Just like Europe, America has an immigration problem that's out of control.
So, President Joe Biden has come up with a new idea — try some of Donald Trump's approaches.
He's not planning to mount the biggest mass deportation from the United States in history as Trump promises. And he's not separating child migrants from their parents at the border as his predecessor notoriously did. But he does plan to use presidential power to bypass Congress, like Trump, in order to block most migrants from being able to request asylum after crossing from Mexico illegally, during periods when the border is overwhelmed by the volume of crossings – as it is now.
This move has no chance of actually solving the problem of a swamped asylum system that means many applicants wait months or years for a decision. But in the short-term, the White House hopes it will curb the number of people currently crossing the US-Mexico border. Biden's move is also sharply political, because everything about immigration is hopelessly politicized in a way that has thwarted every effort to fix immigration laws for decades.
It's no coincidence that the president acted just three weeks before he's due to stand opposite Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump at a CNN debate. He badly needed political insulation on immigration, which the ex-president is using as a platform for his campaign again after riding the issue to victory in 2016.
People familiar with Biden's strategy point out the contrast between the president taking action and the Republicans doing nothing on immigration after the GOP twice blocked the most conservative immigration bill in decades in Congress to keep the issue alive for Trump.
The danger is that Biden simply draws attention to his own failure so far to effectively respond to an issue on which Trump is more trusted by many voters despite his dehumanizing and often racist rhetoric. The president is also again infuriating progressive voters from whom he is already estranged over his Israel policy.
As he rolled out his new measures on Tuesday, Biden insisted that he would rather work for permanent solutions to the immigration overflow with Congress, but that Trump had stopped them. "He didn't want to fix the issue," Biden said, accusing the GOP presumptive nominee for preferring to use immigration to attack him. "It's a cynical, an extremely cynical political move." He also took pains to distinguish himself from Trump's most extreme policies: "I will not use the US military to go into neighborhoods all across the country to pull millions of people out of their homes and away from their families to put (in) detention camps while awaiting deportation."
For decades, the hope behind harsh immigration measures has been that they will deter people from coming to the border. But the conditions that people from Central and South America are fleeing – economic blight, gang warfare and the effects of climate change – are so dire that the deterrence factor is often ineffective. And until a fractured Congress finally resolves to act instead of using immigration as a political tool, an asylum system designed for a long-ago era will continue to fail.
