.By Rich Lowry - Nationalreview.com July
11, 2014
The administration’s response to the border crisis
is yet another misstep on immigration.
As a defender of the nation’s borders, President Barack
Obama is a hell of a pool player.
The
president enjoyed a game at a bar in Denver with Colorado governor John
Hickenlooper the other day, without the noir atmosphere of his furtive visits
to pool halls with his grandfather as a kid, when he felt “the enticement of
darkness and the click of the cue ball, and the jukebox flashing its red and
green lights.”
Obama’s
game the other day was bright and cheery, as one would expect of a president
who didn’t have any depressing visits to frightened ranchers, overwhelmed
border agents, or desperate migrants on his future itinerary.
The
first rule in a crisis for any executive is put on his windbreaker and boots
and get out on the ground. President George W. Bush didn’t do it soon enough
after Hurricane Katrina and, politically, could never make up for it, no matter
how many times he visited New Orleans subsequently. Obama’s bizarre resistance
to visiting the border on his fundraising swing out West fueled talk of the
influx as Obama’s “Katrina moment.”
The
Katrina analogy is both over the top and too generous. It is over the top
because the border influx isn’t a deadly catastrophe swallowing an American
city. It is too generous because Bush didn’t do anything to bring on Hurricane
Katrina, whereas Obama’s policies are responsible for the influx of immigrants
from the border. It is, in the argot of his administration, a “man-caused
disaster.”
According
to the Los Angeles Times, the number of immigrants younger than 18
who were deported or turned away from ports of entry declined from 8,143 in
2008 to 1,669 last year. There were 95 minors deported from the entire interior
of the country last year. At the same time, the number of unaccompanied alien
children arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras exploded from less
than 4,000 several years ago to 40,000 since last October.
The
White House brushes off criticism that Obama is avoiding the border as mere
“optics,” in contrast to its highly substantive focus. But it is still not
taking the crisis seriously.
In
a letter to Texas governor Rick Perry, White House senior adviser Valerie
Jarrett downgraded the erstwhile “humanitarian crisis” on the border (the
president’s words) to an “urgent humanitarian situation.”
When pressed on the
shift in verbiage, ever-judicious White House press secretary Josh Earnest
explained that it is both a crisis and a situation. Yes, it’s that bad.
The
nearly $4 billion the president is requesting for the border is not
fundamentally about enforcement that will reverse and end the tide, but about
managing the influx.
A
devastating critique of the request by the Center for Immigration Studies notes
that about half of the money goes to the Department of Health and Human
Services “for acquisition, construction, improvement, repair, operation, and
maintenance of real property and facilities.” The enforcement portion of the
request, according to CIS, “is not truly geared toward removal,” but instead to
“recouping costs for temporary detention and subsequent transporting of
aliens.”
The
administration’s reaction to the crisis is just another in a long series of
acts of bad faith on immigration. It is asking Congress for more money for its
priorities at the same time the president is promising, in effect, to suspend
yet more immigration laws in response to the failure of “comprehensive
immigration reform.”
Republicans
in Congress should crumple up the president’s border request in a ball and
start over, with an emphasis on holding migrants near the border and working
through their cases quickly to address the short-term crisis, and provisions
for interior enforcement to address illegal immigration more broadly.
Of
course, even if such a bill were to pass and to be signed into law, that’d be
no guarantee that the president of the United States would enforce it. That
speaks to an entirely different man-caused disaster.
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