There’s not a lot that I can add to the discussion of the now-dead border-security deal that hasn’t already been said by the Editors, Andy, MBD, Rich, Mark, and my co-podcasters on The Editors.
So instead, I’ll try to be succinct: The key problem with the border-security bill is that it required congressional Republicans to trust Joe Biden to take a wide range of actions to deter illegal immigration in the final year of his term, when he has done so little to do so during the first three years of his term.
President Biden had three years to fine-tune federal immigration policies the way he wants them; as of late January, Biden’s administration had taken 535 immigration actions. On his first day in office, in January 2021, Biden halted all border-wall construction and acquiesced to only 20 miles of new construction because they had no remaining legal options otherwise. Biden expanded the use of immigration parole authority at a historic scale. Biden ended the Covid-19-related Title 42 expulsions authority in May 2023. He’s raised the refugee caps. Asylum cases are at record highs.
Go figure, as Biden did all this, no potential migrant in Central America or anywhere else in the world believed Biden, his administration, or Kamala Harris when she said, “Do not come.”
There is little evidence that Joe Biden worries about high levels of illegal immigration per se. Joe Biden worries about the political fallout from high levels of illegal immigration, or more specifically, the political fallout from the perception that Biden can’t or won’t do anything about high levels of illegal immigration. Congressional Republican skeptics concluded that even if Biden were given what he wanted in this deal, Biden’s goal would be to change the perception of the insecure border, not change the facts of the insecure border.