Even before Joe Biden took office as president, his government is facing an immigration crisis created entirely by Democrats.
After repeatedly promising to reverse the Trump administration’s rigid immigration and border policies, the new Biden government suddenly realizes that there are consequences. Biden’s message to potential immigrants, reports NBC News, is this: Don’t come – at least not yet. A senior transition official from the Biden government said that migrants “need to understand that they will not be able to enter the United States right away.”
But migrants are not waiting. Inspired by the hope of entering the United States under a milder Biden government, a caravan of some 8,000 Hondurans is heading for the southwestern border. On Friday, advanced members of the caravan clashed with Guatemalan soldiers on the border of the two countries, with two separate groups of more than 3,000 people forcing their way to Guatemala. The caravan can reach the US-Mexico border in a matter of weeks.
The news should not surprise anyone who paid attention to Biden’s campaign rhetoric last year. When you promise to end – “on the first day” – a Trump program that requires Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are on trial, effectively endorsing a return to the past “catch and release” policies, it is perfectly reasonable for thousands of Hondurans to conclude that if they manage to enter the United States after Biden’s oath, they can stay.
Perhaps realizing this, in the past few weeks, the new government has been struggling to moderate its messages on the border in hopes of avoiding a crisis. In late December, Biden said he would reverse Trump’s immigration policies at a slower pace than he initially promised to avoid having “2 million people on our border”. It will probably take six months, he said, to create a new system for prosecuting tens of thousands of asylum seekers, and his team is “setting up protective bars” to prevent a wave of illegal immigration this spring.
Well, sorry, but it’s too late. Biden took down the guardrails Trump built when the president-elect promised to end the current government’s border policies – policies that had been effective in curbing illegal immigration and, to a large extent, protecting the border during the pandemic.
Now, seizures on the southwestern border are increasing. It is surprising that the number of single adults in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador seized in December is the highest in four years.
And it is not for nothing: these countries were hit hard, not only by the pandemic, which decimated their fragile economies, but also by two devastating hurricanes in November. Men looking for work in the United States are likely to make up the majority of the Honduran caravan, the first of several caravans we will see in the coming months, as people desperate for work cross the border and seek asylum.
In these circumstances, Biden’s plea to migrants not to enter the United States illegally will still be completely ignored – and Biden will have no one but himself to blame.
John Daniel Davidson is a policy editor for The Federalist and a senior member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.