In January, President Joe Biden pretended to throw up his hands at the border crisis he had created by undoing all of Donald Trump’s executive orders and the Remain in Mexico policy. “I’ve done all I can do, just give me the power,” he then claimed, while trying to get Congress to sign a bill that would further entrench the disorder and abuse of asylum claims his policies initiated.
It turns out there is something more Joe Biden can do: He can blow more smoke through the use of executive orders, in a desperate attempt to hide the mess his administration created.
Already, some are bragging or falsely complaining that Joe Biden is “shutting down” the border with his executive order. The New York Times calls it a “dramatic election-year move” that shows how drastically immigration politics have shifted in the United States and “echoes an effort backed by President Donald J. Trump.” Would that it were so.
The foreign-born percentage of the population of the United States has ballooned to a historic high as of March 2024 — 15.6 percent of the U.S. population, or 51.6 million people. That’s roughly equivalent to California (the most populous state in the union) and Pennsylvania (the fifth-most populous). Many millions of them have no legal right to live here, and exist in a legal limbo.
The claim is that the new executive order will impel administration officials to close the border once the seven-day average of illegal entries hits 2,500 per day. But there are many loopholes that allow the administration to avoid this and continue to admit bogus asylum seekers at a rate of over a million per year. The executive order would not address the 1,500 migrants per day who use the CBP One app at ports of entry. It doesn’t affect the tens of thousands of migrants a month who fly directly to the United States and are “paroled” into the country, via a kind of rolling amnesty for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The executive order does little to combat the pipeline of asylum seekers who come from countries outside of the Western Hemisphere. Ukrainians, Russians, Afghans, and Eritreans have been pioneering a path of flying to South America and then crossing the formerly impassable Darién Gap on foot before trekking through Mexico to the U.S. border. The U.S. encountered 6,000 Chinese nationals crossing the Mexican border in December 2023 alone.
What the Biden administration has done consistently is propose rules that allow them to wave in more immigrants but advertise the new guidelines as border-control measures. For example, the Times claims that in May the administration proposed a rule change that would allow officers to quickly identify people who are ineligible to receive asylum, such as those who have been convicted of “a serious crime.” In fact, the proposal to allow asylum officers to make snap assessments gave the administration more leeway to process people through its border turnstile, without an adversarial interview with a judge.
In February of 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order it advertised as “Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration System and Strengthening Integration and Inclusion Efforts for New Americans.” The results afterward? Tent cities springing up across the West Coast, and mayors in Chicago and New York trying to dump recent arrivals onto nearby suburbs.
Nobody fell for the political ruse then. We hope nobody does now.