Joe Biden's Immigration Hypocrisy

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  • Source: Reason
  • 07/31/2020
Recently, I predicted that former Vice President Joe Biden would quietly move away from his longstanding flirtation with restrictionist policies and tilt in a pro-immigration direction. The Democratic presidential contenders in general are scrambling to be seen as more friendly towards immigration, and given that Biden has made a career out of swinging with the wind like a "rusty weather vane", as Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch put it, it was only a matter of time before he "creak[ed] in the direction of prevailing winds."

That time arrived yesterday: Biden penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald positioning himself as a champion of immigrants whose polices will reflect "American values." But look past the highfalutin rhetoric and what you find is rank hypocrisy combined with the lamest reform agenda.

Biden condemned President Donald Trump's "morally bankrupt re-election strategy" that, Biden wrote, "relies on vilifying immigrants to score political points." But Biden forgot to mention that Trump, despite his best efforts, might not be able to match the lofty deportation record of the previous administration, in which Biden himself was second in command. Nor did Biden say a word about the 2012 Criminal Alien Removal Initiative, a nasty little Obama-era pilot program that I wrote about here. Under it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in plainclothes and unmarked vans would park themselves outside Latino grocery stores, apartment buildings, parks, neighborhoods, and—on one occasion at least—a Bible Study group, and confront whomever they wished, demanding to know their immigration status. The ICE agents would handcuff and detain those they suspected—without a warrant or formal charges, much less allowing them a phone call and legal representation—and forcibly fingerprint them with a high-tech mobile unit. They'd then run the fingerprints through federal databases, a process that would sometimes take hours, during which time the detainees couldn't leave to pick up their children or get to their jobs. All those flagged as undocumented, even if they were not criminals and therefore not the program's primary targets, would be dispatched immediately to detention facilities to await deportation.

Biden also harrumphed that "build the wall is a slogan divorced from reality" that "won't stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human smugglers." Yet these concerns apparently did not enter his head when he voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. That law cost federal taxpayers close to $2.5 billion and pushed migrants precisely into the arms of "human smugglers." That particular wall also redirected migrants into more remote and treacherous routes, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women, and children.

Biden's Miami Herald piece also expressed support for bringing Dreamers, referring to those who were brought to the country as minors without proper authorization and have since grown up as Americans, "out of the shadows through fair treatment, not ugly threats." But would he offer them a path to citizenship, which would prevent future threats from future administrations,  or would he offer mere legalization? Biden declined to say. And what about their parents—whom Obama had tried to protect via the Deferred Action for Parental Arrivals program—and the other 6 or 7 million unauthorized immigrants peacefully working, living, and raising families in the United States? Once again, Biden's silence was deafening.
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