The Lie Progressives Tell Themselves About Immigration

Below, a look at the rapidly shifting politics of the CHIPS Act. And, both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times follow American Compass’s report on The Young Men Up for Grabs with their own features on the same. But first…

These days are fascinating ones for talking about immigration policy with progressives. Gone is the proud embrace of de facto open borders promoted by the Democratic Party in recent years, from decriminalizing illegal entryand protecting even violent offenders from deportation to extending all manner of public benefits. But rather than admit error, or at least admit political defeat, I’ve repeatedly encountered, to my genuine amazement, a different approach: In fact, they insist, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been border hawks all along.

I was worried that, lacking on-the-record examples to highlight, I might have difficulty persuading you of something so bizarre. Fortunately, the New York Times has done us all the service of producing a 16-minute “Opinion Video” that lays it all out. In “If You Think Biden and Harris Were Weak on the Border, Think Again,” video producer Alexander Stockton explains, “this administration has conducted a campaign to secure the border since Day 1.”

The whole exercise is obscene. It’s obscene not because someone is publishing an odd opinion in the New York Times; obviously that happens most days, but rather because it is so forthrightly dishonest and pretextual, deployed for the purpose of exonerating progressives from accountability for their disastrously irresponsible policy and attempting to instead blame the rubes for not seeing how wise and effective the policy in fact was. If Trump beats Harris on Tuesday, fault won’t lie with the elites who ignored the popular will and are getting thrown out on their ears, you see, it will lie with the masses who just can’t appreciate how skillfully the elite are governing on their behalf. Convenient.

The conventional and reality-based narrative goes that Biden and Harris decried the Trump administration’s border policies and immediately began relaxing them upon taking office, all while delivering a loud and clear message that migrants crossing the U.S. border illegally would be admitted to the country. Subsequently, such entries skyrocketed. For several years, the administration not only failed to reverse course, but also sought to smooth the pathway to entry, with everything from a “CBP One” app for scheduling your entry online to unprecedented abuse of “parole” that granted legal status and even work permits. 

Both 2022 and 2023 saw more than 2.5 million encounters at the Southern border (compared with less than 1 million in 2019, Trump’s final year prior to the pandemic). As the figure reached 300,000 in just one month in December 2023, heading into the election year, the Biden administration finally took action. It induced more enforcement from Mexico at the start of the year and then restricted the asylum process in June. Border crossings declined sharply.

So what can we do with this narrative? Perhaps complexify it? “Critics call this an election year flip-flop,” says Stockton, “but I found a steady drumbeat of policies that have gone largely unrecognized.” It’s all very complicated, so if you don’t understand, don’t be too hard on yourself:

Getting stuff done in government is often far less exciting. It involves fine tuning lots of little dials. It’s taken them some time and trial and error but through many minor modifications Biden and Harris have transformed the border. It used to indiscriminately allow millions in, but now it tightly controls who gets in.

When did we “indiscriminately allow millions in”? During the Biden administration. When did policy changes start to change that? In 2024. But please don’t call it an election year flip-flop.

Anyway, the real problem is asylum, and “only Congress has the power to fix the broken asylum system. It shouldn’t be called Biden’s open border, it should be called Congress’s.” Was it an open border before Biden? Well, no. And what happened in 2024? “Biden and Harris were forced to change priorities.” Odd use of the passive voice there. What forced them to change priorities? And why mid-2024? “They decided it was more important to secure the border than to protect the right to asylum.” 

Which brings us to the best line of the video: “After Biden imposed the latest asylum restrictions, look at what happened to migration. It plunged. This is Biden and Harris’s second strategy for securing the border. Know the law.” There’s even a graphic.