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Biden’s Immigration Obsession Floods U.S. with Migrants, Kamala with Troubles
Immigration ranks as one of the top three issues affecting voter opinion (Biden’s age was number 1, immigration number 2, and inflation/economy in third place.) There’s little more Biden can do about number 1, and little he seems to want to do about number 3, but on immigration Joe will leave quite a record for Kamala Harris (assuming she’s the candidate) to drag into November.
The problem is Joe Biden was obsessed with immigration. He was obsessed with finding new ways to bring more migrants to the U.S. — some tricks resulted in tens of thousands of people entering, others just a few hundred. The numbers seem to matter less than the process. Such is obsession. Harris seems not to share his zeal, but inherits it as a legacy (and an electoral problem) just the same.
Harris’ problem began on the southern border, where practically concurrent with taking office, Joe threw open the doors. The Trump campaign is already releasing ads tying Harris to Biden’s policies there. The ad claims “If you ever wondered how Joe Biden could get the border so screwed up. Remember, he had help,” a narrator reads. “Here’s Biden appointing Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration. And here are a record number of illegal immigrants.”
Under the Obama administration the standard was about 1,000 attempted crossings a day. By the time the Trump administration ended, the U.S. was deporting more people than were illegally coming into the country. In less than a month under Biden, the number of people illegally coming into the country shot up to more than 6,000 per day. Even with Biden’s most recent executive order cutting back on immigration, up to 2,500 crossings are still allowed each day. For the past three years, Biden policy allowed nearly 6,000 asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced an average 1 million immigrants every 200-odd days, a significant number given otherwise only about 1 million legal green card–type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year.
Some 2.5 million joined the illegal population under Obama, actually slightly less than under George W. Bush. Biden broke those records in about his first 18 months in office with the wide-open southern border. More than 8 million migrants have entered the U.S. along the southern border since Biden took office in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. That Harris was ostensibly in charge of border affairs does not help her at all; it gives her some sort of ownership and limits any behind-the-scenes denials. She seems at minimum sympathetic; in 2021, she visited the southern border to say “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
In mid-June Biden-Harris announced a new amnesty policy lifting the threat of deportation for tens of thousands of illegal aliens married to U.S. citizens. Biden (to be fair, it was likely almost 100 percent his idea) promoted the new program at a White House event to celebrate the Obama-era “dreamers” directive that offered deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. The policy allows roughly 490,000 spouses of U.S. citizens an opportunity to apply for a “parole in place” program, which would shield them from deportations and offer work permits if they have lived in the country illegally for at least 10 years. The new policy also removes a legal barrier to allow qualifying immigrants to apply for permanent residency and eventually, U.S. citizenship. It’s a privilege previously reserved solely for spouses of U.S. military members. Those newly-eligible will have three years to apply for citizenship, in time for the 2028 elections if Harris were to get that far.
To invoke some Obama-love, Biden announced another policy on the 12th Anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA; “Dreamers”) making recipients of the program eligible for visas, rather than the temporary work authorization they currently receive under the Obama executive order. Getting a visa potentially legalizes the DACAs and sets them up for a shot at permanent residence and then U.S. citizenship. This move could affect as many as 530,110 active DACA holders. This number does not include the pending applications that cannot be processed due to ongoing litigation. As of December 2023, estimates are that the eligible DACA population to be 1,161,000 were the program to resume in full under Harris.
One way to cut back on deportations is to hamstring the parts of the U.S. government involved in uncovering information that could lead to deportation, in this case with unaccompanied minors. The Department of Health and Human Services is no longer inquiring about the criminal histories of migrant teens in its care. A senior HHS official overseeing the program for solo child migrants told the House Judiciary Committee that even though agency officials contact the embassy of whichever country unaccompanied children hail from, they do not request any criminal records. They do verify date of birth, the child’s birth certificate, and whether the “child” is suspected of being an adult. The result is more than 400,000 have been released into the U.S. in the last few years, with 70 percent of that group aged 15 or older and male. This all raises grave concerns about Central and South American gang members taking up residence in the U.S. via this loophole. The gangs once established won’t be going away, something a President Harris would have to answer for.
There’s also some small scale stuff that help illustrate the whole. One U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in an unnamed airport did not have an effective process for detaining and removing inadmissible travelers. In a two year period CBP released at least 383 inadmissible travelers from custody; 44 percent of the travelers did not return for their removal flights and disappeared into the United States. Overnight detention requests for inadmissible travelers before removal flights are denied because of staffing and bed space limitations. In addition, CBP does not have enough overtime funds to pay officers to detain inadmissible travelers at the airport after operating hours. CBP also cited difficulties transferring inadmissible travelers to another airport because they must receive permission from the airline involved.
