Joe Biden’s Progressives Split over Pro-Migration Promises

Joe Biden’s deputies and allies are walking back from the campaign’s radical pro-migration promises and are now calling for safeguards against another Latin American wave of blue-collar migrants.

“We’ve got to make sure that we don’t give an impression that we have open borders,” Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, told the Dallas Morning News.

He added, “The criminal organizations, they hire people, they know what our policies are. We don’t want them to go and advertise that there’s no wall, so start coming into the U.S., and then we start seeing caravans again. It’s a balance.”

The Associated Press reported:

At least initially, Biden may keep in place a Trump administration order that authorizes Customs and Border Protection to quickly expel any migrant as a public health measure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

… The new administration may decide it’s necessary to avoid a rush of migrants and to protect Border Patrol agents and other CBP employees, says Doris Meissner, a former senior U.S. immigration official now with the Migration Policy Institute. “This health circumstance is not likely to just disappear come January or February,” she says.

“They understand that what [President Donald] Trump did works, and so they had to demonize it,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. He added, “But now that they’re going to be responsible for the consequences, they are afraid of what’s going to happen. Justifiably so because undoing the measures that the president put in place will inevitably result in a rush to the border. So they have two choices: keep Trump’s policies in place or face the political consequences of a rush of illegal immigrants at the border. They’re in a difficult situation, and all I can say is: ‘Pass the popcorn.'”

The walk-back advocates are not against unskilled migration, despite the harm it does to America and Americans, Krikorian said. “They think that anybody should be able to move anywhere they want. … They just want it to be done more carefully, in such a way that it does not lose all of them their next election.”

The risk was exposed in 2014 when a wave of migrants drowned Obama’s poll ratings. A July 2014 AP poll of 1,044 Americans showed 68 percent disapproval of Obama’s immigration policies, up eight points after March 2014. The “wrong track” number spiked to 72 percent, up ten points after March. Many polls show the public likes immigrants and conditionally tolerates migration, provided it does not cost Americans jobs or money.

The Biden walk-back is seen in many media reports. The AP reported, “Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School, thinks Biden will move cautiously on asylum to avoid setting off a new wave of arrivals and says other changes will face ‘procedural and practical problems.'”

NBC reported:

President-elect Joe Biden has committed to establishing a government task force that would work to reunite all migrant families separated by Trump administration policies. But, according to two sources familiar with the incoming administration’s planning on immigration, Biden has so far not decided whether separated parents will be given the opportunity to come to the U.S. to reunite with their children.

CBS reported:

At the southern border, Mr. Biden has pledged to discontinue the Trump administration’s policy of requiring non-Mexican migrants to wait in Mexico for the duration of their U.S asylum cases. It is unclear, however, how the cases of thousands of asylum-seekers currently waiting in northern Mexico will be adjudicated and whether any of them will be paroled and allowed to continue their proceedings in the U.S.

But Biden’s deputies are also beginning to dismantle some of Trump’s border defenses, as promised by his 2020 migration platform. For example, unnamed advisers say the Biden administration will demolish the legal wall created in Central America, stop building the steel wall along the border, revive President Barack Obama’s child-delivery flights for the children of some migrants, and halt deportations for 100 days while drafting rules to protect nonviolent illegal migrants.

The reports are silent about Biden’s likely push to reopen the hugely lucrative pipelines of visa workers into the Fortune 500 jobs U.S. graduates need.

Krikorian doubts Biden’s team can balance the competing demands from the radical and the cautious pro-migration groups, from the many foreigners’ rational desires to migrate into the United States, and from the voters’ deep opposition to mass migration across the border.

“They’re gonna fail — I don’t think there’s any way to do that,” he said, adding, “These counsels of caution cannot be heeded politically by the [Biden] administration, at least not to any significant degree. And so, they’re going to find that either they’re going to be letting in huge numbers of people — which is going to blow up in their face, and they’re going to lose the House in 2022 — or they’re going to be putting ‘kids in cages’ [at the border] again. … I don’t think the Biden administration has any way of squaring the circle.”

Progressives forget that people outside the United States are rational and will accept the invites from pro-migration groups, Krikorian stated. For example, a father with several kids, a cell phone, and a decent job in El Salvador likely has the knowledge to weigh the costs and benefits, plus the money to make the trip, he said, adding, “Biden will incentivize that dad to make the trip to the United States. In a sense, depending on the circumstances, the dad would be crazy not to do it.”

Krikorian continued, “The open-borders people assume that everybody living south of us is a victim of some kind, maybe not even a victim of ours, but a victim, and then we have a responsibility to rectify their victimhood. … But the immigrants we get, generally speaking, are the better sort of working poor from most countries. Usually, the top people don’t move here, and the people at the absolute bottom don’t have the resources or ability to move here. So it is people who are poor but who have a little get-up-and-go [who come here] — and those are the very people that those countries need to develop and progress. We are siphoning them off because it makes us feel good, not because it’s actually in our country’s interest or in their country’s interest.”