President Joe Biden’s deputies announced plans that would temporarily reduce the visible migrant inflow at the southern border before the 2024 election.
The new curbs will replace the Title 42 border barrier on May 11. They will expire in May 2025, six months after the 2024 election.
“This proposed rule will establish temporary rules concerning asylum eligibility in those proceedings when the Title 42 order is lifted,” said a statement by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The plan would reject claims by the migrants who refuse to ask for asylum in the many countries they travel through on their march to the United States. It would also target migrants who do not use the quasi-legal “parole pathway” that is being offered via a federal cellphone app developed by the Department of Homeland Security. The app allows migrants in Mexico and other countries to register for a quasi-legal, semi-secret parole pathway into the United States, and it allows the administration to regulate how many migrants are allowed in each day and month.
An agency press release said:
Under the proposed rule, individuals who circumvent available, established pathways to lawful migration … and also fail to seek protection in a country through which they traveled on their way to the United States, would be subject to a rebuttable presumption of asylum ineligibility in the United States unless they meet specified exceptions.
Officials hope the carrot-and-stick, deportation-or-app, policy will reduce visible border chaos — and so minimize the risk that Biden’s reelection campaign will be damaged by televised images of migrants rushing across Americans’ border.
Pro-migration groups are denouncing the plan and may sue the federal government to block it. But those progressive groups — and their business backers — want Biden to win the 2024 election, so they may quietly allow the new migrant-management policy to be implemented.
File/Migrants taking part in a caravan heading to the US, walk from Huixtla to Escuintla, Chiapas state, Mexico, on June 9, 2022. (PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
The new 2024 rules may not reduce the inflowing number of economic migrants that threaten Americans’ ability to earn decent wages and afford decent housing.
For example, Biden’s deputies say they plan to import roughly 600,000 migrants each year via t”parole pathways” and the “CBP One” cellphone app. This inflow is above the roughly 1 million legal migrants allowed by Congress.
The agency statement said 60,000 migrants have already been allowed to the parole pathway since October:
For those who followed the lawful process, through February 17, more than 26,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians were thoroughly screened and vetted, and received travel authorization. Thousands of Venezuelans (for whom the program was launched in October 2022) have already arrived: 33,800 have been screened and vetted and received travel authorization from October through the end of January.
Since early 2021, Biden and his deputies have imported 6 million people via legal, quasi-legal, and illegal routes. That is roughly three migrants for every four American births.
The new curb on visible migration is both bad and good for the GOP’s business-backed establishment.
The establishment’s donors quietly support Biden’s policy of importing foreign workers, consumers, and renters. That is why GOP politicians rarely try to win elections by showing swing voters how they are hurt by the pocketbook damage from Biden’s flood of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants.
But the establishment happily uses Biden’s border chaos to help spike the turnout of the GOP base. But if there is no visible chaos in the 2024 race, the GOP establishment will try to create a substitute issue that can also spike GOP base turnout.
Still, 20 GOP states have sued to block the parole pathway that allows many migrants to enter via the quasi-legal parole pathway route. If that pathway is blocked by the lawsuit, Mexico may wreck Biden’s hide-the-migration plan.
The new migration plan heavily depends on Mexico.
Biden’s deputies have been reluctant to protect Americans by enforcing Congress’ border rules.
File/Immigrants wait to board a U.S. Border Patrol bus to be taken for processing after crossing the border from Mexico, while standing amid a shadow cast by the U.S.-Mexico border barrier, on May 19, 2022 in Yuma, Arizona. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
So Biden’s deputies need Mexico’s cooperation to help hide the very unpopular migration rush into the United States.
Currently, Mexico is helping Biden by letting the United States start the parole pathway deep inside Mexico. The path relies on U.S.-funded non-profit groups that house and coach economic migrants while they apply for access to the United States.
In exchange, Mexico expects the U.S. to continue importing Latino migrants, and also to ignore Mexico’s passive acceptance of the drug cartels that are helping to kill 100,000 Americans each year.
The quiet deal helps explains why the White House does little to stop Mexico’s drug exports into the United States.
The President has the power to threaten Mexico’s ability to produce parts for the U.S. manufacturers, such as auto manufacturers. In 2019, President Donald Trump used economic threats to force Mexico to curb illegal migration.
But under the Biden administration, “we are doing that which needs to be done” to counter the cartels, Biden’s homeland security chief told the Washington Post in January.