Opinion Obama's Border Crisis

It’s hard to imagine a more apt summation of the lunatic state of the nation’s immigration debate than this week’s split screen.

In Washington, most respectable opinion lined up, yet again, to condemn Republicans for not passing an amnesty under the guise of defunct-for-now “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Meanwhile, the crisis on the Southern border continued. A massive influx of people — largely driven by Central Americans, many of them children — drawn here in the expectation of lax immigration enforcement is overwhelming border officials and facilities.

A Wall Street Journal story about the White House reaction to the crisis was headlined, “Obama Plans Executive Action to Bolster Border Security,” which has a man-bites-dog feel to it after all of the administration’s executive actions to undermine immigration enforcement.

The border crisis is of a piece with a broad unraveling of the president’s policy over the past year. His erstwhile spiritual mentor might have put it under the category of “chickens coming home to roost.”

He adopted the policy of maximum risk in Iraq by pulling out all our combat troops, and Sunni jihadis are marching on Baghdad. He championed a vast new health law reliant on the smooth operation of perhaps the most complex federal website ever, and it’s still not functioning properly. He has systematically ignored the nation’s immigration laws, and tens of thousands of new illegal immigrants are showing up at our doorstep.

House Speaker John Boehner appropriately attacked the president over the crisis the other day, but spoke imprecisely when he excoriated him for “giving false hope to children and their families that if they enter the country illegally they will be allowed to stay.” Actually, the hope is quite real.

As the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies notes, apprehensions of non-Mexicans have increased sharply over the past year, but deportations of citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have dropped in the same period.

A leaked memo from a high-ranking Border Patrol official said that only 3 percent of non-Mexicans apprehended at the border are being returned to their native countries.

“It will not be open arms,” Joe Biden thundered in Guatemala City the other day, in an attempt to dissuade would-be migrants. “We’re going to hold hearings with our judges, consistent with international law and American law, and we’re going to send the vast majority of you back.”

The only part he had right is that we will hold hearings with our judges. The immigrants themselves may or not be part of them.

The administration is waving the families and children into the United States, dispersing them around the country, and giving them a date — often quite distant because of a huge backlog — to appear in immigration court.

Experience says only about a quarter of illegal immigrants released pending a court date will actually show up for the proceedings.

Why would they? As Byron York of the Washington Examiner points out, once illegal immigrants are in the country, they fairly quickly can become part of the broad category of people that the administration has exempted from interior enforcement.

Even many of the illegal immigrants who bother to go all the way through the system and get a removal order don’t go anywhere. At the end of last July, according to Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, there were 872,000 aliens who had been ordered removed but were still here.

For a would-be migrant, the question is: Whom to believe, Joe Biden or your lying eyes? If a kid gets through to his aunt in Phoenix and is then essentially scot-free, word of that is going to get back quickly to his home country and trump the chest-beating of the vice president of the United States.

But isn’t the Obama administration infamously breaking records with its deportations? This claim, frequently made by both the administration’s allies and its critics on the Left, is nonsense. Jessica Vaughn has conclusively demonstrated that it is the product of statistical sleight of hand.

The administration includes in its accounting Border Patrol arrests that wouldn’t previously have been counted as deportations. The reality is that, thanks to a June 2011 executive action, the administration has gutted interior enforcement by essentially limiting deportations to criminal illegal aliens. As John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said recently, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.”

Vaughan notes that interior arrests have declined 40 percent since 2011 and ICE released more illegal immigrants than it arrested in 2013, including nearly 70,000 with criminal records.

It is true that a Bush-era law forces the Border Patrol to hand over child migrants from countries other than Mexico to the Department of Health and Human Services to be placed with a suitable relative. The administration is rightly calling for that law to be changed.

But the administration’s policy of eviscerating interior enforcement is entirely its own creation and has no basis whatsoever in law. That policy, the president’s de facto amnesty of young illegal immigrants imposed by executive order and all the talk of a more wide-ranging amnesty over the past year have had their predictable effect.

The key to reversing the tide is enforcement, and not just at the border. If illegal immigrant adults receiving newly arrived children from the border knew that they would be reliably deported upon coming to the attention of authorities, the message would get out quickly. The influx would radically slow, if not stop.

But the president wants even less interior enforcement. The same Wall Street Journal story with the headline about Obama bolstering the border reported he “will make at least minor adjustments to deportation policy later this summer that would shield some illegal immigrants from deportation” — with his base agitating for even more far-reaching action.

For the left, and its fellow-travelers in the business community and on the libertarian right, there is only side of the split screen that matters. It’s always amnesty.