Biden at the Southern Border // What is the administration doing in regard to immigration and why is it angering so many people?

Immigration over the southern US border is a resource of unlimited political point scoring. It won’t help light the lightbulbs in your house, but it puts bread on the tables of many a politician—and “bread” in their pockets as well.

Lots of the rhetoric around the subject is therefore hyperbolic, inaccurate and incendiary. There are the left-wing activists (as well as some libertarians) who demand that all borders be permanently open, no matter the costs to the country. Then there are the right-wing advocates who blame every ill in American society—from COVID to drug addiction—entirely on illegal immigrants coming over the southern border, no matter the actual facts.

With the Biden administration finally taking more concrete action on the question of the southern border, some of President Biden’s words have fallen into that well of hysteria surrounding the subject. Some of his Republican opponents have castigated him for “comparing drug dealers to Holocaust survivors,” when he recently pointed to the Holocaust as an example of when seeking asylum in the US touches on human rights. His full words, in context, show that he was making no such comparison.

Similarly, Biden’s announcement that he would be visiting the southern border this past weekend was immediately discounted by his opponents, though they had criticized him for over a year for not making such a visit. The importance of the president actually visiting the border is a political one, in any case, and both sides were using it for political points.

But what is the Biden administration actually doing at the southern border? It has angered his allies on the left. It has also led to calls of hypocrisy, with critics saying that Biden criticized Trump’s strong tactics for dealing with immigration but that he is now using exactly the methods that Trump used. But there is also a new policy that may change illegal immigration for good—if it works.

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