There’s also the so-called “Dark Brandon” scenario, where lame duck Biden, freed from election-related restraints, makes more immigration changes by executive order for Kamala to take responsibility for. Either way, Biden was a terrible president on immigration issues and some Democrat is going to have to pay for it.
Biden (and by extension, Harris) is appealing to a very small part of the base. Over two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his handling of the border. Even Hispanic voters are not swayed by Biden. A recent poll showed a large number of Hispanic people favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The CBS News/YouGov poll found 53 percent of registered Hispanic voters favor the government starting “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally,” a program already proposed by Donald Trump.
Candidate Harris faces the worst of two worlds. As the sitting Vice President she is expected to support Biden’s (unpopular) policies. As a Candidate she must drag those policies forward, and must limit ideas of her own or face calls of disloyalty from the party base. Indeed, a Politico article on policy differences between Biden and Harris failed to even mention immigration. Immigration is probably the most significant of those double-edged issues, but other divisive topics, from Ukraine to Gaza, suggest hers will not be an easy road.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Don’t Be a Palooka, Joe
Joe, I’m writing to ask a favor, a big one, for America. Don’t be a bum, a palooka. If you lose the election, lose it graciously. Don’t drag a damaged America through a long fight designed to cripple the next Trump term, the way Democrats did it in 2016. Those same voices are gonna want you to never concede, to “sue ’til it’s Blue” but you gotta resist them and do the right thing. Don’t be the guy to wreck America. You don’t appear much in public, so I hope this message in a bottle reaches you.
I gotta tell you Joe, while two months in America can change a lot, it doesn’t look like November 3 is gonna be your night, kid. So far you got nothing to offer but you’re not Trump, and because I know you play some poker, that’s stretching a pair of twos too far. Pennsylvania new voter registrations added 150,000 more Republicans than Democrats. Trump is beating you on Latino outreach, Joe, and owns the Cuban vote (as well the formidable Jewish vote) in crucial Florida. One pollster my TAC colleagues spoke with on our podcast believes that the “shy Trump voter” effect is even stronger today than it was in 2016. You see the raw data, but I bet your pollsters are undercounting Trump support. You gotta admit, Trump’s line about you — he sent your jobs to China and your sons to war — cuts pretty deep.
That matters I know the way many Trader Joe Americans noodle around when they want to see if it’s OK to talk positively about Trump. They’re afraid even at my age I’m gonna blast them for admitting they are doing OK in the economy, their retirement savings rebounded since the March fall. Once they open up, they’re afraid of you, Joe, afraid you’ll lose control to the progressives nipping at the party’s heals and with that they see chaos. When Elizabeth Warren sneaks in a pro-BLM message during your convention, they don’t see the justice they titularly support, they see chaos. And the crap they roll their eyes over happening in New York is now in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Swing states, Joe, on literal fire under Democratic leadership. Trump as the safe candidate, crazy, huh?
I know you are counting on left behind out of work Americans without 401ks as your people, but Joe, they aren’t. Those folks are in fact Trump’s base. They don’t blame him, they think he fights for them. You and I can have a lo-carb beer alongside a little Maalox, or maybe just some nice Jell-O, after you retire and try to make sense of that, but you can’t say it ain’t so, Joe.
So whattaya got? You cried wolf more times than Mrs. Blitzer. The sky never fell. Russiagate was a lie built on falsified FISA documents, sleazy CIA-aligned operatives, and paid-for propaganda. Impeachment was so weak it collapsed. Large numbers of voters don’t blame Trump for COVID, and statistics show the worst economic damage to individual voter’s wallets has been done by Democratic governors willing to act against their own citizens to help politically damage Trump. A Democratic governor keeps kids from school and you want the parents to blame Trump? Your party Goebbels’ are down to whimpering about violations of the Hatch Act most non-Beltway American know nothing of and care less about, and the Post Office. The Post Office, Joe? That’s your big talking point two months out? You sounds like Marcia Brady trying to snitch on Greg.
(Joe, seriously, enough with the post office. The USPS handles 472.1 million mailpieces a day. There are only 153 million registered voters in the U.S., and typically only about 60 percent of them even bother to vote. You still get your paper Lands End catalog; handling the ballots is nothing.)
