If she wasn’t the border czar, what was she doing staging a perfunctory photo op at the border after months of resisting it?
As part of its promotion of Kamala Harris’s candidacy, the legacy media is working overtime to deny that President Biden named his vice president as “border czar.”
As NR’s Matthew Wilson noted, Axios has hilariously been trying to do cleanup on its repeated labeling of Harris as “border czar.” (The BBC described her that way as well.) Joining Axios in retailing the Harris-for-president talking points are Time, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and no doubt many other tentacles of the media octopus.
But of course she was the border czar.
Czars in the non-Romanov sense have been around in some sense for a century or more, but the idea of a “czar” in charge of a specific policy issue really took off in the FDR administration during World War II, with a transportation czar, a shipping czar, even a synthetic-rubber czar.
More recently, Bill Bennett, one-time contributor to this journal, was named the first drug czar by President George H. W. Bush. Obama had more czars than Moscow, including a climate czar, a green-jobs czar, and a car czar. (Alan Bersin was his border czar.)
Here’s some of what President Biden said a couple of months into his term when naming Harris border czar:
I’ve asked her, the VP, today — because she’s the most qualified person to do it — to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.
And later on:
And so, this increase has been consequential, but the Vice President has agreed . . . to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees and enhance migration enforcement at their borders.
And finally:
So it’s not her full responsibility and job, but she’s leading the effort because I think the best thing to do is to put someone who, when he or she speaks, they don’t have to wonder about is that where the President is. When she speaks, she speaks for me.
In other words, she was border czar. In fact, Harris was the replacement for Biden’s previous border czar, Roberta Jackson, who formally stepped down from the post a few weeks after the president’s announcement of Harris’s new responsibility.
You don’t get a business card that says “Kamala Harris, Border Czar” — the label is journalistic shorthand; it is, as Wikipedia puts it, “an informal title used for certain high-level officials in the United States and United Kingdom, typically granted broad power to address a particular issue” — you know, like Kamala Harris over the border crisis.
The Harris people knew they were being tossed a hot potato by their antagonists on Biden’s staff. CNN reported that:
After the announcement, Harris’ aides appeared to “panic,” according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals.
She was being “set up to fail” by the Biden people, as Kevin Williamson wrote — and fail she did.
And if she wasn’t the border czar, what was she doing staging a perfunctory photo op at the border after months of resisting it?
But even if Harris insists that she’s just the “root causes czar,” how’s that working out? Since she assumed that role, there have been around 8 million illegal-alien apprehensions at the southern border. It’s clear the whole root-causes narrative was just a PR ploy to justify nonenforcement of immigration laws.
“Do not come,” indeed.
And even if it was sincere, we’ve been doling out development aid in the Third World for three-quarters of a century, and it’s probably just made things worse. What’s more, even if aid really did accelerate development, it would initially drive an increase in the desire to emigrate, as people had a little more money in their pockets and were cut off from their traditional communities and ways of life by the disruptions of development. (This is infelicitously called the “migration hump.”)
On top of all that, the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policies, as administered by disgraced Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have globalized illegal immigration, such that Harris would have to address the root causes in some 170 nations around the world.
But “Kamala Harris, Border Czar” is itself shorthand for the larger issue: The presumptive Democratic nominee for president is an immigration extremist. She’s in favor of taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens; closing all contract detention centers for illegals awaiting deportation; decriminalizing illegal infiltration across the border; abolishing ICE (“starting from scratch”), which she likened to the Klan; granting law licenses to illegal aliens; and more.
She has an F-minus grade from the low-immigration group Numbers USA.
Unfortunately, Harris is not an outlier in holding these fringe views. The Democratic Party has radicalized on immigration — a process that began well before Trump. I wrote back in 2005 how every group on the left would sacrifice its own interests and constituents if they conflicted with open immigration. (I wanted to call it “Open Borders Uber Alles,” but Kathryn demurred.)
Support for de facto unlimited immigration is now a litmus-test issue for Democratic officials and activists. Harris’s radicalism is simply more proof of that.