Another day, another Trump-era border policy that Joe Biden pretends to have discovered in order to look like he’s at least trying to handle a problem he created.
The New York Times on Tuesday reported that the administration plans to introduce a “new rule” that will allow authorities to quickly deny asylum claims of illegal border crossers who fail to prove that they first tried seeking asylum in Mexico or in another country they passed through to get here.
Setting aside that this “new policy” is about four years old, now is the perfect time for House Republicans to draft a bill that would cement it into law. Of course, no Democrats will support it, even as they defend all of Biden’s border failures, and Biden himself would find any excuse not to sign such a bill, because he’s not serious about fixing his own mess. But it’s worth making them look stupid for it anyway.
Biden is even inviting the episode. Reporting in the Times said, “On a call with reporters, administration officials said that failure by Congress to pass an overhaul of the nation’s outdated immigration laws and a spate of lawsuits from Republican-led states had prevented the government from effectively managing the southern border.”
Okay, well, an “overhaul” is effectively impossible with a divided Congress, but if the “new rule” was preferred by two administrations, one Republican (Trump) and one Democrat (Biden), there is no reasonable argument against making it a law. It’s not an “overhaul,” but it’s a start.
Capitol Hill sources tell me that the new Republican-led Congress is crafting immigration bills at this very moment and I’m sure members will be very proud of whatever sprawling, complicated legislation they come up with. But they could instead start small and, at minimum, force Democrats to reject a measure that the leader of their own party is taking.
In just the past four months alone there have been almost 1 million foreigners who attempted to dump themselves into the care of American taxpayers. Every single one of them will have received some type of assistance, whether it was food, a shower, a paid trip to some destination within the U.S., or in most cases, all of the above. The popular asylum scam is how many of them will end up staying here indefinitely. Anything that can cut back on that grotesque and appalling abuse of our system is worth the effort.
So give it to Biden. He asked for it.
