President Joe Biden has abdicated all responsibility for controlling the border, with the White House laughably reduced to blaming the migrant crisis on Republicans.
The White House claims that Congress won’t “solve” the problem, which means, essentially, that the GOP doesn’t agree with mass amnesty.
Because that’s what Biden’s version of “comprehensive immigration reform” amounts to, and indeed is the policy he’s imposing in bits and pieces by executive decree.
He’s finding or creating ways to get various groups “legal” status so his Department of Homeland Security can report fewer illegal migrants “encountered” and admitted into the interior.
Of course the whole “asylum seeker” charade is itself of dubious legal status, as the administration grants itself a license to wave in people who have no hope of qualifying for asylum and will never even file for it unless it qualifies them for some interim benefits (like work papers) over the decade or more it’ll take the immigration court to get to their cases.
The law actually states that you must apply for asylum from the first nation you land in after fleeing your homeland, but that rule somehow went by the wayside in the Obama era and never got conclusively restored in the Trump years.
Because Congress won’t pass a bill giving everyone in the country legal status, Biden refuses to do anything about border security.
Which, by the way, makes it impossible for Republicans to negotiate: GOP voters are seeing thousands a day lined up to get waved in and hearing how New York and other migrant-friendly cities are overwhelmed and screaming for help.
Until “legal” practice starts to resemble the letter of the law, even Republican electeds who favor greater legal immigration won’t get caught dead negotiating with this White House.
Indeed, as a matter of grassroots politics, the Democratic-created crisis is moving ever more GOP voters toward a “zero immigration” stance: We’ve already let in so many illegals who will never leave, goes the logic, that we should just keep them all out.
As long as nearly all Democrats in Congress are too afraid of offending the hard left to get deeply serious about border enforcement, any bipartisan compromise is impossible.
That is: Biden has to act, not hold the country hostage by refusing to do his sworn duty.
So: At least until the country has a president willing to do more than lie about the border, the crisis will only grow worse.