The emergency at our southern border needs a serious response.
But first the unserious Biden administration — and the unserious Democrats in general — need to make some admissions about what is actually happening.
So far, they’ve been unwilling to do that.
A month ago, Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas denied a crisis was happening at all.
On the eve of Title 42 expiring last week, with 10,000 migrants arriving a day, Mayorkas said, “We have seen the effectiveness of our approach” at the southern border.
What effectiveness? Thousands of migrants are crossing into the country every day, and cities and towns are struggling to deal with them.
Which part of the approach is effective?
We’re having the wrong conversation on immigration and letting the left lead the way.
The question is not what to do with migrants, it’s whether we should be admitting them in the first place.
But when we hear “Up is down” and “Black is white” rhetoric from people like Mayorkas, we start to see other, only slightly less crazy opinions as reasonable.
Take Mayor Eric Adams. He’s portrayed as some kind of moderate for daring to point out to the Biden administration that our border is overrun and New York City can’t handle the migrants arriving en masse daily.
Axios ran a story Tuesday headlined “Scoop: Inside the Biden split with NY Mayor Eric Adams.”
Alex Thompson writes, “Adams has bluntly criticized the White House’s handling of the recent surge of migrants crossing the U.S. border.”
But there really is no split — Adams is criticizing the lack of funding for New York City to handle these migrants, not President Joe Biden’s decision to let them all in.
That same day, Adams denied any plans to roll back New York’s “sanctuary city” status, which is a blanket invitation for migrants to come on in.
I hate disagreeing with the wise Bob McManus, but he had a pro-Adams piece in Tuesday’s Post.
The idea Adams “stands apart from fellow Democrats who advocate for crime and cultural disorder in the name of social progress” is either wrong or our standards for sanity have gotten far too low.
In a Twitter scuffle with Florida Sen. Rick Scott just two months ago, Adams, then floating the plan to offer arriving migrants free college, challenged the idea that, well, anyone could be here illegally.
Scott tweeted, “New Yorkers are fleeing due to the high crime, high taxes, and woke leadership. Now @NYCMayor wants them to pay for illegal migrants to go to school?”
Adams responded, “These aren’t ‘illegal migrants.’ They’re asylum seekers, here legally.”
And this is the moderate?
We’re watching millions of single men cross our border, clearly in search of economic opportunity and not because they’re seeking asylum, but Adams wants us not to trust our own eyes.
Anyone can be an “asylum seeker” in Adams’ telling.
This is arguing for open borders, just using slightly different language.
Those of us who believe in old-fashioned concepts like countries controlling their borders and immigration policy can’t allow this fringe position to become something we accept as “moderate.” It’s not.
What Adams has recently learned but won’t state plainly is that his idea, to simply welcome in anyone who wants to come, is unsustainable.
If New York, a proud sanctuary city with a giant population and tons of resources, can’t handle the influx, what have our border towns been subjected to for the past few years?
Continuing the pandemic-era policies of putting New York children dead last, Adams started sticking these migrants into gyms at schools around the city. How long can this last?
“Dems encourage people to go around our legal immigration process, anyone who objects is branded racist — and yet the left refuses to admit what it really wants,” I wrote in a 2021 column in these pages.
Adams is a perfect example of this.
Anyone can be an “asylum seeker” who spends years in our country waiting for a court date for which they may never show up.
This insanity has been passing for moderation. Enough.
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the new book “Stolen Youth.”