On a number of recent occasions, I've described President Biden's long-awaited visit to the border as his extremely belated attempt to pretend to care about the historic and deadly crisis his policies have unleashed. This has drawn hackles from some progressives, who insist that of course Biden cares. I remain unconvinced. Despite his 'empathy' brand, Biden has a penchant for coldly ignoring or downplaying conditions or ordeals that are politically unhelpful to him, a trait that he may have passed down in some form to at least one of his children. Month after month, records have been shattered at the southern border. Migrants, incentivized to come to America by Biden's negative partisanship-driven policies, have died in the highest numbers ever. American officials have been killed amid the chaos; others, demoralized by the calamity, have taken their own lives. Biden's most high-profile public commentary on their difficult work, made harder by him, has been to amplify a false smear against them.
So forgive me for questioning the depth of the president's alleged concern and caring about the disaster he has wrought and studiously ignored -- until, it would seem, enough fellow Democrats and media allies signaled that continued silence was untenable, from an optics standpoint. Then, at long last, the president did an official border visit for the first time in his multi-decade career, not seeing any migrants in the process. The latest 'tell' about priorities comes to us from a Bloomberg story about the summit in Mexico City that Biden attended after making his pit stop in El Paso. Well over two million border encounters were made last fiscal year, with an even worse trajectory underway this year, Biden's policy tweaks notwithstanding (especially considering got-aways). Beyond sovereignty and humanitarian issues, there are serious public safety and national security components to this disaster, too. You might think this would be the very first bullet point on the agenda between high-level American and Mexican officials engaged in face-to-face bilateral discussions. You'd be wrong, apparently:
US and Mexican cabinet officials ran out of time before discussing migration in a formal meeting in Mexico City on Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, leaving a major issue between the countries largely unaddressed. Uncontrolled migration across the US southern border remains a political liability for President Joe Biden, and the topic was on the agenda for a formal meeting between the American leader, Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador and more than two dozen of their top aides in Mexico City, officials said. But a private talk between Biden and Lopez Obrador before the official meeting ran long, leaving the larger group — including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — with less time than expected. Officials said that Biden and the Mexican president, known as AMLO, discussed migration and the border in their private session, but it isn’t clear how much time they spent on the subject or in what detail they spoke. In the larger meeting, Biden, AMLO and their cabinet secretaries spent most of their time discussing supply chains and drug smuggling, officials said...[The Mexican president] said the three leaders “did speak about migration in a very broad manner.”
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They "ran out of time," and therefore gave very short shrift to the giant crisis. What people prioritize can be revealing. And this is infuriatingly, and unsurprisingly, revealing. One thing that we did witness was Mexico's president personally thanking Biden for freezing a key element of border enforcement:
Mexican President Obrador thanks Biden for having built "not even one meter of wall ... although the conservatives don't like it." pic.twitter.com/nM0UJLbsm8
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 11, 2023
And Biden's rhetoric continues to suggest that he's more interested in curbing the images that look bad, rather than seriously stemming the flow of illegal immigration into the country he leads:
In which the president acknowledges when anyone with eyes can see: his aim is not to curb illegal immigration, it's to make it go more smoothly. https://t.co/TDyI4XRqlr
— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 16, 2023
Making it smoother and easier for people to "temporarily" arrive -- some of them semi-legally, thanks to sweeping and controversial executive action -- will make it smoother and easier for them to stay. The incentives, as usual, are exactly backwards. And the results of these backward incentives continue to speak loudly, both on the ground and through the data:
BREAKING: CBP sources tell FOX News the December migrant encounters number will exceed 250,000 for the first time in history - yet 15 days into Jan and they have yet to release the official figures. It comes after 9 straight months over 200k… @FoxNews
— Griff Jenkins (@GriffJenkins) January 15, 2023
NEW: Per CBP source, migrants from approximately 170 countries around the world were encountered at the southern border in Fiscal Year 2022.
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 15, 2023
So far in Fiscal Year 2023, I'm told migrants from over 140 countries have already been encountered. @FoxNews
That latter statistic underscores the folly of the "root causes" project, which may help at the margins, but is an unrealistic border security strategy. The White House keeps embarrassing itself with transparently political attacks on Republicans, one of which instantly backfired last week:
NEW: Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about this directly just now. She insisted again that Governor DeSantis is making a "mockery" of the situation by deploying Florida resources to assist with migrant boat landings...even though the US Coast Guard (federal gov) asked FL for help. https://t.co/6h01OEhE7Y
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) January 13, 2023
In fairness, Jean-Pierre is not good at her job, so you may not expect a strong response from her, but the Biden DHS spin has also been quite weak. Finally, having visited El Paso and declaring the border catastrophe a "national crisis" in need of national (i.e. federal) solutions, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has stated that his so-called sanctuary city has "no room" remaining, and cannot accommodate any more illegal immigrants. The significance of his assessment should be immediately obvious:
1) interesting framing given that those busses have also been coming from Colorado and Dem-run cities like El Paso.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) January 16, 2023
2) Clear that the bussing has worked bc it got Adams to recognize the problem and call on the Biden admin to address it. If NYC doesn’t have room, how can El Paso? https://t.co/1Z0NkaPiva pic.twitter.com/7BoxfHNjMD
In case you missed it, I'll leave you with this report about how some of the illegal migrants (framed by some as victimized asylum-seekers, a label that applies to only a small fraction of arrivals) have been passing their time in the Big Apple, at US taxpayer expense. Huddled masses, etc:
Migrants are 'drinking all day,' 'having sex in the stairs' in taxpayer-funded New York hotels: whistleblower https://t.co/3KUX1SHH0L
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 12, 2023
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