PHOTO: Thomas Hawk
Creative Commons
Amateur Night
. . . .
It’s difficult to believe that the president and his top officials did not realize their immigration policies, refugee admissions among them, would galvanize Republican opportunism and demagoguery. Perhaps they failed to anticipate the scale of unaccompanied Central American minors and families who would cross the border seeking asylum this spring. Maybe they are worried that GOP attacks, conflating that wave of asylum-seekers with refugees, would further imperil the Democratic congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections, despite Mr. Biden’s own healthy standing in the polls.
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The president would do well to re-read his own campaign’s clear-eyed pronouncements on the subject. They correctly slammed Mr. Trump for decimating America’s decades-long leadership on refugees, whose admissions to this country were slashed by more than 75 percent in four years, to fewer than 12,000 in fiscal 2020. “We cannot mobilize other countries to meet their humanitarian obligations if we are not ourselves upholding our cherished democratic values and firmly rejecting Trump’s nativist rhetoric and actions,” said the Biden campaign statement on refugees.
While the administration bumbles its way toward a policy, real lives are at stake. Some 33,000 refugees in Africa, the Mideast and elsewhere, all of them having passed rigorous screening by the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies over the course of months or years, are stuck in camps where they await flights to the United States. They see this country as a beacon, just as Mr. Biden insisted it is.
It’s difficult to believe that the president and his top officials did not realize their immigration policies, refugee admissions among them, would galvanize Republican opportunism and demagoguery. Perhaps they failed to anticipate the scale of unaccompanied Central American minors and families who would cross the border seeking asylum this spring. Maybe they are worried that GOP attacks, conflating that wave of asylum-seekers with refugees, would further imperil the Democratic congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections, despite Mr. Biden’s own healthy standing in the polls.
In any event, the president’s retreat on refugees is a danger sign. It looks like weakness; it smacks of spinelessness. Time will tell whether it is a short-term tactical maneuver or a more basic lack of resolve in the face of political headwinds. Here’s hoping it is the former.
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Read the complete editorial at the link.
Read the full op-ed, which actually recycles much that you’ve already heard on Courtside, at the link.
It “might be difficult to believe,” but you need look no further than the continuing worsening mess in Garland’s dysfunctional Immigration Courts, the failure to implement the rule of law at the border, the inability to get a robust refugee program up and running near the Northern Triangle, and the glaring lack of immigration/human rights expertise in the West Wing to see how unprepared “Team Biden” was to deal with inevitable, totally predictable, issues on which progressive Dem experts had been raising the alarm since before the election.
Incredibly, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of progressive immigration/human rights/due process experts out here in the Dem camp, Biden has managed to surround himself with the wrong folks — those who can’t get the job done and prove it every day!
“Courage of their convictions” — that’s the problem here: Either his advisors don’t believe in the immigration, human rights, and justice agendas that Biden and Harris ran upon or they don’t have the guts to carry them out! Either way it’s a problem.
This is the same old, same old arrogant, uninformed “it’s only immigration not something important” attitude that has turned strength into weakness for Dems over the past decades! As Stephen Miller could testify, having the brainpower, expertise, courage, advocacy skills, energy, and persistence of the immigration/human rights community lined up in opposition isn’t conducive to implementing your agenda, whatever it might be.
Also, a pile of dead bodies beyond the border and continuing “Dred Scottification” of the other in dysfunctional, disgraceful “captive courts” might squeak by in the “present tense,” but will be an unflattering historical legacy that in the long run will outweigh all the achievements.
Turning supporters into critics, abandoning your values and promises, ginning up court suits opposing your out of control, due process destroying “courts,” and scofflaw asylum policies — some of them right out of the Stephen’s Miller playbook — seems like a bad way to proceed for any politician, let alone ones as experienced and skilled as Joe Biden & Kamala Harris.
Recognizing when the “honeymoon is over” and you need folks on your team who can actually turn campaign promises into real-world action is critical.
So far, the “Amateur Night @ the Bijou” approach to immigration, human rights, due process, and racial justice, predictably, isn’t getting the job done. The Biden Team needs to either turn to the experts, or face the real prospect of four years of continuing failure — along with the dead bodies, ruined human lives, and sense of continuing betrayal by gutless politicos that go with it.
Due Process Forever! Not “rocket science,” 🚀 but “mission impossible” without bringing in the pros!
PWS
04-19-21