The Biden Border Surge

#31 -- It's coming, if he wins, and may screw up the Dems' plans

PREDICTION: If Biden's elected, there will be a huge surge of migrants entering through our Southern border -- equal to the "asylum"surge of 2019, when entries topped 100,000 a month. The reason why is pretty obvious: Biden has pledged to make it possible by reversing key Trump policies that brought the last surge under control. As Todd Bensman, a reliable, non-excitable reporter on these issues, notes:

[A]spiring border-crossers around the world will rush the border if Biden wins because they have heard his promises to end deportations, limit detentions, reopen the asylum system and its loopholes to all comers, end all Trump-era asylum initiatives, provide free healthcare, and prioritize a "pathway to citizenship" for millions of illegally present people already in the country or who can get here in time to get it.

Bensman calls this the Biden Effect. It includes Biden's promised end to the "Remain in Mexico" program, one of the things that finally ended the 2019 asylum crisis (before the pandemic came along and Trump used emergency powers to simply turn people away). ‘Remain in Mexico’ required asylum seekers to wait outside the U.S. while their cases were adjudicated. The other Trump trick that worked was threatening Mexico with tariffs unless they prevented migrants from traveling up from Mexico’s neighbors to the South. Mexico responded by deploying national guard troops who blocked “thousands and bused them back to Central American countries,” Bensman notes.** “If Biden removes the tariff threat, Mexico could return to its traditional role as a migrant-transit superhighway to the U.S. border.”

Add in the pent up demand among would-be migrants after four years of Trump hostility, plus the likely revival of the US economy with opportunities for good-paying work. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands ( or millions) will eventually decide to make the trip? Many will have learned the lesson of the early Trump years -- that if enough people claim asylum at once, they will overwhelm the system and its detention centers. There won't be enough judges to hear their cases, and they'll be released into the U.S. interior with a court date months or years into the future- - for which many don't bother to show up. They're in.

Biden proposes to handle any surge by doubling the number of immigration judges. But that takes a while to gin up, even if funding’s made available. And Biden's judges won't be trying to reject asylum claims in any case -- more the opposite, since Biden would also reverse Trump's attempt to tighten up on the grounds for asylum, which had been gradually expanded by immigrant rights lawyers to include fear of domestic violence (i.e. a “culture of machismo”) or gang violence.  If Biden somehow succeeds in making the system smooth and efficient, is that going to discourage people from coming?

The surge is likely to come sooner rather than later -- maybe even before Inauguration Day. In January of this year, Bensman interviewed would be migrants who had already collected in Mexico awaiting a Biden victory. And we know from 2017 -- when the flow almost instantaneously stopped after Trump’s election -- that would-be migrants, both asylum seekers and illegals, are highly informed about day to day changes in U.S. policies. Why wouldn't they be? If they aren't, the "coyotes" who get paid to take them to our country will tell them,

What if the surge happens just as Biden's taking office? It could have a powerful political impact, not only on immigration debates. Democrats now often talk as if enacting a Biden New Deal -- health care changes, tax changes, voting requirements, police reform, gun control, green jobs, in addition to immigration amnesties -- will be almost easy. All they have to do is win a majority in the Senate, eliminate the filibuster, and it's katy bar the door. But what will voters feel if the first visible impact of their choice involves images of tens of thousands of uninvited, relatively indigent people (from around the world, not just Central America) backed up at border corssings, or streaming across rivers and hopping fences between legal crossing points?

They might not like it. And the result could be lower support for the new administration across its entire agenda. If that happens, Biden will have a choice to make: Carry out his immigration platform — which will only increase the flow — and jeopardize, all those other initiatives, or stick with the Trumpian measures that brought the previous surge under control. Even if Biden himself might want to face reality and choose the latter course, will the rest of his party (including migrant activists and hard-boiled political schemers who see migrants as future Democrats)?

Either way, you'd think Trump might want to bring up the prospect of the Biden Surge during today’s debate, when it might make a difference.

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** — This is why it seems silly to still expect Mexico to ‘pay for the wall.’ Mexico has already done more than its share by sealing off its own southern border. If they want to continue performing the same service for Biden, that’s one way he might avoid (or delay) the migrant surge and make my prediction wrong.