The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“President Joe Biden signs his first executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Six of Biden’s 17 first-day executive orders dealt with immigration, such as halting work on a border wall in Mexico and lifting a travel ban on people from several predominantly Muslim countries.
“President Donald Trump was especially active, and especially foolish, on immigration, so there is plenty to undo. But Biden also is looking farther ahead, and he has proposed a comprehensive immigration reform that is meant to resolve the issue for the foreseeable future. This part of his thinking is harder to endorse. . . .
“The challenge here is to strike a difficult balance — one that resolves the status of the millions of people living in the country illegally, builds a system to promote the additional immigration the country needs and ensures that future illegal immigration is kept under control.
“Biden’s proposal rightly provides an eight-year pathway to citizenship for most of the 11 million people thought to be living in the U.S. without legal status, but it lacks an effective plan to strengthen immigration enforcement alongside. Critics who deride the plan as “amnesty first, enforcement never” have a point. As it stands, the proposal risks aggravating . . . illegal immigration. Its prospects of becoming law look minimal. . . .
“Adding these proposals to the Biden plan would stand a good chance of bringing moderate Republicans to support comprehensive reform. . . .” – Joe Biden’s Long-Term Immigration Reforms Shouldn’t Ignore Enforcement, Editorial, The Columbus Dispatch. 2/14/21 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Biden’s immigration policies aren’t “mending” anything. They are a systematic attack on our nation’s sovereignty and national security. What was unreasonable or “foolish” about former President Trump’s immigration policies such as building a border wall, restricting movement from terrorist-supporting countries (some of which happen to be Muslim), and preventing border surges based on bogus asylum claims.
In place of these policies, Biden wants to give a one-hundred-day free pass to stay to most illegal aliens and a pathway for them to become citizens and voters. No doubt he presumes that they will vote for his party out of gratitude. During the presidential campaign, Biden appeared to disavow the call of his party’s radicals to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the agency tasked with interior enforcement of immigration laws.
Now evidence indicates that the Biden Administration will push for this objective in fact, if not in name. His new Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkes, is floating plans to “reorganize” the agency so that agents will have little time to arrest and deport illegal aliens. It looks like a deliberate effort of deception. ICE will still exist, but its mission won’t.
But aside from this stealth, the anti-border, anti-American goals of the Biden Administration are pretty blatant and plain to see. So plain, in fact, that it seems as though this editorial is trying to warn the administration to be a little bit more subtle. Specifically, it warns that provisions to enhance immigration law enforcement must accompany Biden’s amnesty in order to make it palatable enough to opponents to gain passage.
Those opponents shouldn’t be fooled for a moment. So many times in the past, immigration advocates made promises that weren’t kept. After the 1986 amnesty, for example, they vowed they would never seek amnesty again. They also promised a system to allow employers to check whether the workers they hire are legal. That system, E-Verify, didn’t happen until eleven years later, and it is still not required at the federal level for employers to use. Similarly, Congress authorized, as part of the 1996 immigration bill, a system to track whether temporary visa holders go home. That hasn’t happened.
It is plain that immigration advocates can’t be trusted. If they want trust they must earn it. And they can only do that by allowing immigration law enforcement to work before they ask for anything else.