The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, United States Border Patrol has had about 4.7 million encounters with about three million individual illegal crossers along the Southwest border. . . .
“But January 5, 2023 was a conceptual break from the past. The Biden administration announced a plan framed as additional immigration enforcement, but its most important aspects expand legal migration to the U.S. Using a power that Congress gave presidents in 1952 called humanitarian parole, Biden is allowing 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti to legally come to the U.S. each month.
“The migrants must have a U.S. sponsor and meet health and security standards. Once here, they receive a two-year residency permit—which could be extended—and they can apply for a work permit. They have almost no access to public benefits. If the numbers admitted under humanitarian parole are anything close to 30,000 people per month and the program lasts for the rest of his administration, this will be the single biggest immigration liberalization since the Immigration Act of 1965.
“From a border security perspective, the goal of humanitarian parole is to incentivize migrants to apply from their home countries (or neighboring countries), get prior approval to enter, and then fly to the United States instead of paying smugglers to come to the border. . . .
“But most importantly, the Biden administration needs to extend humanitarian parole to every country south of Mexico with large numbers of migrants showing up at the border. It can start with adding Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru, because they are the largest sending countries.
“The Biden administration has turned a massive flow of illegal immigrants into a smaller flow of legal immigrants using a 71-year-old legal power granted to him by Congress. Migrants on humanitarian parole are legal migrants, lawfully allowed to live and work in the United States.
“By extending humanitarian parole to other countries, increasing the numbers, attaching work authorization to parole, and reinstituting normal immigration fees, President Biden can be the first president to gain control of the border in generations.” — Biden’s Plan to End the Border Crisis Is Already Working, David J. Bier, Alex Nowrasteh, news.yahoo.com, 2/19/23 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: To a certain extent, one can appreciate the honesty of these writers as they essentially call for unlimited immigration. This is a refreshing contrast to the Biden Administration’s spokesmen constantly lying that the border is under control, even as they promote an endless flow of illegal migrants across it. Their strategy is pretending that a lot of illegal immigration is really legal. To illustrate, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas speaks more of providing “legal pathways” for illegal immigration rather than stopping it.
The administration pushes its agenda with the falsehood that virtually all illegal aliens are eligible for asylum. In reality, most of them are economic migrants who don’t face the kinds of persecution that a claim for asylum requires. Acceptance of bogus asylum claims allows large numbers of illegal aliens to enter our country and game our system so that they will never have to leave.
For the Biden Administration the only downsides to this flow are the bad optics of masses of people surging across the border. This upsets many Americans and raises the possibility of a political backlash against Biden. Mayorkas’ “legal pathways” are the administration’s solution to this problem of optics. The key is to make the invasion appear orderly and legal.
One means of doing so is abuse of humanitarian parole, abuse that this article endorses. When this law passed in 1952, the House Judiciary Committee specifically stated that “[The parole] authority should be surrounded with strict limitations . . . to permit the Attorney General to parole inadmissible aliens into the United States in emergency cases, such as the case of an alien who requires immediate medical attention before there has been an opportunity for an immigration officer to inspect him, and in cases where it is strictly in the public interest to have an inadmissible alien present in the United States, such as, for instance, a witness or for purposes of prosecution.”
In other words, the law only authorizes parole is on a limited, case-by-case basis. The Biden Administration, in contrast, has expanded parole broadly and indiscriminately. As the writers of this article accurately note, it’s the “biggest immigration liberalization since the Immigration Act of 1965.” They don’t care about the legality of the program. They want to expand it even more.
The Biden Administration can’t afford to be so brazen about its goals, even though those goals are the same as the writers. The Administration seeks to hide its aims with a policy of lawlessness and (perceived) order.