Biden was right to restrict illegal immigration. His liberal critics are wrong | Opinion

Liberal politicians and immigration advocates have lost the national debate on immigration.

They prove this by remaining stubbornly tone-deaf to the political reality that most US voters - including Latinos - are concerned about what they view as a crisis at the US-Mexico border.

With Republicans led by former President Donald Trump clearly attempting to exploit the historically high illegal border crossings in an election year, President Joe Biden addressed these realities last week when he issued an executive order restricting the number of asylum seekers entering the United States without a visa or other authorized documentation.

Opinion

Liberals protested loudly on X and other social media platforms while others compared Biden to Trump.

“By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S,” said U.S. Senator Alex Padilla of California.

Padilla wants Biden to help clear a backlog of cases that are causing desperate people to live in limbo as they plead for asylum in America. He also wants Biden to support “smart and strategic investments” that create more legal pathways to migration while addressing the root cause of migration. These are worthy ideas but all of this requires money that Congress has not given the president.

A good Senator for California, Padilla’s response to Biden’s asylum restrictions omitted an important issue to voters: border enforcement. The U.S. Border Patrol encountered nearly a quarter million undocumented immigrants in December alone, a record.

It used to be that most encounters and apprehensions almost exclusively involved people fleeing Mexico or Central America, but that has been shifting according to the data. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 50,000 encounters from last December involved people from Venezuela. There have also been sharp increases in people from China at the U.S.-Mexico border. Majority-Democrat cities such as New York have been overwhelmed by migrants, some from as far away as Africa.

Judging by the responses of liberals on social media, any enforcement measures taken by Biden or anyone else are always wrong, cruel, or bad.

“We join immigrants and communities across the country in condemning President Biden for continuing to treat immigrants as expendable and legitimizing the far-right’s fear-mongering and racist agenda,” wrote the Detention Watch Network, a Washington D.C.-based. non-profit seeking to abolish detention in the United States.

American voters disagree.

A CBS News poll released Sunday showed broad support for Biden’s action with 70% of registered voters saying they agreed with what he did. Tellingly, Latino support was at 69%, nearly identical to the overall number.

A Pew Research Center poll in March showed that 76% of U.S. Latinos believe the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border was either a crisis or a major problem. In liberal California, an October Public Policy Institute of California poll showed that 64% of California Latinos believe the situation at the border is a crisis or a major problem. So did 68% of all Californians who are likely voters.

These numbers may explain why the majority of California’s Latino Legislative Caucus was silent in response to Biden’s action from last week, which will block access to new asylum cases if illegal border crossings remain high - more than an average of 2,500 per day.

Mike Madrid, the Sacramento-based political operative who has run election campaigns for Democrats and Republicans, has written that both major political parties are addicted to their immigration immigration talking points.

Republicans demonize immigrants to scare and activate white voters. Democrats posit Republicans as racists in an attempt to activate liberal white voters and Latinos. But as Madrid writes in “The Latino Century,” his soon-to-be-published book, Latino voters are increasingly American-born, English-speaking and concerned about border security in numbers similar to white voters. (Full disclosure: I helped write and edit Madrid’s book, which will be published on June 18).

“Democrats are seemingly stuck in addressing Latino issues as those of the immigrant (particularly the undocumented) while the vast majority of Latino voters are not immigrants, nor prioritize that experience as a primary concern when voting,” Madrid wrote in his book, whose full title is “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy.”

Compassion for undocumented immigrants and concerns about border security are not mutually exclusive. Comparing what Biden is doing now and what Trump did as president is preposterous. Neither Biden nor his administration are touting cruel programs that dehumanize immigrants. Biden’s administration has used temporary programs to admit thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans through family reunification. The problem with these programs is that they don’t offer a pathway to legalization. That’s up to Congress to settle, not the president.

Congress has failed to act on border security so Biden acted last week, within the limitations of his office, because it’s in the national interests.

Biden is making a pragmatic management decision given that Congress refuses to provide adequate funding for the short-term border crisis or immigration reform for the long-term, a bipartisan effort that Trump has killed. As long as liberal Democrats lash out at Biden as the problem, they won’t just lose an immigration debate to Republicans. They will lose with voters at the polls.