Worse yet, you aren’t the only candidate using the Not Trump strategy. Your real opponent is Stay Home; that’s where a lot of the Never Trumpers may end up. Some important number of voters are not going to vote for Trump, but they don’t see much in you. They will “vote” by staying home, again. Last election about 42 percent of eligible voters stayed home and given they tended to be young and of color they likely cost Hillary the election; registered voters who didn’t vote were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out. You’re strategy is based on people who think they can solve problems by changing the channel. Most of those younger “democrats” aren’t. They hate Trump a little more than they hate you, but they’re not part of your party. They’d really like a third party, for change, but until then they’ve made it pretty clear they won’t vote for crappy candidates like you just because Nancy Pelosi tells them to.
More? You didn’t get any post-convention bounce, not even with five nights of free media and both Obamas. Nice try with Kamala, by the way, but the only people who vote based on the VP choice want you dead, Joe. And talk about a plan backfiring, research suggests the more Democrats message democracy is dead and Trump is going to win by cheating no matter what, the lower Democratic turnout will be. And that’s on top of recent polls suggesting voter enthusiasm (which drives turnout) for you lags Trump in key battleground states.
So sorry Joe, it does not look good. I’m sure you see more sunlight than I do, and a lot can happen in the world around you and Trump in the next two months. It ain’t over, and the race doesn’t always go to the swift and the strong, but that is the way you place your bets.
And that brings me to the favor I’m asking of you, Joe. If you really lose, concede. Thank everyone, promise Kamala will be back fighting in 2024, and affirm democracy worked. Don’t gin up a Konstitutional Krisis. If you really really have unambiguous proof of fraud, lay it all out in one splash, no weeks of leaks and hearings, and make sure it is clear enough all but the most committed ideologues have to admit you are right and let the process continue. You will save America.
Everybody sees instead what the people around you are planning. Even you warned Trump will steal the election. Rep. James Clyburn said he believes the president “plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold onto office.” The Atlantic and The Washington Post regularly run stories speculating that Trump will usurp the election or reject its results. Hillary dictated you “should not concede under any circumstances” because “eventually I do believe he will win.” Her strategy for you is “a lengthy legal battle after the election,” the Sue ‘Til Blue plan which envisions November 3 as only an opening act, followed by lengthy counts and recounts of mail-in ballots, followed by court challenges, all in hope of shifting public opinion toward not accepting the election. Hillary made a good run at that four years ago, convincing a fair number of people her popular vote win meant the Electoral College didn’t count. You’ve sat with her after a couple of glasses of white wine, Joe. She really believes she won, doesn’t she? But you and I know that’s some Third World trip, not paying attention to elections whose results you don’t like.
The poster child for being a Good Loser, Al Gore, is teeing it up for you as well. Gore believes the military will eventually have to remove Trump from office. But pay attention to Gore’s whole statement, the part when he said “there’s no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. You can always explore the option of dragging something out, tearing the country apart, mobilizing partisans against one another in the streets and all of that, but it is not a wise course for our country.” Gore of course is talking about Trump doing all that, but I’m talking about you, Joe.
America can’t handle it, Joe, so please don’t bring it on us. Don’t listen to the voices saying you have to save democracy by refusing to accept the election results. We are so divided as a nation that you refusing to go along with the vote, fanning the flames by claiming the popular vote is controlling, insisting racism lost you the election or otherwise playing to the divisions could set off something that will be hard to control. It could ruin whatever confidence Americans have in our system, flawed as it may be. You won’t inspire people, you will inflame them. You opponent is a predator and will fight a nasty campaign. Go ahead and fight hard back. But when it is over, don’t fake losing, own losing. The critical tool for ending of democracy is people’s conditioned readiness to believe it does not work anymore.
Joe, we’re both old enough to love the movie On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando at his most perfect. You remember the key scene, in the car with his mobster brother. Brando, a prize fighter who could have gone all the way, got talked into taking a fall to make the mob money betting against him. Brando realizes giving in, doing what the dark forces wanted him to do even when he knew it was so wrong, ruined him. He made some money, and the mob guaranteed him an easy job for life in thanks. But he knew he was a bum, a palooka, when he maybe could’ve had class, could have been somebody.
Brando’s brother failed to tell him the right thing to do. I’m here for you, Joe. Leave Hillary and Stacey Abrams in the history books as bitter losers. Fight your fight, Joe, and then do the right thing for yourself, your legacy, for America.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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