The radical immigration activists who worked so hard to get Joe Biden elected must be wondering when their payday is coming. On issue after issue, promise after promise, Joe Biden has disappointed the activists and is now starting to anger them.
To be sure, Joe Biden is trying. After announcing a return to an “orderly, safe, and humane” immigration system, the president discovered — much to his chagrin — that desperate, poor people don’t want to be orderly about coming to the U.S., nor do they care if it’s safe and humane. They just want in. And they’ll do anything to get here.
Biden’s promises to be nice to illegal aliens and welcome all who want to come have hit the brick wall of reality. Now, the president has refused to raise Trump-era refugee limits. Where activists envisioned up to 125,000 refugees able to come immediately, Biden has decided to keep the 15,000 limit for the time being.
One of the migrants’ favorite ploys is to try and cross the border illegally and, when caught, declare themselves “refugees.” The term “refugee” has legal standing. “Illegal alien” does not. Once they do declare refugee status, they’re in “the system” — and getting them to leave if they’re not eligible for refugee status takes years.
Certainly, there are tens of thousands of legitimate refugees fleeing certain death and persecution at the hands of brutal governments. But trying to discern who is a legitimate refugee and who is an economic opportunist—or a violent criminal or even a terrorist—can take months, as Joe Biden is beginning to realize.
Needless to say, the left is missing an opportunity for some moral preening and they’re not happy about it.
Restoring “the soul of the nation” cannot mean simply unseating Trump. It also has to mean reversing the policies his administration put in place in an attempt to codify into law his racial and sectarian conception of American citizenship. If Biden cannot do that, then he has restored little more than Democratic control of the presidency. And should he fail to rescind these policies simply because he fears criticism of those who enabled Trump’s cruelty to begin with, it will be nothing short of cowardice.
“My faith teaches me that we should be a nation that once again welcomes the stranger and shows a preferential option for the poor, remembering how so many of us and our ancestors came here in a similar way,” Biden wrote in 2019. “It’s not enough to just wish the world were better. It’s our duty to make it so.”
Beautiful sentiments, to be sure. But Serwer hit the nail on the head. This is all about Democratic control of the presidency in a divided nation. What the moral preeners like Serwer can’t see is that Biden is not a healer, he’s not a uniter. He’s a politician faced with a crisis that could easily spiral into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Biden’s current solution — to turn back everyone but kids — may be preventing an immediate disaster but is only a temporary solution. Nor is keeping limits on refugee admittance the answer to the refugee crisis. It certainly won’t satisfy his radical left base. But considering that 42 million people from South and Central America want to migrate to the United States, some way must be found to discourage that mass of humanity from coming.
