San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Senators should be honest about seeking open borders
Well, President Trump has confirmed liberals’ fears by defying the rule of law — the problem for liberals is that he has done so is in response to their own demands on immigration.
The administration is almost surely correct in its original reasoning that as a result of the 1997 Flores consent decree and its 2016 extension by the Ninth Circuit, absent legal changes, the administration cannot legally detain families together, as he attempts to do in his new executive order.
But whatever its shortcomings, the administration’s effort is still far better than the bill offered by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein — “Keep Families Together” — which is a monument to careless lawmaking that incredibly has been signed onto by all the Democratic, and two independent, senators. The bill was drafted so sloppily that it makes no distinctions between those arrested for crossing the border illegally and those accused of serious criminal acts who are also parents. As Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. — the Senate’s most prominent immigration hawk — noted, the Feinstein bill will also encourage further kidnapping of children by ruthless gangs of human traffickers (a growing problem even acknowledged by the New York Times). One provision that stipulates a “strong presumption” in favor of family unity and a “presumption that detention is not in the best interests of families and children” effectively requires the vast majority of illegal immigrants arriving with children to be released into the general population rather than detained.
Republicans have known about the family separation issue and have been attempting to address it legislatively. Both major House immigration bills — introduced long before the latest immigration dustup — contain provisions that specifically supersede the Flores consent decree to allow families to be detained together.
The primary cause of the current crisis was the Obama administration’s wink-wink amnesty policies, which encouraged an enormous influx of illegal immigrants. Border crossings of adults with children soared from less than 15,000 in 2013 to almost 78,000 by the last year of the Obama administration. The numbers of pending immigration cases involving unaccompanied minors at the border pending went to 78,000 from less than 3,500 when Obama took office, according to the White House. This was not caused by any enormous objective change in the conditions in Central America, but because of specific policy incentives created by the Obama administration related to deportation procedures and asylum claims.
While the media breathlessly highlights cases of immigrants allegedly fleeing violence, a recent comprehensive United Nations study of thousands of Central American refugees suggested that from 1 to 5 percent of them came to the United States for reasons related to their security. The overwhelming majority acknowledged being economic migrants. But the Obama administration actively encouraged the abuse of the asylum process through changes in how “credible fear” claims (the first stage of an asylum claim) were handled. As a result, claims went from 5,000 in the first year of the Obama administration to 94,000 in the administration’s last year, according to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Almost 90 percent of these “credible fear” claims were accepted, yet half were so disingenuous that the beneficiaries never even bothered to follow up with an asylum application once they entered the country. But in successfully claiming “credible fear,” migrants know they can set off a legal process that involves years of appeals.
Meanwhile, amid the media frenzy, fundamental immigration questions go unasked and unanswered: Who and how many people do we let in? And how do we afford it? A forthcoming paper from Yale University researchers suggests that more than 22 million illegal immigrants live in the United States — more than double the “official” total. Beyond that, more than 150 million people want to immigrate to the United States, according to a recent Gallup survey — and the countries where such desires are highest are also growing their population the fastest.
Meanwhile, the ink was barely dry on Trump’s order when Sen. Kamala Harris tweeted, “This Executive Order doesn’t fix the crisis. Indefinitely detaining children with their families in camps is inhumane and will not make us safe.”
In other words, the only humane thing is to release them, where most will eventually skip out on one of their court dates and disappear into the American interior — setting them up to be future recipients of a DACA-style amnesty in a decade or so.
Ultimately for the vast majority of illegal immigrants, de facto open borders is the fundamental position of both of California’s senators, and most of their Democratic colleagues. If only they were honest enough to admit it.