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Editor's Note: Happy (almost) Easter! We're taking a brief hiatus to paint some eggs. We'll be back in full swing Tuesday!
“The Biden administration for the first time Tuesday allowed journalists inside its main border detention facility for migrant children, revealing a severely overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250…
“The Biden administration has continued expelling adults who try to cross the border under a coronavirus-related public health declaration enacted by former President Donald Trump. Biden also has tried to expel most families traveling together, but changes in Mexican law have forced agents to release many parents and children into the U.S. Biden has declined to resume the Trump-era practice of expelling unaccompanied immigrant children.” AP News
Read our recent coverage of the border here and here. The Flip Side
The right is critical of Biden’s policies, arguing that they are exacerbating the situation at the border.
“Trump had made significant progress toward securing the border, only for Biden to halt construction on his wall and end the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy… Biden insists the surge is normal, when it’s setting records. He insists it’s not because of his words and policies, when common sense, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the migrants themselves say the opposite…
“Border Patrol turned away only 13 percent of the 13,000 border-crossers traveling in family units. Indeed, over 1,000 children and family units are crossing the border on any given day, and the feds expect crossings to double over the next month…
“Some 15,500 immigrant children are in federal custody, with 5,000 of those housed in facilities on the border (some of which are the very ‘cages’ liberals condemned under President Trump). Even White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that these detention buildings are ‘not places made for children.’”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“Now some of the immigration enforcement agents are reportedly too overwhelmed by the numbers to do even the minimal amount of processing work. According to an Associated Press report, entire families have been turned loose, not only without a court date but without any paperwork at all. Some haven’t even been fingerprinted or had their identity verified. So I take it we’re just working on the honor system now?…
“Somebody made the decision to have the CBP start releasing all of these people without even finding out who some of them are, to say nothing of arranging a court date to determine if they need to be deported… This isn’t a border control policy. It’s surrender.”
Jazz Shaw, Hot Air
“‘It’s great that the U.S. is welcoming women and children,’ Pastor Abraham Barberi tells me when I visit the migrant shelter he runs in Matamoros, Mexico. ‘But they’re also sending the message to families: ‘Let’s leave everything behind because our children will make it across the border.’’ Andrea Morris Rudnik of Team Brownsville, a volunteer group that helps migrants, agrees: ‘We’re basically encouraging moms and babies to cross the river, which is not right. And they’re willing to do it.’…
“Parents with infants, toddlers and young children are crossing together, while others make the difficult decision to entrust children over 8 to coyotes and send them to the U.S. alone… Some 82 migrants have died since October while attempting to enter the U.S… As the weather grows warmer, the numbers of migrants will increase and the situation will worsen unless the incentives change…
“Congress could help by closing loopholes in U.S. asylum law, increasing opportunities for migrants to enter the U.S. legally on temporary work permits, and allowing Central American children to seek asylum in their country of origin instead of making the dangerous journey north. But if politicians prefer to have immigration as a campaign issue than find a solution, the consequence will be wealthier and more powerful cartels, more migrant parents making impossible choices, and more children’s bodies washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande.”
Jillian Kay Melchior, Wall Street Journal
“The biggest factor driving such flows has gone largely unaddressed: the willingness and ability of American employers to hire untold millions of unauthorized immigrants. The vast majority of the people are coming here for the same reason people have always come here: to work (or to join their families who are here to work). Unless there is a serious effort, through mandatory E-Verify and other relatively simple means, to ensure that persons hired to work in the United States are eligible to do so, our country will continue to entice unauthorized immigrants and reward unauthorized immigration…
“It is discouraging to see the Biden administration characterizing the ‘root causes’ of unauthorized immigration as poverty, corruption and violence in Mexico, Central America and elsewhere and vowing to address the issue by attacking these problems. These are certainly ‘push’ factors, but they are nowhere near as powerful as the ‘pull’ factor of jobs in the United States readily available at wages unimaginable in these other parts of the world. And obviously the U.S. government has far greater power to regulate the conduct of employers within its own borders than to solve deep-rooted social problems abroad.”
Christopher Landau, New York Times
The left argues that the US bears responsibility for the root causes of migration and calls for more humane treatment of migrants.
The left argues that the US bears responsibility for the root causes of migration and calls for more humane treatment of migrants.
“While often discussed as if emerging from a vacuum, the state of weakness, corruption, inequality, and domination of organized crime that so often forms the basis of asylum seekers’ claims has been created and fomented at every turn by U.S. policymaking…
“Starting with early Cold War-era covert and overt military intervention and regime change and continuing through the exporting of gangs like MS-13—originally established in California—through harsh and short-sighted immigration enforcement during the ‘law and order’ late ’80s and ’90s, there is almost no socio-political-economic issue plaguing these countries that doesn’t have U.S. fingerprints all over it… Put another way, the mainstream conversation on asylum is already rooted in the wrong premise, that the migrants arriving at the border are in effect pleading for a display of benevolence from the U.S. and not merely asking it to take responsibility for the damage it has inflicted.”
Felipe De La Hoz, New Republic
“Owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season last year, with the last two storms, Eta and Iota, striking Central America… the Northern Triangle countries—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—have been afflicted by climate-induced drought for a decade, leaving 3.5 million people facing food insecurity, but the floods from those two storms produced even more savage damage. Twelve hundred schools were damaged or destroyed; forty per cent of corn crops and sixty-five per cent of the bean harvest were lost…
“As a percentage of G.D.P., the damage is greater than that done by the worst storms ever to hit the United States, yet the people of these countries did comparatively little to cause the climate crisis—whereas the four per cent of us who live in this country have produced more greenhouse gases than the population of almost any other nation. So there’s really no way to pretend that migrants arriving at our southern border have no claim on America. Honduras could have built the biggest, most beautiful wall on its northern border, and our CO2 would still have sailed right across it.”
Bill McKibben, New Yorker
“First, the United States must marshal and deploy immediate, large-scale food assistance to those suffering the impacts of Hurricanes Eta and Iota — two ‘once-a-century storms’ that made landfall 15 miles and two weeks apart in November 2020… Second, those suffering from the impacts of Eta and Iota are also in need of immediate employment opportunities to root them in their communities. Fast disbursing, cash-based programs can and should be stood up to do that…
“Third, the people of the Americas cannot wait for COVID-19 vaccines — and certainly should not wait behind more geographically distant partners. The Biden-Harris administration has put Mexico and Canada at the top of the list for excess supply of U.S. manufactured vaccines. The countries of Central America (and the Caribbean) must be next… [These] are certainly not the only elements of a new U.S. approach to managing migration and addressing root causes, but they are essential to building a new, durable and effective approach.”
Dan Restrepo, The Hill
Some point out that “As worthy of sympathy as [the migrant] families are, we live under a system of laws that doesn’t provide for their needs unless they meet a high legal standard. As a matter of law, America’s borders are not open. Not everyone who comes is legally entitled to stay… Yet to my frustration, many of my friends in the immigrant-advocacy community will not help shape these decisions; most are unable or unwilling to name any category of migrant who should ever be returned… Hard policy decisions are better made with input from people who care deeply about the lives at stake…
Biden is working to reestablish American refugee-processing capabilities in Central American countries so that those truly fleeing for their life can get to safety without having to rely on smugglers to bring them on the dangerous trip through Mexico. The ability to seek safety without journeying north, combined with faster asylum processing for those who have made the trip, will help those who have a legitimate claim get answers quickly and get on with their life. Those who have traveled but do not succeed with their asylum case should be returned—in as compassionate a manner as possible—to their country of origin.”
Cecilia Muñoz, The Atlantic
