Stoking fear of brown-skinned immigrants infiltrating the U.S. border with Mexico has been the preferred strategy of Republicans in the Donald Trump era, so it’s no surprise that the usual suspects in the white nationalism crowd were quick to declare a crisis in the early days of the Joe Biden administration. And, alas, President Joe Biden has played right into their hands with cautious and uncertain messaging that was slow to acknowledge the recent increase in border crossings, failed to adequately warn against human trafficking and barred reporters from border facilities for children.
As a result, right-wing media got an unexpected pathway to ratings — an opportunity to distract from insurrections, GOP opposition to a popular COVID-19 relief bill and continued pandemic worries with 24/7 talking about a border crisis. And, make no mistake, any news reporting that centers on whether a White House spokesperson will use the term “crisis” or not is about as trumped-up (or perhaps Trumped-up) as reporting gets.
Particularly rich has been Republican fear-mongering of immigrants they claim are bringing with them the coronavirus, even as elected GOP officials in border states unwisely lift pandemic-related restrictions including, incredibly, use of face masks. Apparently, the governor of Texas isn’t worried about COVID-19 being spread around his state despite a 6% positivity rate and nearly 24,000 new cases recorded just this past week unless it originated with an undocumented individual.
If that fear of immigrants tracking in disease sounds familiar, that’s because it’s been the common refrain of the anti-immigrant crowd since at least the 19th century. Of course, immigrants are perfectly capable of contracting COVID as all humans are. Seeing them as a threat, but not your next-door neighbor, takes a special kind of xenophobia.
Let’s also stipulate some additional points: Human trafficking is bad. U.S. border facilities are inadequate. Little children should not be walking alone to the U.S. from Honduras. The Biden administration hems and haws a lot. But what’s clearly missing from the “crisis” blather is much-needed context, a point President Biden made repeatedly during his Thursday news conference.
First, what’s happening is hardly unprecedented. Monthly apprehensions for illegal border crossing are up, but they’ve been higher at other times during the Trump years and before. Second, most people who attempt to make the crossing are sent back. Third, the Biden administration has not overturned the policy of expelling undocumented people apprehended at the border if they test positive for COVID-19. And finally, illegal border crossing — with all its human toll — never stopped during the Trump years.
What was diminished significantly was an opportunity to seek legal asylum in the U.S., a situation President Biden has reversed. So if anyone is going to measure the human suffering of children traveling great distances to enter the U.S. illegally, they should also measure the past suffering of refugee families denied entry despite persecution based on race, religion or political views.
In reality, the U.S. lacks a sustainable, rational immigration policy and has for decades. It just got demonstrably worse in the Trump years as his supporters were convinced that building a wall with Mexico was the solution to virtually any problem facing this country. And this isn’t just about the undocumented but about legal immigration, too. The United States does not allow enough of the latter, and that’s what has bulked up the former.
A rational change of policy would surely start with providing a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants so that they might be fully productive and protected members of society. And perhaps the second move might involve a return to family-based immigration that would allow lawful Americans to sponsor relatives living outside the country. Although disparaged as “chain migration,” this is a system that works and helped build a country founded by immigrants.
There are many other areas in need of reform, from restoring the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals to boosting the H-1B visa program that has long provided temporary skilled foreign workers for everything from Johns Hopkins medical research to Chesapeake Bay blue crab packing plants. Immigration policy is complicated. Stoking racist fear of nonwhite “others” is not.
The Biden administration needs to find its footing, better explain to the public why the nation needs overdue immigration reforms, like the kind President Ronald Reagan once endorsed, and do so as clearly and transparently as possible. Biden may not be the Great Communicator, but he did a better job of it Thursday. Whether that will convince many of the filibuster-prone Republicans in the Senate is another matter altogether.
