Congress’ abdication
The Biden administration is vastly expanding immigration while Congress continues to do nothing. This isn’t how our republic is supposed to work.
Whether Congress likes it or not, immigration is happening in a big way under President Joe Biden. For that, Congress really has only itself to thank, or blame, as the case may be.
No amount of self-serving railing from anti-immigration hard-liners will cover the fact that Congress for years has done nothing of significance about immigration policy. The refusal by too many to seek common ground, especially on the right, has left it to the executive branch to fill the void of governance.
And so the nation swings wildly from malevolence to benevolence. With his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, President Barack Obama protected hundreds of thousands of people brought here illegally as children from deportation. President Donald Trump threatened DACA participants with removal as he vilified all sorts of foreigners, separated families, caged people in inhumane conditions, and hyped a fantastical border wall.
Now, as The New York Times recently reported, Mr. Biden has been using his executive authority to allow over 1 million people to enter or remain in the country, many of them refugees from Ukraine, Haiti, and parts of Latin America. The Times wrote that the various initiatives “could become the largest expansion of legal immigration in decades.”
We may agree with Mr. Biden’s goals, but the means are hardly ideal, for two reasons in particular.
First, courts could deem Mr. Biden’s actions an abuse of executive power, or a successor could wipe out all these protections with the stroke of his or her own executive pen. That leaves hundreds of thousands of people living under the threat of deportation. We’ve seen this already with DACA; Congress’ failure to make it permanent has left the nearly 600,000 people still in the program as of last year facing the prospect of being thrown out of the country they have long called home.
And second, it’s an abdication of legislative duty. Our government wasn’t designed to be ruled by executive fiat. It’s our representatives who are supposed to set policy; the executive is supposed to carry it out.
Predictably, Mr. Biden’s initiatives have met criticism from Republicans whose base has long been energized by the issue of illegal immigration — an issue they’ve kept alive by blocking comprehensive reform. Even as their representatives in Congress refuse to approach a solution, 20 Republican states are suing over the administration’s program that’s allowing so many people in from Latin America. Rather ironically, they’re attacking a program aimed at reducing the illegal crossings at the border that they so decry.
It’s easier, of course, and more politically profitable in some quarters to just keep warning of “caravans” at America’s doorstep and screaming accusations of “open borders” than to address immigration comprehensively and cooperatively. But it’s left red border states complaining that they are overburdened by all these newcomers and New York City’s mayor recently saying that the influx is destroying his city.
If Americans want results, they need to stop turning to presidents to unilaterally solve the problem. Instead, they must hold accountable those responsible for perpetuating it in Congress, where obstructionists seem to think that if they shout loud enough about immigration, no one will notice that they’re the ones preventing the country from doing anything about it.