Insiders are already admitting that former Vice President Joe Biden’s plans to roll back most of President Donald Trump’s immigration reforms could spur a surge of illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border.
Two of Trump’s most consequential reforms have been the implementation of “Remain in Mexico” and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 rule — greatly slowing illegal immigration at the southern border while allowing federal immigration officials to quickly return border crossers to their native countries.
Remain in Mexico, specifically, ensures that border crossers claiming asylum are not immediately released into the interior of the U.S. as they previously were. Instead, they must remain in Mexico while awaiting their asylum hearings.
The policy helped lead to a blue-collar wage spike for America’s working and lower-middle-class that often must compete against newly arrived illegal and legal immigrants in the U.S. labor market.
Biden has vowed to roll back both reforms, a move that even insiders close to his transition team admit could lead to a surge of illegal immigration, according to CNN:
Each of those policies has made claiming asylum in the US at the southern border nearly impossible, but the consequence of pulling them back too quickly could result in a sudden increase of migrants on the southern border. [Emphasis added]
“You don’t want a surge to happen before you’re ready to handle it,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “They’re going to have to rely on one of the policies they hate the most and that they disagree with philosophically, so that they can get to a long term fix.” [Emphasis added]
The former DHS [Department of Homeland Security] official echoed that concern: “You have to have a pressure valve in place before you start unwinding down these policies or you’ll allow a crisis to generate.” [Emphasis added]
Similarly, the pro-migration lobby is warning of a surge at the U.S.-Mexico border as a result of Biden’s plans. Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith, for example, wrote that such an illegal immigration boom would be politically negligent of Biden:
In economic terms, a few hundred thousand Central American migrants will do little to hurt the U.S., but their presence will rile up law-and-order voters who bristle at the notion of people crossing the border illegally or skipping out on asylum hearings. That could hurt Biden with constituencies like Hispanic voters who live in the Texas border counties that swung hard to Trump in 2020. [Emphasis added]
Biden’s plans have been embodied thus far by his appointing former DHS official Alejandro Mayorkas to lead the agency. Mayorkas’ record at the agency, as Breitbart News reported, includes lowering immigration fraud standards, approving as many visas as possible, and maximizing immigration to the U.S.
A report by John Soloman notes that Mayorkas was flagged in 2015 “for intervening to help Democrat-connected foreign investors involved in the EB-5 work visa program” by the DHS inspector general.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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