The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Americanists vs. Transformationists
Every time a new immigration story breaks, it provides more confirmation that Joe Biden’s policy is open borders. Hudson Institute analyst John Fonte call it an “existential conflict” and he says that what’s “at stake is our life or death as a self-governing republic.”
The ongoing mass illegal migration crisis is best understood as an existential conflict between two forces: Americanists vs. Transformationists. These forces, in turn, represent two competing regimes or ways of life.
He recounts the events of the last 10 months, and quotes DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who way back in March admitted, “We are on a pace to encounter more individuals [i.e., illegal immigrants] on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years.” That brings crime, from drug running and theft to rape and murder. “Why is this happening now?” Fonte asks rhetorically. Because Biden wants it to happen.
On his very first day in office Biden announced a 100-day freeze on all deportations (including criminal aliens found guilty of assault, perjury, vandalism, computer hacking, resisting arrest, and forms of manslaughter including drunk driving) and the immediate cut-off of all funds for the building of a border wall. In addition, Biden’s DHS began to phase out the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) with the Mexican government. That agreement held that asylum seekers from Central America should remain in Mexico while their claims are being adjudicated. In the vast majority of cases, these Central Americans are ineligible for asylum under both U.S. and international law.
On June 1, Secretary Mayorkas terminated the Remain in Mexico rule. In August, a district judge (later backed by the circuit court and the Supreme Court) found that DHS had acted improperly and ordered the program reinstated. At this writing the Biden Administration is attempting to reverse the ruling and end Remain in Mexico. The outcome is uncertain.
A court blocked Biden’s inauguration day deportation freeze, but the administration issued new guidelines for deporting illegal alien criminals that guarantee very few deportations will be carried out. Biden returned to the Obama policy of “catch and release” in which illegal border crossers are released into the United States after being given a notice to appear before an immigration judge (often on a date far in the future.) DHS data reveals that between 2014 and 2020 about 81 percent never reported for their hearing.
Moreover, “catch and release” has become “processing” or “catch and bus” as thousands of migrants are quickly bussed (or flown secretly, “in the dead of night” as the New York Post put it) into the interior of the United States, without the consent or knowledge of local authorities.
In paragraph after paragraph, Fonte continues to describe the Biden administration’s actions to facilitate a crisis. “Besides abandoning immigration enforcement,” he writes, “the Biden Administration has proposed a massive amnesty for almost all illegal immigrants in the United States.”
Why is the Biden Administration doing this? No doubt there are strictly partisan considerations. Many Democrats argue that mass immigration, legal and illegal, will assist the progressive cause as the political transformation of California has suggested. Going deeper, however, we could view the border crisis through the lens of a titanic power struggle of clashing interests, values, and cultures among five competing forces: 1) the cartels, 2) the Mexican and Central American governments, 3) the migrants themselves, 4) the Americanists, and 5) the Transformationists. These five groups have very different end goals, principles, and concepts of justice.
Fonte goes on at length to describe these five groups and their goals before concluding with the big picture:
At the heart of democratic self-government is first and foremost the moral right of a free people to govern themselves. What is at issue in the migration crisis is nothing less than our self-government as a free people. Do American citizens have the moral right to decide our immigration policy or is it to be decided for us by non-citizens, without our consent? …
In the migrant crisis of 2021, in this existential conflict between Americanists and Transformationists, that is exactly what is at stake — our life or death as a self-governing republic.