Border bill Biden was so eager to sign would’ve made things worse for migrants | Opinion

All of those pointing out how intellectually dishonest it was for Republicans to have rejected their own, very conservative border bill, in many cases because they didn’t want to do anything that might make Joe Biden look good, are 100% correct.

The Trumpublican repudiation of their own answers to a situation they’ve been howling about for years, yet also did nothing about when they held the White House under Donald Trump, plus majorities in both the House and Senate, is as cynical as it gets. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was right, too, that in refusing to take “yes” for an answer, congressional Rs were caving to Trump’s quite public bullying.

The former president told his devotees on the Hill to save the problem for him to solve. And in this view of what would solve it, if some migrants, including children, drown in the Rio Grande and die of heatstroke or dehydration in the desert meanwhile? Well qué lástima and what were they thinking, I guess, because what’s more important, their lives or his election? Please don’t reply.

I will not answer this hypocrisy with more of the same, though, by pretending that Biden was on the right side here. He wasn’t, because the legislation he was so eager to sign would have only make things at the border worse. And he caved, too.

Oh, there were some very good things in this bill, like aid to Ukraine and Israel, which should never have been held hostage in the first place, along with humanitarian aid to Gaza and Ukraine. The bill would also have helped the Afghan refugees we owe bigly. That part of the package is urgently needed, and will let’s hope still be passed.

But the larger bill would have only made legitimate asylum claims harder to prove, would have done nothing to expand the legal immigration we need, nothing to address the status of undocumented immigrants already in the country, and nothing to protect migrants fleeing violence from danger.

Biden succumbed to the politics of the situation, for which I judge him all the more harshly because he knows better and in my view is better than this.

Wall Trump mostly didn’t build is a symbol, not a solution

So what was so bad about the bill? I’m going to let Dylan Corbett, executive director of the terrific El Paso-based Catholic outfit the Hope Border Institute, answer that.

The whole asylum process is broken, he told me, and the bill was right that it does need a complete overhaul. But this legislation was not that. Instead, there were “some scary things in there,” like money for the same old enforcement — not just by border agents, but ICE, too — that we keep funding without ever having anything but misery to show for it.

Biden knows as well as anybody that the wall Trump mostly only talked about is a symbol rather than a solution, so why would we waste money on it now?

Because “the right has been so persuasive in their messaging,” Corbett said, “that even the president is now embracing the restrictionist logic” of enforcement first and nothing later.

It’s because of what does exist of the wall, along with the draconian enforcement measures of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, he said, that even more desperate people now try to swim for it and drown, or else cross the desert and die there: “The enforcement-first approach is deadly.” As a result, Corbett said, more migrants are dying in the El Paso area than he’s seen in his 10 years there.

This administration, he said, has done some good things: “Until about a year ago, we didn’t have a large-scale processing facility” for those claiming asylum, “and now we do, so we can do it with more dignity and order, and children are not dying” in detention while they wait.

But “rather than letting Abbott steal the narrative, let’s match people coming here with communities that need them, and focus on legal immigration.” With so many industries in desperate need of workers, why aren’t we doing this?

Biden’s “Faustian bargain is damn immoral,” Corbett said of the doomed bill he supported. And as in every such trade in art or life, he didn’t get what he bargained for, either.

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops committee on migration, wrote to Senate leaders on Tuesday, urging against those parts of the legislation “which would effectively mandate rushed proceedings for most people seeking protection, severely limiting due process and access to asylum” and would “heighten the credible fear standard, making it even more difficult than it already is under current law for those with bona fide asylum claims to pursue relief in the United States.

Outdated asylum system needs total overhaul

Over the years, I have covered asylum hearings in Arlington, Virginia, Florence, Arizona and Artesia, New Mexico. Until you see these slapdash proceedings for yourself, you might not believe that what passes for due process for migrants could be possible in this country.

In detention centers in the two border states, I saw migrants, sometimes with no English and no translator, shuffled through in seconds and sent back to what seemed to me like certain death.

In the hearing in Virginia, a mother and her two daughters from El Salvador testified about fleeing the country after the 17-year-old was warned that either she would become the “girlfriend” of a gang or else would be killed. But was she escaping the religious persecution that would have entitled her to asylum? Sure, she said, because her family was Catholic.

She was not a very able liar, and I was not convinced that religion had anything to do with the fact that her family had been targeted. I was very relieved, though, that the judge spared their lives that day, surely only pretending to be persuaded, at least pending a final hearing. The rules about who gets to stay have changed multiple times since then, not always for the better, but the entire system is from another century.

The Cold War asylum process, set up to handle those escaping communist countries, was just not designed to handle the kinds of cases that today overwhelm it. What our dysfunctional system really does need is the complete overhaul that the legislation that died on Wednesday was not. That we’d get an even worse bill under Trump was not a reason to pass this one.