Out of control: what’s really going on at the US border
More than eight million illegal immigrants, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of the entire US population, have entered America under Joe Biden. If Donald Trump becomes president, that’s why.
The southern border with Mexico is absolute chaos. Biden has done for America what Labor did to Australia when it unpicked John Howard’s border controls. But the US mess is infinitely worse.
There have been more than seven million illegal border crossings to the US from Mexico. Not all of them stayed in the US. But those who are pushed out just come back. The figures are slippery and disputed. However, on the most conservative estimates, 4.5 million to five million illegal immigrants are in the US who arrived under Biden.
The real number could be much higher. This figure includes a conservative estimate for the so-called gotaways, immigrants who entered illegally without being detected by any government agency.
No one knows for sure how many illegal immigrants there are. Biden has been a weak and mediocre president, but in most areas not the worst you could imagine.
However, on illegal immigration he has produced an absolute, unmitigated disaster. And it’s all his own work, all the result of being determinedly the opposite of Trump.
Every aspect of policy on border security and immigration has hopelessly broken down. Nothing is working properly. It’s a colossal mess, an epic failure. The sheer figures are staggering. December just gone was a record month for illegal crossings over the Mexican border. There were just under 250,000 arrests on the border.
Under Biden’s “catch-and-release” policy, the vast majority of these were released and allowed to stay in the US as they await a court date to decide their immigration status.
But the average waiting period for a court hearing on immigration status is now five years and more. Those most likely to fail at court don’t go to court. And by the time people do get to court, they, and their lawyers, know exactly what to say to stay in the US. In any event, by then it’s impossible to expel them. Even if told to leave, they don’t go but disappear into the informal economy, the world of fraudulent documents, dodgy social security numbers, work for cash and, of course, crime.
So the 250,000 who were mostly caught and released in December will almost all stay permanently. This is surely the very worst way to run immigration policy. For years these folks will populate a deathly legal twilight zone, many with the slight but nagging possibility of deportation in the future if policy should change, some with limited work rights. Many will have children as quickly as possible to set down anchors in the American legal system. Many will become part of a new underclass.
The numbers are actually much worse than even the quarter of a million in one month suggest. As well as 250,000 arrests, another 50,000 came in under appointment. Well, then, you might say, they’re not illegal. But they have no legal basis for being in the US.
The system under Biden is so comprehensively overwhelmed on the southern border that it is taking desperate measures to reduce the appearance of chaos. It’s allowing people to register for an appointment using a mobile app. All they have to say is that they’re planning to cross the border and seek asylum. They are given an appointment and then allowed to come into the US and join the long queue waiting for a court date.
In theory, the court might decide they have no valid claim to be in the US and, again theoretically, they could be removed. But once they’re in, they’re in forever. This is just abject surrender to the forces of illegal immigration, backed by the billions upon billions of dollars in the people-smuggling business. But wait, there’s more. It turns out the Biden administration has operated another scheme similar to this in which it has flown in another 320,000 people to various cities around the country. Again, these are not people who have a well-established claim, or any claim, to be in the US. They are merely people who plan to walk into the US so the government flies them in instead.
The Biden administration does as much of this as possible in secret. It won’t disclose the number of flights, the cities they’re going to or when they arrive. It’s government policy but it’s not public policy, it’s secret policy, and it’s undemocratic.
December will have had its own share of gotaways as well, so that maybe 350,000 people came into the US in December alone, who will virtually all stay permanently, who were not chosen by the US immigration system, not provided for by US law.
In effect, there is no border between the US and Mexico. This is entirely Biden’s doing. Lately, Biden has tried to reverse these policies. He has even once or twice just lately threatened to close the Mexican border altogether.
But he won’t take the measures Trump took, his whole re-election strategy is based on the continued demonisation of Trump, and Biden has created such a humungous, roiling, slithering mess of policy failure and social polarisation that his administration seems paralysed.
This chaotic government impotence means it’s not just Central and South Americans coming in illegally. In 2023 alone, 37,000 Chinese nationals were detected coming in from Mexico. The Mexican route has become a worldwide jamboree. Some tens of thousands of Indians and others from the subcontinent have arrived that way. People now come through Mexico from all over the world – Iranians, Afghans, Chechens. A large number of people, running into some hundreds, on terror watch lists have entered illegally through Mexico.
No one is suggesting illegal immigration is all Biden’s fault. But he deliberately opened the border without any idea what this would mean or how he could keep it under control.
This is a personal failure of Biden and a corporate failure of the Democrats and of the global left generally. The left internationally now believes virtually every Western nation is in some core fashion illegitimate, a settler nation or a practitioner of territorial imperialism in the past and economic imperialism today. Therefore, in the left’s weirdly irrational view, such nations have no right to enforce their borders.
This is an ideological revolution and a repudiation of the inheritance of social democratic good government. The mad radicalism of this position is evident in contrasting Biden’s presidency not with Trump’s but with Barack Obama’s, when Biden himself was vice-president.
In the last five years of Obama’s presidency, his administration deported more than 400,000 people in each of three years and more than 300,000 in each of two years. This was substantially more deportations than happened under Trump. Obama didn’t do this because he was a wicked neo-imperialist, a racist or a white supremacist. Rather, like all governments of centre left or centre right up to then, he assumed the US should be able to control its borders.
Obama certainly believed in immigration, like most Americans. But he wanted the US to be in control of the process. In the US, with its long land borders, deportations are a necessary part of effective border policy.
In its first two years, the Biden administration deported barely 50,000 people a year. Just this week, according to American press reports, the unbelievable mess of Biden’s policy was illustrated when 200,000 cases up for consideration for deportation were dropped by the courts because the Department of Homeland Security didn’t file the proper paperwork on time.
