President Joe Biden’s tone-deaf new executive order purporting to reduce illegal immigration is one more example of why he does not deserve another term, notwithstanding that his opponent, former President Donald Trump, also belongs nowhere near the Oval Office.
The order itself is devoid of logic. It will shut down asylum requests at the border if they average more than 2,500 at official ports of entry, but reopen them if the number drops below 1,500. But why, pray tell, should Biden allow up to 2,500 daily to start with, or restart allowances to keep them above 1,500? Why should he allow a single person to enter “without papers” at all?
If the point is that the system is overwhelmed, then why not order that all new border requests be blocked until the system clears the backlog created by Biden having let nearly 10 million — repeat, 10 million — into the country in just over three years?
Then again, why invite the unprecedented, Noah-size flood of illegal migrants in the first place? What is it about left-wing ideology that requires a fetish for a permanent class of untraceable residents, including a large number of violent criminals, within our borders? Even if Biden wanted to show some supposedly “humanitarian” instincts by unilaterally loosening a few immigration restrictions, why go so astonishingly overboard?
Deliberate decisions to go overboard from the port side of the ideological spectrum, though, have become Biden’s standard practice. After campaigning in 2019 and 2020 as a relative “centrist” promising a return to at least semi-normal governance after Trump’s four years of divisive drama, all Biden had to do was chart a nonradical course somewhat left of, say, former President Bill Clinton. Biden didn’t campaign on promises to radically change American culture, but only to soberly pursue a semi-liberal-infused version of good governance.
Instead, he announced as he was taking office that, despite the closeness and discord of his election, he now aimed to be the “most progressive” president in history. To his great discredit, that’s how he has tried to govern. Rather than merely liberal, again and again, the Biden administration has pushed actions so radical that even former President Barack Obama’s leftist appointees didn’t dare try to implement them.
Biden’s multiple, astronomical spending splurges, by far the largest and most fiscally irresponsible in history, created the inflation that has driven his approval rating into the gutter. Biden’s bizarre decisions, plural, to allow Iran to access billions of dollars in previously frozen funds surely assisted Iran’s ability to support the Hamas terrorists who still send missiles into the same nation of Israel that Biden repeatedly knifes in the back.
Domestically, never before in history has anyone put the weight of the federal government against parents in so many ways. The administration has filed legal memoranda against parents who merely asked that schools put unambiguously pornographic books out of reach of elementary school students. And it helped gin up a letter equating some parents groups with "domestic terrorists" and then had the Justice Department open an investigation in response. Biden has also sided with schools that want to keep basic health-related information from children’s parents, as if parents are the enemy. Yeah, look it up — that’s what Biden is doing.
The Biden administration also investigates traditional Catholics as domestic terrorists; refuses to apologize for sending heavily armed teams in a dawn raid to arrest a peaceful pro-life protester in front of his terrorized children for noncrime; excuses blatantly illegal, threatening harassment of Supreme Court justices while refusing to enforce the laws protecting them; and ignores Supreme Court rulings and congressional directives willy-nilly in order to push the most invasively regulatory state in U.S. history while working toward outlawing popular products such as gasoline-powered cars and efficient dishwashers.
On almost every front, Biden could have pushed policy in a modestly liberal direction without going on a radical rampage. The swing voters who provided his margin of victory weren’t concerned with moderate shifts in policy goals in either direction — all they wanted was Team Normal, within a reasonable ideological range.
Instead of Team Normal, Biden has given them a Frankenstein monster of a government insisting on dragging people, by whatever force available, into a supposedly brave new far-left polity.
Only from such an extreme vantage point is the idea of 2,500 illegal immigrants per day, nearly 1 million a year, seen as a serious restriction rather than a veritable welcome sign for an invasion. As with so many of Biden’s other policies, the illegal immigrant wave undermines American culture, to the detriment of all.