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August 4, 2021 - 10:24am
Often President Biden’s policies seem incoherent or contradictory, but nowhere are the consequences clearer than immigration. Many Americans may have welcomed the end of Trump’s incendiary comments about undocumented newcomers, but Biden may be helping to prove some of the former president’s case. In the process, he is threatening Democratic prospects in the years ahead.
Although the mainstream media and the White House generally dismiss reports about a border surge, the numbers from Homeland Security suggest a huge ramping up since Biden took office. During the first six months of 2021, US Federal Government statistics find the number of “enforcement actions” preventing illegal entry to be already double the total number for 2020, reaching a 20-year record of over one million. Biden spokespeople have tried to suggest that this growth can be blamed on the last administration, but both Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Guatemala’s Alejandro Giammattei place the blame on “expectations” raised by Biden’s campaign and early statements.
This surge could undermine Democrats if not nationally, certainly in parts of the south-west, where the party has been making gains for years. Overall public support for his immigration policies started cratering as early as April, when barely two in five backed his approach. By May, according to Pew, over two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Administration’s border polices. Biden’s gambit of putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the issue is widely seen as ineffective; she did not visit the border for months and continues her rapid loss of public support.
Particularly concerning to party strategists may be opposition in border communities, themselves largely Hispanic, to the large scale movement of undocumented immigrants. This trend was evident back in the 2020 election, where Trump gained Hispanic support, particularly in the border regions of Texas. This spring, a Republican, Javier Villalobos, was elected Mayor of McAllen, a large border town that is 85% Hispanic and a longtime Democratic stronghold.
There are various reasons for disenchantment. For one thing Covid-19 has deeply impacted Latin America — now arguably the pandemic epicentre. Concerns of a massive infusion of infected people, as seen in detention centres, can’t be good for Democrats who were elected in part to turn back the pandemic.
But there are other reasons to fear uncontrolled immigration. For one thing, the border has become a primary terroir for the criminal gangs who proliferate throughout Mexico and Central America. In one part of the border, Laredo, criminal arrests of undocumented people grew 900% this year. At a time when concern about rising crime is now escalating, importing gang bangers and other lawbreakers may not be a popular policy.
And finally, there’s an economic element that could play havoc with Hispanic and other blue-collar voters. Before the pandemic, the tighter border conditions seem to have helped working class Americans of all races increase their incomes for the first time in decades. The labour shortage post-pandemic could help raise incomes for service, manufacturing and hospitality workers — but perhaps not if the market is flooded with a new wave of poor, often desperate, and legally dubious workers.
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SubscribeI am a professional tradesman – one of those guys you see standing on building framing with a pneumatic nailer, I know the construction industry. (I just work part time now, few hours a day)
Pre 1990s, say, most unskilled construction work went to low educated white and black males. It paid OK, and it was essentially an apprenticeship as well as casual work. If one worked it one could end up with a real living. If you had aptitude and worked at it one could become a professional tradesman and make a good living.
This ended with the illegal migration on the huge scale. The unskilled illegal migrants pushed down wages substantially – they were single young men with no dependents, living as groups in a house, eating cheap food they prepare, sharing a truck – any money was almost all profit to them. The Americans needed a house for them and their partner, and children, cars, and all the things life take as people living in their own country – they were priced out. The people who cut grass, the meat cutting plants, just every kind of unskilled work where documentation is not controlled, illegals took. They have destroyed the lives of the native, uneducated, young people.
Illegal migration – which is merely outsources your immigration policy to criminal cartels, have dome greater harm to the poor than anything else ever done! The Democrats HATE working poor. They want them on welfare and to be wrecking society so they can step in as a police state.
Amen, Brother.
Obviously the immigration matter is an old one. In 1943, for example, the US implemented a “bracero program” (guest worker program) to bring in agricultural laborers from Mexico. Why? Because the federal government had a more important job for all those Okies who populated the pages of “Grapes of Wrath”. Those folks had been picking peaches in California, but now they were set on taking down actual, real Fascism in Europe and East Asia. It was those Okies who landed on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima.
The Bracero program was shut down in about 1964.
May I copy and paste your post, with attribution?
As of late, Democrats are completely out of touch with average Americans. The party caters to white elites and the black community. But they have for sure lost the plot otherwise.
The Democrats don’t give one infinitesimal damn about the Black Community except the way a milk farmer cares about his Jersey cows.
A massive sweeping overstatement! So do any politicians ever ‘give a damn’ about their voters?
The relationship is complex, is it not?
I certainly hope so and anticipate the Biden implosion that craters the Dem party.
It’s hard not to think that putting the Vice President nominally in charge of dealing with the immigration problem was just a dodge to buy time. The whole point is to throw the borders open and then enable these people to vote — and to vote illegally at that. We can’t be instituting common-sense voting processes!
The business of dealing with “root causes” is also a dodge. People involved in development economics have been puzzling over “root causes” for more than a century, and they find that they still can’t sort out how to reliably launch development and to sustain development. Dani Roderick (2008) and William Easterly (2003?) have nice books that elaborate this last point.
Blaming Trump is the most absurd dodge. A year ago a prospective migrant could do the math: pay a coyote $7,000 to $15,000 to get to the border, but being required to wait IN MEXICO for one’s asylum application to be processed might destroy the expected benefits of making the costly effort. So, they decide not to venture to the border in the first place. Problem solved in crisp, game theoretic fashion. “Staying home” corresponds to the equilibrium outcome. Awesome. But, the Biden administration willfully through that away. Why? Again, to induce a flood of illegal immigration and to create a new class of illegal voters.