White House: Open Borders Will Reduce Migration Numbers

Pro-migration advocates are telling Democrats and reporters that fewer migrants will be registered at the border each month once the Title 42 anti-disease border rule is removed.

The implausible claims come as President Joe Biden is being tugged in two directions. Democratic legislators and the voters want him to keep the Title 42 border barrier past its scheduled expiration date of May 23 — but his business and progressive allies want him to remove the barrier.

“The administration’s decision to roll back Title 42 is wrong and reckless,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) told Politico on April 20. His voice is important because he is the likely Democratic candidate in the Ohio Senate race this year.

Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkjas, is using the Title 42 barrier to exclude only about one-half of the economic migrants who arrive at the U.S. southern border. But he busses most of the rejected migrants back to Mexico, instead of flying them home. This lax policy allows the rejected migrants to try again and again to sneak past the border guards.

Mayorkas’s repeat crossers inflate the monthly numbers, which reached 221,000 in March 2022, officials say.

Mayorkas’s inflated numbers create a PR problem for Biden, say the pro-migration activists who want to admit all the migrants. They argue that Biden and the Democrats would be in less political trouble if they open the border to nearly all the migrants the first time they appear at the border.

“It is deceptive to suggest that the numbers of administration numbers are so high simply because of Title 42 and the so-called double-counting of repeat attempts,” countered Robert Law, a pro-enforcement advocate who worked for President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

“The [monthly] numbers are high because the Biden administration [welcoming] policies are encouraging these numbers,” Law told Breitbart News. Law now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.

At least one former Biden official publicly agrees the numbers will go up: “I do think that numbers will increase when Title 42 is taken down,” Tyler Moran, a former immigration official in Biden’s administration, told Slate.com.

Moreover, Mayorkas’s 115-page plan for responding to the end of  Title 42 projects a massive spike in migration.

The White House has announced that Title 42 will be lifted on May 23. But a growing number of Democratic legislators, and apparently some White House officials, are looking for ways to extend the barrier because they fear a November rejection by many swing voters.

In reaction, pro-migration administration officials and their allies are making the open-is-less claim.

“Once Title 42 is lifted … if they try again, they will be committing a crime,” an official told Fox News, which also reported:

The White House cited February numbers, noting that in February, under the Title 42 order, more than 90,000 individuals were expelled for attempting to cross the border, and warned that they have “no legal barrier to trying again and again.”

Axios got the same open-is-less pitch from “Biden administration officials,” perhaps from Mayorkas’s deputies:

Once Title 42 is lifted, they say, the administration will properly process migrants. People who are removed after being processed would face more serious consequences than those being rapidly expelled under the current system.

Officials did not tell reporters that the deportation “process” takes several years.

During that processing time, the migrants can get jobs, pay off their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels, import their wives and children, file for green cards, and also hide from federal deportation agents when they are ordered home. So the much-touted “process” is expanding the existing population of illegal immigrants that is used by investors to push down wages and drive up housing prices.

In effect, the legal process provides a legal facade for the bipartisan economic policy of extraction migration that stimulates the U.S. economy with more foreign consumers, renters, and workers.

Progressives who are backed by business and investor groups echo the more-is-less claim.

“More delay to “buy time” to continue Trump policy that will cause more cruelty, repeat entries & inflated border stats would be a political miscalculation … [and] a moral and legal miscalculation.,” tweeted Eleanor Acer, a director at Human Rights First.

It makes things worse. This is self-defeating. Last month, 2 of every 5 people apprehended by the Border Patrol had already been apprehended and expelled at least once already. The average repeat crosser is now caught 3+ times! Title 42 is responsible.

Pro-migration advocates are also trying to portray supporters of the Title 42 policy as immoral acolytes of Stephen Miller, Trump’s former aide, a man who is hated by many progressives. “Just absolutely wild to see some Democrats embracing a policy implemented by Stephen Miller,” said Mario Carrillo, an activist with the progressive American’s Voice group. “Will never understand what voters they’re trying to win by essentially admitting that Stephen Miller’s assault on asylum is okay with them.”

The [migrants] are rational thinkers, and they have an economic incentive [to cross the border] if they see that Title 42 has been lifted. If they think they are more likely than ever to be allowed into the interior of the country ….We’ll gain 10 new arrivals [for every reduced repeat crosser] and they’ll be coming from farther and farther away.

Biden’s team should return to Trump’s policies, he said. Economic migrants who arrive at the border should be refused entry, not released to take jobs, he said. “They need to be returned to their home countries … that makes the [economic] calculus from the alien’s perspective that much more challenging.”

Some pro-migration advocates admit Law’s prediction.

“On the border. I do think that numbers will increase when Title 42 is taken down,” Tyler Moran, a former immigration official in Biden’s administration, told Slate.com. She continued:

There’s been a lot of reporting about the high apprehension numbers at the border. But [each] apprehension means the system is working. It means that Border Patrol is apprehending or catching people at the border. And some of those people will ask for asylum and they will have a right to do so. And some of those people will be removed. In fact, if you look at just like the general percentage of people who ask for asylum, it’s only about 30.5 percent of people … [So] one can stand for secure and well-managed borders and also for the right of people to seek asylum. It’s not an either-or.

“When Title 42 is taken down, anyone [in the world] will have the right to ask for asylum,” she added.

Besides, “Immigrants have always been a huge benefit to our country economically but also culturally … We need immigrants to keep our economy afloat,” she claimed.

Overall, Mayorkas’s team has released 840,000 migrants into the United States since January 2021, despite a federal law mandating the detention of migrants.