Biden Sends Harris on a Fool’s Errand

Biden Sends Harris on a Fool’s Errand

– By Howard Sierer –

President Biden sent Vice President Harris on a fool’s errand to convince Guatemalans not to come to the U.S. This after both he and Harris spent their entire presidential campaigns and the first months of their administration saying in effect that “our borders are open, come on up.”

Biden’s campaign pledged in writing to cease all border-wall construction, immediately end family separation, suspend all deportations for 100 days, “end prolonged detention,” “end workplace raids,” and create a path to citizenship for everyone currently living in the U.S. illegally.

Kamala Harris is hardly a blameless victim. When she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, she declared her intent to use executive orders to end deportations and create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Tellingly, neither of them ever once spoke about enforcing our existing immigration laws.

Central American migrants – and the coyotes who exploit them – took Biden at his word when he followed through with his promised 100-day suspension of all deportations only hours after he was inaugurated. What has followed is chaos at the border with humanitarian conditions that would have shamed even Donald Trump.

Now comes the unsurprising report that illegal border crossings in the first eight months of this fiscal year have exceeded those from every full year since 2006. The U.S. Border Patrol reports that in May it stopped 180,034 people trying to cross, the highest number since Biden took office and nearly eight times the 23,000 stopped in May 2020.

Vice presidents often are given assignments that deal with messy issues that presidents wish would go away: Trump named Pence to head his COVID-19 task force. Biden sent Harris to Guatemala earlier this month to disavow everything she and Biden had said for years about illegal immigration. It didn’t go well.

In a dramatic breach of customary diplomatic niceties, Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei told CBS News the change of U.S. government led directly to the migrant surge: “The message changed to, ‘We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children.’” When that happened, “The very next day the coyotes here were organizing groups of children to take them to the United States.”

Giammattei summed up his relationship with the Biden administration: “We are not on the same side of the coin.”

While she was there, Harris said all the right things to the Guatemalan people: “If you come to our border, you will be turned back. Do not come.” But that’s not what Central Americans are hearing from their friends who are already in the U.S. In April, 37 percent of those showing up at the border seeking asylum were being welcomed into the States and then set free.

So, who do you think wannabe migrants are going to believe?

As political analyst Amber Athey noted, Harris has repeatedly claimed that she is addressing the ‘root causes’ of the migrant crisis, the conditions in Guatemala that might drive people to migrate in the first place.

The first problem with her approach is that we have been throwing billions of dollars at Central America for decades and haven’t seen a noticeable decline in crime and corruption, or an increase in economic security. The plan to nation-build our way out of a surge in illegal immigration calls to mind failed neoconservative projects to prevent terror by “spreading democracy” throughout the Middle East.

Athey notes that the second problem with this approach is that even if it were somehow successful, it would take decades for any noticeable benefits.

A central theme of the Biden administration has been that if Trump was for it, they’re against it. And if Trump was against it, they’re for it. Instead, a little common sense would have shown that Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the Remain-in-Mexico policy, was a great success. Asylum seekers were required to stay on the Mexican side of the border while their cases were adjudicated.

Not only did the MPP eliminate releasing hordes of migrants into the U.S., most never to be found again, but it pressured Mexico to control its border with Guatemala, dramatically reducing the refugee flow. Proof of the pudding: hard times for coyotes who saw their livelihood dry up. Sadly, they’re back in the money now.

Meanwhile back in Washington DC, Harris and her political supporters are far more worried about her reputation than they are about solving the border crisis and implementing immigration law. As I’ve pointed out previously, Democratic officials continue to demonstrate a blatant disregard for the rule of law.

As a long-time advocate of greatly increased legal immigration, I can only imagine the frustration of the thousands of would-be immigrants who are waiting outside the country for their chance to become citizens. While they wait for our quota system to allow their entry, typically for years, millions of illegal border crossers are promised a shortcut “path to citizenship.”

Gotta hand it to Biden and Harris, they’ve made a mess at the border with no easy way out.

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