President Joe Biden signs executive orders on immigration Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Before leaving office, Donald Trump had drastically reduced the waves of illegal migrants pouring over America’s borders with deft diplomacy and tough rules and enforcement. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the so-called “Border Czar,” immediately squandered Trump’s gains in an appeal to the radical pro-immigration wing of the Democrat Party. The Wall Street Journal explains:
In his first weeks in the Oval Office, President Biden made a sharp U-turn on Trump’s immigration policies. He ordered a halt to building the border wall, suspended deportations and ended a Trump policy forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico. His 28 executive orders on the issue included rescinding a Trump policy making every migrant who crossed the border illegally subject to deportation, not just those who later committed a crime. And he sent a bill to Congress to legalize 11 million people without permanent legal status. It went nowhere.
“We’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said. For most Democrats, it was welcome news after controversial Trump policies that included separating migrant families at the border.
Now, four years later, illegal immigration has helped power the political comeback of the man Biden defeated in 2020. Immigration is a top concern for voters, with only inflation a bigger worry, polls show. Immigration is also the issue where Trump holds the biggest advantage over Harris—a 16-point gap in the latest Wall Street Journal survey.
“The border may tip the election to Trump,” the pollster Nate Silver, who runs a statistical model on election outcomes, said recently in his weekly newsletter.
The story of the border over the past four years shows how the Biden team, eager to restore America’s reputation as a haven for migrants, underestimated the risks they ran in loosening controls at the border. Distracted by the pandemic, inflation and the war in Ukraine, they shifted too late to more rigorous enforcement, according to interviews with current and former officials.
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