In Brief: Biden’s Backdoor Amnesty
As the surge at the border continues to worsen, Biden is throwing gas on the fire.
If we covered immigration every time there was a significant headline about Joe Biden’s intentional invasion, it’s about all we’d write about these days. In this case, the editors of National Review have the latest:
The Biden administration announced that it is granting temporary legal status to potentially more than 700,000 Venezuelans, protecting them from deportation orders. The administration is also working to grant to over half of the same population work permits that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas indicated would be good for up to five years. Normally, such work permits are limited to just two years.
This announcement comes as Eagle Pass, Texas, is once again getting overwhelmed by the thousands upon thousands of migrants who have thrown themselves at the border in just the last week. The mayor of Eagle Pass has declared a disaster and state of emergency while Customs and Border Protection is rushing personnel there. Alongside the massive amnesty for Venezuelans, Mayorkas announced that the Defense Department would commit 800 troops to help secure the border, joining another 2,500 from the National Guard — a nice, but ultimately meaningless, gesture without a serious political commitment to enforcement.
The editors note that while New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul have grown increasingly frantic in their comments about the migration crisis hitting their state, the two Democrats “praised the new amnesty.” That’s largely because a huge number of the illegals in New York are Venezuelans. Giving them legal status suddenly makes the problem go away for providing government services because the migrants will be allowed to work.
But going down this route is foolish and shortsighted.
The original idea of temporary protected status was to provide a legal humanitarian arrangement for aliens whose home country was subject to a hurricane, earthquake, or famine. The key word was supposed to be “temporary.” But the status has become a favorite legal tool of those who want to provide backdoor amnesty because the letter of the law allows endless extensions, and ample stretching of the definitions, for those who qualify. Venezuela’s government has made it a basket case for a decade; it has not suddenly gotten worse to justify immediately granting relief and work permits to a population that sits somewhere between the size of Sacramento and Boston.
“The announcement of this policy is bound to cause a surge of further migration from Venezuela, and elsewhere,” the editors note. Any reward for some becomes an enticement for others. They conclude:
Americans across the country are tired of dealing with the consequences of the chaos at the border in their communities. Republicans need to remind American voters that the Biden administration chose this disorder — and is choosing, as even Democrats beg for relief, to apply legally dubious Band-Aids that will only perpetuate the problem, or make it worse.
