"President-elect" Joe Biden's attitude toward the border will create another crisis. Charles Fain Lehman writes:
President-elect Joe Biden sparked outrage among activists when, a month before Inauguration Day, he retreated from his promise to unravel President Trump’s restrictive immigration regime on Day One. Instead, he suggested, the Biden administration would undo Trump’s actions over a period of months, thus avoiding a rush of “2 million people on our border” and the ensuing chaos in the opening days of his presidency.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics show that apprehensions at the southern border were at an eight-year high in October and November; December data will likely reflect similar activity. A new wave of migrant caravans, including a group that launched an unsuccessful trek from Honduras, is of particular concern.
Biden is right to worry that undoing Trump’s aggressive enforcement regime would prompt a spike in illegal immigration, but his proposed solution—rolling back Trump’s regulations slowly—misses what would cause that rush in the first place. The problem with Biden’s immigration plan is not its speed of execution, but its lack of any principle that would limit immigration, illegal or otherwise. Instead, the Biden agenda will encourage illegal entry—an arrangement with potentially disastrous consequences.
[Charles Fain Lehman, "The Next Border Crisis Will Be Biden’s," January 4]