Biden is way to the left not just of Trump and Obama but of his own past record. In 2007, during one of his many unsuccessful attempts to become the Democratic nominee for president, Biden declared: “No great country can say it’s secure without being able to secure its borders.”
Trump didn’t solve illegal immigration, partly because it’s unsolvable and partly because the Democrats in congress prevented him from doing things such as building an effective wall. But he slowed it right down.
However, Trump did use genuinely hateful and extreme rhetoric. This had two main effects, one that you might regard as unintentionally good, and one unintentionally bad. The good effect was that the sheer force and insistent quality of Trump’s rhetoric discouraged people from trying to enter America illegally.
The bad effect was that it convinced Democrats and their inner-city activist base that everything connected to border control was evil, reactionary, racist and imperialist. So they abandoned enforcing America’s borders.
As soon as he took office, Biden moved decisively to unpick all the Trump measures, and indeed all the Obama measures, which had been effective.
Even before he became president, Biden engaged in irresponsible rhetoric. Contrasting his compassion with Trump’s meanness, Biden said: “We could afford in a heartbeat to take another two million. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”
On every level, this was a dangerous statement for a potential president, a mistake at least equivalent to former German chancellor Angela Merkel inviting millions of Arab and North African migrants into Germany.
First, when the leader of a big, wealthy, democratic nation declares his society can easily welcome two million undocumented people, he’ll get not two million but 20 million, and the number will keep growing while ever the door is kept open.
Second, many people on the move internationally, certainly those who fly to Mexico from China or the Middle East, are not in desperate need or fleeing persecution. A huge number crossing the Mexican border are men of military age travelling on their own. They may be seeking a better life; that doesn’t make them refugees. Most have passed through some other nation where they wouldn’t face persecution but that wouldn’t offer the US standard of living.
What about ethics? The imperative to welcome outsiders runs deep in the Jewish and Christian traditions. The Old Testament declares, in Leviticus and elsewhere: Welcome the stranger, for were you not strangers in Egypt. In the New Testament the parable of the Good Samaritan is one of many teachings that the injunction to charity must transcend tribal and national boundaries.
But this doesn’t mean nations are not allowed to have borders. Being born in the US, or Australia, enjoying reasonable health and a loving family, means you’re luckier than 99.99 per cent of all human beings who have ever lived. This carries an ethical obligation to share that good fortune. One way is by having a generous immigration program.
In all of history, few nations have been more generous to immigrants, or had a bigger proportion of their population as immigrants, than the US and Australia. A generous refugee program should be part of that. But in a well-governed nation this is an orderly part of coherent government.
Too many conservatives forget that when Howard re-established control of Australia’s borders, he then substantially increased Australia’s immigrant intake. Too many leftists forget that under Howard Australia took in more actual refugees than under any other prime minister.
Biden as President could have increased America’s refugee intake while maintaining control of the southern border. Instead, in the political imperative to demonise Trump, he undertook a blizzard of actions that destroyed American control of its own border.
First, he stopped building the wall. There is nothing ethically wrong with a border barrier that prevents people from entering illegally. Good fences make good neighbours.
Second, he abolished the so-called Title 42 mechanism under which the US could instantly expel people who entered illegally. This is not really a matter of deportation or expulsion but more refusing to let someone in who has no right to come in, just as any Australian who arrived at a US airport without a visa would be liable to be arrested, detained and sent home on the next plane.
Biden abolished Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, under which people had their asylum claims evaluated outside the US. This means if the result is unfavourable they don’t stay in the US anyway.
Biden ended the co-operation programs Trump had with neighbouring countries to discourage illegal immigration. And he stopped deporting people. Biden took a slew of other measures that destroyed border control as well, all designed to emphasise his repudiation of Trump and earn applause from the activist class.
Now, according to the latest Gallup poll, Americans rate illegal immigration as the first or second most important issue. Barely 28 per cent approve Biden’s handling of immigration. It could be even worse than this. Much of the US mainstream media strains not to cover the issue, except as something wickedly exploited by Republicans, because they don’t want to help Trump.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been aggressive in sending busloads of undocumented immigrants to left liberal cities such as New York. The Texan argument here is unassailable. If the US is to take millions of unauthorised immigrants, there’s no reason the border states should bear all, or even most, of the burden.
New York is now spending more than $US12bn ($18bn) a year accommodating the immigrants it has received. The left-wing mayor of New York, Eric Adams, says the migrant crisis could destroy New York. Most of the migrants are law-abiding people but a serious number are criminals. The National Guard has been deployed on the New York subway.
The issue has crystalised around Laken Riley, a 22-year-old university student who went for a run on her campus in Georgia and was beaten to death. The accused killer is a Venezuelan who entered the US illegally on Biden’s watch. He’d been arrested for various crimes in New York, but because New York styles itself a sanctuary city it doesn’t surrender undocumented migrants who commit crimes to federal authorities for deportation, even if they serve significant time in jail.
This is all one of the greatest policy failures in American history. It represents the violent and destructive collision of left-wing ideology with intractable human reality. It’s a failure so monumental that in any normal time it should guarantee Biden’s defeat.
But these days, who knows?
Migrants cross through a gap in the US-Mexico border fence in Jacumba Hot Springs, San Diego, California. Picture: Getty
Migrants try to get to the US across the Rio Grande from Mexico in May last year. Picture: AFP
US President Joe Biden speaks with US Border Patrol agents as he visits the US-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas, on February 29. Picture: AFP
US President Donald Trump didn’t stop immigration, but he did slow it right down. Picture: AFP
