Biden Finally Admits It’s a Border Crisis
Meanwhile, the administration attempts to muddy the waters by conflating refugees with illegals.
Now it’s a crisis. With his poll numbers tumbling over his failed handling of the massive influx of illegal immigrants, President Joe Biden on Saturday finally called the border situation a “crisis.” Biden’s comments came as he walked back his administration’s decision the day prior to refrain from lifting the refugee cap placed by Donald Trump. And this was due to immediate blowback from the Left.
Attempting to explain his sudden about-face, Biden tied the refugee cap to the “crisis that ended up on the border with young people.” He then explained, “We couldn’t do two things at once. And now we are going to increase the number [of refugees].” So, after months of refusing to acknowledge the crisis at the border, Biden now blames his initial refusal to lift the refugee cap on the border crisis he and his administration vehemently denied existed.
Recent polling shows that Americans are now more concerned with illegal immigration — a border crisis that Biden brought on by rolling back Donald Trump’s effective border enforcement policies — than they are with COVID-19. Obviously, from a political standpoint, this is disastrous news for Democrats, which explains Biden’s convoluted attempt to now address the situation.
Strategically speaking, while in practice embracing a de facto open-borders policy for politically motivated calculations, the Biden administration must attempt to show some semblance of engaging in border enforcement and limiting illegal immigration. Thus the convoluted, and likely intentionally so, explanation of the actions taken on lifting refugee limits.
What the Biden administration is doing is seeking to erode and expand the definitional distinctions the U.S. has long had in place when it comes to recognizing genuine refugee status. Refugees are those fleeing their home nation for issues related to suffering due to political, religious, or ideological persecution, and not, as the Left is now insisting on including, economic limitations. While many refugees may be poor, poverty alone has never been accepted as a legitimate rationale for asylum.
If the Democrats can get more of the American public to buy into this redefinition of illegal immigrants as refugees deserving of asylum status, then it will serve to blunt criticism of their de facto open-borders policy.
But why are Democrats so set on bringing in such a large influx of illegals when just a decade ago they were singing a different tune? It has everything to do with California. As Power Line’s Steven Hayward astutely observes, “California used to be a fairly reliable Republican state in presidential elections even though it has long had a Democratic majority in registered voters; indeed it was the anchor of the GOP’s dominance of the electoral college from 1968 through 1988. But following decades of large-scale hispanic immigration, California is now a rock solid Democratic state (or so the legend goes — I think there is much more to this story than merely changing demographics). Thus Democrats think that with enough hispanic immigration to the rest of the country, they can flip Texas and Florida, solidify Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada, and rule forever.”
Or does Biden think it’s a crisis?
.@PressSec was forced to clean up @JoeBiden’s remark after he described the surge in migrant children arriving at the country’s southern border as a “crisis.”
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) April 19, 2021
“The president does not feel children coming to our border… is a crisis.”https://t.co/ql5eQdgGYR pic.twitter.com/82Nn03bZir
