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On Tuesday, President Joe Biden unveiled an executive order that he argues will help to “secure the border.” The centerpiece of the order, which has been telegraphed by the president for months, gives the president authority to halt asylum processing at the southern border when illegal entries reach a threshold of 2,500 arrests for illegal entry per day.
During the 2020 presidential campaign and early presidency, Biden ruthlessly attacked Donald Trump’s executive actions on border issues. In 2019, Biden lambasted Trump’s border policies, stating that Trump’s immigration policies were “an assault on human dignity and everything we stand for as a nation.” In February 2021, Biden moved to end Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which resumed the process of admitting new asylum seekers into the United States.
Fast forward to today, and after noticing that the American people are greatly concerned about the border, Biden is enacting a policy that mimics Trump’s supposedly harsh measures, and is targeting asylum seekers. How interesting.
The action and its timing are obviously political. For three and a half years, the Biden administration insisted that the border was under control, despite evidence to the contrary. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in testimony to Congress in April 2023 that, “the border is secure, and we are working every day, day and night, to increase its security.” However, the data tell a different story, with illegal crossings and asylum claims surging to unprecedented levels.
Now, with the presidential election looming just five months away, Biden has suddenly decided it is essential to take drastic action?
American attitudes about the border are unambiguous. One year ago, a poll conducted by Pew Research Center showed that only 23 percent of Americans believe that the government is doing a good job managing the southern border. Unlike many issues, the results are not terribly partisan, as only 35 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents agreed with that statement.
Even Hispanic voters, who many people assume would be more permissive on the issue, are decidedly unhappy. In March of this year, Pew published a poll showing that 74 percent of Hispanics describe the southern border as “a major problem or a crisis.”
These numbers, and the degree to which Americans care about the immigration issue, are mortal threats to the Biden reelection effort. His abrupt shift thus reeks of election-year politicking, a cynical attempt to placate voters who view immigration as a significant concern.
But will it work? Will anyone buy this as being anything other than political gamesmanship? Will it change even a single vote? I suspect not, because attitudes about immigration are so entrenched, and Biden’s visibility opposing the prior Trump restrictiveness was so significant. There is a reason, in my estimation, that many swing-state Democratic senators in difficult reelection fights chose to avoid Biden’s White House event. They likely felt it was political poison to be seen with Biden on the immigration issue.
But this move may be more than just ineffective, as Biden actually risks some of his base by doing this as well. Speaking to Semafor, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic U.S. representative from Washington, called the executive order “really disappointing,” saying that it “just plays into the idea that somehow harsh enforcement is going to work. That was Trump’s approach. We should be showing what the difference is.”
Biden has already been facing internal division within his party on several issues, perhaps none more threatening than the Israel-Hamas war. He is already facing discontent among progressives who feel he has betrayed them, tacitly supporting “genocide” in Gaza, and promise to not vote for him as a result. Further alienating them on the immigration issue could be a significant problem for him.
Even if this action were a genuine attempt to tackle the border issue, it is still woefully insufficient as a means for dealing with the problem. Setting aside the various exemptions and loopholes, the order only really targets asylum seekers while doing little to address the broader issue of illegal border crossings. It sets a threshold of 2,500 arrests per day before any action is triggered, Biden is establishing a level of “tolerable” border crossings at nearly 1 million illegal entries per year.
So what are we left with? A mostly meaningless exercise of political theater, meant to appeal to people who will not be swayed by it, while possibly pushing away a core group of voters he needs to be energized for him in November. Brilliant.
