Two million migrants may arrive at the nation’s borders if officials do not properly manage the rewrite of border and asylum rules, President elect Joe Biden said Tuesday, as he offered a new “family reunification” justification for mass migration into Americans’ workplaces and communities.
“We already started discussing these issues with the President of Mexico and our friends in Latin America, and the timeline is to do it so that we in fact make it better, not worse,” Biden told a press conference:
The last thing we need is to say we’re going to stop immediately the [curbed] access to asylum the way it’s been run now and end up with 2 million people on our border. It’s a matter of setting up the guardrails so we can move the direction. I will accomplish what I said I would do — a much humane policy based on family unification.
Biden’s emphasis on family identification is a new twist. It may signal an effort to ostentatiously block the rush of new migrants while also quietly helping many resident Central American illegals settle into the United States by helping them import their spouses, children, and parents under the claim of “family reunification.”
Roughly three million Central Americans arrived between 2009 and 2019, starting with President Barack Obama’s relaxed rules and ending with President Donald Trump’s 2019 reforms.
That “family reunification” population could far exceed a million people — or roughly one-quarter of the roughly four million Americans turn 18 each year — even if there is accurate identification of nuclear families. This huge inflow would nudge down blue collar wages, push Americans out of jobs, crowd public schools, and drive up housing prices — while also allowing college graduate progressives to portray themselves as the noble protectors of victimized refugees.
The new border policies will take six months to implement, Biden said:
But it requires getting a lot in place and requires getting the funding to get in place, including just asylum judges for example. It will get done, and it will get done quickly, but it’s not going to be able to be done on Day One, [because we could] lift every restriction that exists … and go back to what it was 20 years ago, and all of a sudden, find out that we have a crisis on our hand that complicates what we are trying to do … It is going to take probably the next six months to put that in place.
But Biden will likely fail to balance his support for migration with the essentially infinite demand from migrants worldwide for getting into the United States, said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies:
[Biden’s aides] are not stupid. They understand [their pro-migration goals are] unpopular with the public, so they’re going to try to manage expectations — both of the voters and of potential migrants — so that two things happen. One, the changes are introduced. slowly, not all once, and [second] they do what they can to hide the consequences … So that the Biden people can say ‘Look, we’re not crazy on immigration.’ And they hope to dampen the enthusiasm of prospective illegal aliens. I don’t think they’re going to succeed at that, but that’s their objective.
Biden’s deputies have already signaled they will preserve some of Trump’s border policies to head off a short term surge at the border. For example, Biden’s deputies have indicated they will keep the Migrant Protection Protocols for some time. Those rules, which are also called “Remain in Mexico,” prevent migrants from getting U.S. jobs while waiting for an asylum verdict.
But tens of millions of migrants will make their own decisions, said Krikorian:
potential Most potential migrants are likely to wait and see what happens to the more adventurous ones who strike out on their own. In other words, if we end up sending people back to Matamoros or Juarez under Remain in Mexico, [other] people may figure the risk of owning all of that money … isn’t worth it.
But that assumes that Biden won’t change the policy. I don’t see how they are not going to change the policy. Once word gets back to the sending countries that people are stepping across the border, saying the magic asylum words, and are getting released, then you’ll see momentum pick up. Biden has made clear that that is what he’s going to do. So unless he completely backtracked and keeps in place everything Trump has done, he cannot not spark a new migrant crisis. It’s just not possible.
The key moment comes if Biden releases migrants into the United States so they can get the jobs to pay their coyotes, said Krikorian. That release would allow the migrants to get jobs and send dollars back home to their lenders and family members, also restarting the cartel-and-coyote-run conveyor belt of migrants into Americans’ jobs and communities:
The paying customers of the smugglers get what they paid for if Biden releases them into the country. The [coyotes] would be back in business because they would have a product [access to American jobs] to sell again.
Mexico’s government has its own interests, he added. “If we take all the migrants off their hands, so they don’t back up in Juarez. Tijuana, and Matamoros, then the Mexican government may well figure, ‘Let’s go back to business as usual, just wave them all through, and it becomes Joe Biden’s problem.'”
The administration’s promise of aid to Latin Americans cannot solve the problem in the short term, he said. The aid will “spark increase immigration because [economic] development always increases the number of people who have the means to move,” Krikorian said.
Biden’s policy may prove disastrous for Biden and his Democrats in 2022, Krikorian said.
“Biden’s attempt to slow walk this crisis are merely queuing up a crisis during the midterm elections,” said Krikorian. “If they had a really big crisis now and then tried to do something to limit it, then the political effects might actually become less serious than by trying to kick the can down the road so the beginning of 2022 is when things really explode. And guess what, there’s an election that year. I’m not sure how they think they’re going to manage it.”