A Man for All Seasons of Border Chaos The President is wasting one of the great political opportunities in recent memory. By James Freeman
Has any recent President enjoyed a better opportunity and a greater incentive to enact immigration reform than Joe Biden ? The U.S. is suffering its worst worker shortage ever recorded at the same time it continues to suffer a humanitarian crisis as job seekers and unaccompanied minors mix with opportunistic criminals in the chaos at our southern border. Mr. Biden is desperate to appear caring and competent after his disgracefully executed departure from Afghanistan. He may never have a better set of facts to drive a bipartisan plan to boost border enforcement and increase legal migration. All he has to do is stop indulging the Sandernista desire to remake America and instead focus on solving the country’s problems.
As for the need for more willing workers, the government reported today that open positions in the U.S. hit another record high. Jeff Cox at CNBC notes:
Job openings outnumbered the unemployed by more than 2 million in July as companies struggled to fill a record number of vacancies, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
The department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which the Federal Reserve watches closely for signs of slack in employment, showed 10.9 million positions open. That was much higher than the FactSet estimate of 9.9 million and the June total of 10.18 million.
Lucia Mutikani at Reuters adds that the JOLTS report “also showed a steady increase in the number of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs, a sign of confidence in the labor market.” She adds:
“This is a super tight job market,” said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “The ongoing struggle to find the right worker for the right role continues.”
Many of the right workers are eager to join us from other countries. But instead of crafting solutions to problems in immigration policy, the President pretends they don’t exist. The Journal’s Jason Riley notes:
Remember when the White House assured us in the spring that the migrant surge on the southern border was “seasonal” and nothing to worry about? Oops. “The Border Patrol made about 200,000 arrests at the southern border in July, marking the busiest month at the border in 21 years and a 12% increase over the previous month,” the Journal reported in August, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Detention centers are so overwhelmed that illegal immigrants are being released into the population without being screened for Covid.
At Mr. Biden’s first presidential press conference on March 25, he spun the crisis as an annual rite:
The truth of the matter is: Nothing has changed. As many people came — 28 percent increase in children to the border in my administration; 31 percent in the last year of — in 2019, before the pandemic, in the Trump administration. It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.
At the time, many reporters like Cecilia Vega of ABC News weren’t buying Mr. Biden’s seasonal explanation. She said:
Sir, I just got back last night from a reporting trip to the border where I met nine-year-old, Yossell, who walked here from Honduras by himself, along with another little boy . . . and we were able to call his family. His mother says that she sent her son to this country because she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied minors like her son. That’s why she sent him alone from Honduras.
Unfortunately, seasonality was extremely satisfying to some media folk. The Washington Post published an “Analysis” carrying the headline: “The migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border is actually a predictable pattern.”
“Evidence reveals the usual seasonal bump—plus some of the people who waited during the pandemic,” claimed the subhead. Tom Wong, Gabriel De Roche and Jesus Rojas Venzor wrote:
The increase in border crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico has generated a lot of attention—and a lot of theories about where this increase is coming from and whether it might be linked to Biden administration policies.
Underappreciated in the developing narrative is just how predictable the rise in border crossings is. We analyzed monthly U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from 2012 through February and found no clear evidence that the overall increase in border crossings in 2021 can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase fits a pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020s coronavirus border closure.
The message was catching on. Jazmine Ulloa reported in March in the Boston Globe:
Migration and foreign policy experts from across the political spectrum sought to dispel notions that the current increase in migration is a national security crisis. Central American migration patterns tend to be seasonal, picking up in the warmer months and dropping off in the sweltering summer when the dangerous trek up north can become even more deadly.
What would we do without migration experts? The sweltering summer has obliterated their analysis with a historic surge.
And as Mr. Riley noted, there’s at least one other conspicuous reason why Biden border policy lacks credibility. The President has frequently backed far more drastic Covid containment measures than the one he has been scaling back on the southern border. Recently John Gramlich of the Pew Research Center noted the change in how arrests are resolved:
Migrant encounters refer to two distinct kinds of events: apprehensions, in which migrants are taken into custody in the United States to await adjudication, and expulsions, in which migrants are immediately expelled to their home country or last country of transit without being held in U.S. custody.
Most encounters that have occurred in recent months have resulted in expulsion, not apprehension, under a public health order known as Title 42. President Donald Trump’s administration invoked Title 42 in March 2020, arguing that it would slow the domestic spread of the coronavirus by expelling migrants rather than holding them in close quarters in U.S. immigration facilities. Between April 2020 and the end of the Trump administration, more than 80% of monthly migrant encounters at the southwestern border resulted in expulsion rather than apprehension.
Expulsions have become less common—and apprehensions more common—in the first months of President Joe Biden’s administration. In July, 47% of migrant encounters resulted in expulsion, down from 83% in January, when Biden took office. During the same period, the share of migrant encounters that resulted in apprehension rose from 17% to 53%.
Nothing could restore credibility faster on this issue—and for Mr. Biden—than a sincere effort to enact bipartisan reform.
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