Joe Biden promised the United States would accept all asylum seekers, although U.S. asylum has been studded with fraud and abuse for a long time.
Although the Biden administration is attempting to deny and shift blame for the border crisis, its actions speak louder than words. A week ago, it had to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the southern border to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection bring illegal immigrants into the United States. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wasted little time blaming former U.S. President Trump for passing a broken immigration system to the current administration. However, it is President Biden’s immigration policies as well as Democrats’ ill-conceived immigration proposals that are responsible for today’s border crisis. Even when he was a presidential candidate, Biden promised the United States would accept all asylum seekers, although U.S. asylum has been studded with fraud and abuse for a long time. As soon as he was sworn into office, President Biden signed three executive orders to undo the previous administration’s strong immigration law enforcement. One such policy was the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” protocol, which made asylum seekers wait in Mexico for U.S. immigration courts to hear their asylum petitions. One of Biden’s executive orders ended this Trump policy, and the United States has admitted asylum seekers into the country since then, regardless of their petitions’ credibility. These asylum seekers can start working in the United States immediately while waiting for their court hearings. Due to backlogs in U.S. immigration courts, sometimes the wait is longer than a decade. Since many of the asylum seekers are actually economic migrants, the long wait doesn’t bother them because it helps them achieve their goal of working in the United States. Many asylum seekers don’t ever bother to show up at their immigration hearings. This problem has been around for a long time and the Trump policy, imperfect as it was, was the first serious attempt to address it. The Biden administration also rolled back border security measures such as stopping the construction of border walls and subjecting ICE to stricter oversight and narrower immigration law enforcement. ICE expects immigration-related arrests and deportations will decline sharply under the Biden administration’s new rule. Last month, House Democrats added fuel to the fire by introducing a far-reaching immigration bill dubbed the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. The bill is largely based on immigration proposals Biden campaigned on, including offering amnesty to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in this country by creating an express route to citizenship for them while investing little in measures to strengthen border security.
