforms are being considered which are more efficient.”
A crisis months in the making had to be resolved in days, leading to deportation flights and footage of agents on horses batting at migrants. This in turn elicited an open letter to the president from immigration advocates blasting administration policy:
In recent weeks your Administration has violated asylum rights and refugee laws enacted by Congress and embraced policies that inflict cruelty on Black, Brown and Indigenous immigrant communities. We fear that commitments made on the campaign trail—to uphold the United States’ domestic and international legal obligation to asylum, to end privatized detention, and to disentangle federal immigration enforcement from local law enforcement—are being shredded before our eyes.
And what do these advocates suggest as appropriate policy?
Your Administration must restore asylum access at ports of entry, rescind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s expulsion order, and issue a new termination memo for the Migrant Protection Protocols. Deportation flights to Haiti must stop, and those seeking safety at our borders must be granted their legally assured chance to seek asylum. Your Administration must end its reliance on incarceration for immigration processing, and instead commit to working with community-based legal and social service providers.
In other words, immigration advocates are calling for a de facto open borders policy. Anyone who wants to enter should be able to, and migrants should be released into the US interior for management by community-based service providers. It is exactly this policy which has caused the border crisis in the first place.
Meanwhile, the Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, rejected including amnesty in the reconciliation bill, writing that
Changing the law to clear the way to LPR [legal permanent resident] status is a tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact. Finally, it is important to note that an obvious corollary of a finding that this proposal is appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation would be that it could be repealed by simple majority vote in a subsequent reconciliation measure. Perhaps more critically, permitting this provision in reconciliation would set a precedent that could be used to argue that rescinding any immigration status from anyone - not just those who obtain LPR status by virtue of this provision -- would be permissible because the policy of stripping status from any immigrant does not vastly outweigh whatever budgetary impact there might be.
Amnesty was bound to be rejected, for the very reasons MacDonough elaborates. This should not have surprised immigration advocates.
Before the current border surge, a number of Republicans looked willing to support at least a partial amnesty, including legal resident status for DACA participants and perhaps something similar for those with long-standing residency in the United States. As it is, a hemorrhaging border makes the topic of amnesty radioactive, providing Republicans a viable rationale to reject amnesty. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, captured the sentiment: "[Amnesty] would have led to an increased run on the border — beyond the chaos we already have there today,” he told the New York Times.
The proposed trade is as it has been: amnesty for border security. In actively undermining border security, the Biden administration has poisoned the well for amnesty. By endorsing open borders in the letter above, signatories like the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Human Rights Watch, the National Immigration Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center have eviscerated the prospects of long-term undocumented residents. Given the choice of championing newly-arrived migrants or millions of Mexicans and Central Americans who have lived in the US for at least fifteen years, immigration advocates have prioritized new migrants.
The window for amnesty may not re-open for a long time. President Biden has fully Corbynized the Democratic Party as fundamentally socialist and phenomenally inept. He has violated his mandate with independent voters by proposing a fantastic expansion of government when voters wanted only calm. And it gets worse. Home prices have started to fall and stock prices are shaky. The massive money creation by the Fed is working its way out of assets like housing and stocks into consumer goods and products inflation. Historically, a steep fall in asset values is associated with a financial shock like those of 1987 in the US or 1998 in Asia. Alternatively, the Fed may have to postpone the taper, bringing higher inflation. Some sort of adverse economic event likely sits between us and the election. Between the rebranding of the Democrats as a socialist party, incredibly poor policy management, and an economic downturn, the Democrats are likely to be obliterated at the polls next November. After the current surge in illegal immigration, Republicans in the next Congress may be in no mood to discuss amnesty. Possibly not for a long, long time.
Immigration advocates should have taken a harder line, calling on Biden to firmly enforce the border, and use the goodwill to secure at least DACA and perhaps an enhanced package for undocumented residents living more than a decade in the US. Instead, we will see a large rise in the illegal population and a Republican retreat to the battlements of 'no amnesty'. The left may bank this as a win, but long-term undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans may come to appreciate that they have been sold out by those very advocates who claim to champion their cause.