The Cracked Morality Behind Biden’s Open-Border Policy

P ete Buttigieg had quite the appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box the other day.

Challenged by anchor Joe Kernen about President Biden’s reversal of Trump border policies, the secretary of transportation insisted that it hadn’t happened, in a Tokyo Rose–level denial of reality.

“That’s literally not true. It’s literally not true,” Buttigieg told Kernen with great umbrage and conviction.

According to Mayor Pete, Biden ended only Trump’s policy of child separation. “He got rid of the policy to tear children out of the arms of their parents, that’s true, but it is not true some of the other things that have been suggested,” he averred.

To say that Buttigieg’s statement was flagrantly untrue is almost unfair to other flagrant falsehoods. Trump ended child separation in June 2018 shortly after its implementation when it became clear that it was a debacle. If you look at Biden’s key February 2, 2021, executive order on the border, it ends everything except child separations, most importantly Remain in Mexico and the safe-third-country agreements.

Now, Buttigieg is not an expert on immigration policy, but he’s also not stupid or ill-informed. At the very least, we can assume he listens to NPR. That he apparently quite sincerely believes that the administration’s only rollback was of child separations speaks to the worldview that has informed Biden’s approach to the border.

In this view, child separation is essentially all that Trump did, if not literally, then metaphorically. Everything else was the moral equivalent of child separation, so basic decency required that it all had to go.

Joe Biden himself expressed this perspective at a March 21, 2021, press conference, where he, too, said that he had ended child separation, again a policy that ended years previously. Asked if he had moved “too quickly to roll back some of the executive orders of your predecessor,” Biden replied:

First of all, all the policies that were underway were not helping at all — did not slow up the amount of immigration — and there’s many people coming.

And rolling back the policies of separating children from — from their mothers, I make no apology for that. Rolling back the policies of “Remain in Mexico,” sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat and — I make no apologies for that.

I make no apologies for ending programs that did not exist before Trump became President that have an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity. And so, I make no apologies for that.

In short, he was engaged, unapologetically, in ripping up everything that had come before because it was so morally intolerable.

And this very much included Remain in Mexico, the Trump policy that had asylum-seekers stay on the Mexican side of the border while their asylum claims were adjudicated. When Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas reversed the policy, after some initial setbacks in the courts, he maintained that it had “imposed unjustifiable human costs” and failed to provide “humanitarian protections.”

No doubt, it’s better for the migrants to get into the United States immediately, rather than wait in Mexico for the appropriate processes to play out. But they chose to leave their home countries to go to Mexico in the first place, and Mexico gave us assurances that they’d take appropriate care of the migrants when we implemented the policy. (If Biden officials were distressed by the conditions for the migrants in Mexico, they could have sought to improve them.)

The problem, of course, is that once illegal immigrants gain entry to the United States, they are very unlikely ever to leave. So the options are having border security, with some version of Remain in Mexico and similar policies, or not having it all.

In theory, the third option would be detaining migrants in the U.S. while any asylum proceedings are completed, as the actual letter of the law demands. But the Left that has so influenced Biden’s immigration policy considers detention to be inhumane, too. The only decent alternative, then, is simply to wave illegal immigrants into the United States, which, as it happens, has been the Biden approach.

This is why the de facto open border isn’t, at the end of the day, a function of incompetence, or inadequate resources, or lack of congressional action. No, it is a product of a profoundly flawed moral vision.

First, this view is too partisan and thoughtless to distinguish between Trump’s worst border policy, the child separations, and ones that were effective and entirely reasonable.

Second, it doesn’t take into account the costs imposed on the United States and our citizens by allowing mass illegal immigration, nor the terrible risks we are enticing more and more migrants to take on their trek to our southern border on the (correct) assumption that they will get in.

What the Left considers the humane approach at the border has really resulted in untold chaos and enormous burdens and expenses for communities all over the country that already had ample challenges — just ask a big-city mayor near you.

So, Pete Buttigieg might not know, or care to know, the facts. Yet he is perfectly representative of the set of attitudes that has created the ongoing crisis imperiling the Biden presidency.