The Other Big Lie

 

This thing I saw on Twitter Thursday afternoon

is in the first place an egregious deception, because that photo of a caravan from Honduras marching through Arriaga in Chiapas state (credited to AFP/Getty) is from October 2018, in the middle of the Trump Administration, and has no connection to anything that is happening now, and my first thought on seeing it was that posting it is some kind of Republican dirty trick. Were they spreading the story of open borders in the hope of encouraging more migrants to come, with the purpose of making the Biden administration look bad? Working to create a genuine crisis for a political profit?

As the declaration of an end to the COVID emergency approached, and with it the Title 42 provisions allowing the border patrol to bar migrants more or less at random on the grounds that they might spread the virus, which they started using to bar asylum seekers under the Trump administration (as if they had more chance of bringing COVID to Texas than of catching it there themselves) and continued doing after courts blocked Biden from stopping the policy, and the policy was thus going to be blocked more or less automatically on Thursday, a remarkable chorus of doomsaying Republicans began to arise, like these from the Twitter account of @sentedcruz:

May 4: Body bags are piling up because of Biden’s negligence at the southern border. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 4: We’ve seen over 6 million illegal aliens storm across the southern border in 2.5 years under Joe Biden’s leadership. This is the direct result of his political decision to open our borders. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 5: Law enforcement will continue to be overwhelmed by the number of illegal aliens Biden is allowing to flood across the border. Title 42 hasn’t even expired yet and they can’t keep up with the thousands storming the southern border. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 8: At this moment, there are 700,000 illegal aliens waiting to flood the southern border knowing they’ll get a free ticket into America as soon as Title 42 ends. President Biden allowed this. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 10: Texas is already being overrun with illegal aliens ahead of Title 42’s expiration. The Lone Star State - and the rest of the country - will pay dearly for Biden’s open border policy decision. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 10: President Biden is AWOL. We’ve had consecutive days of 10,000+ illegal aliens flooding through the southern border. Title 42 is expiring and we are seeing an unmitigated disaster – and the Biden body bags are stacking up. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 11: I'm in Brownsville hours before Title 42 expires. We are witnessing an absolute travesty unfolding on our southern border. #BidenBorderCrisis

May 12: President Biden and the Democrats in his party can't be bothered by the atrocities taking place at the border. They want the number of illegal aliens in America to go up - this is a political game for them. #BidenBorderCrisis #Title42

Although it was widely known that the lapse of Title 42 would be accompanied by new rules heavily restricting new asylum claims, the form of the new rules was pretty well known (since mid-December), asylum officers were trained on how to apply them on Tuesday May 9, and they were published on Wednesday May 10, but the basic position was available in February: adult migrants won't be admitted at all unless they can show they've been denied safe refuge in some other country (basically, Mexico), and when they apply they need to do it through a cell phone app known as CBP One, which is said not to be working very well, but what they really need to do is go back somewhere—Colombia or Panama are good choices—and apply from the institutions the US has set up there. 

In other words, crossing the border at the wrong spot and surrendering to the CBP agents and informing them that you're applying for asylum is no longer even a little bit likely to get you in. It's not going to get you in!

And very few will get in through the process envisaged, at the proper crossing and with the smartphone app. Even as Republicans like Cruz carried on with their prophecies of unprecedented invasions, and even as the press continued to amplify them, the reality on Friday was much quieter, as even The New York Times felt it had to acknowledge:

Migrants continued to seek refuge in the United States in numerous pockets across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, though U.S. Border Patrol officials and shelter operators said the flow of desperate people was lighter than they had feared it could be, given how many people had traveled north from their homes in recent weeks.

The migrants themselves apparently knew the door was shutting even as the Republican kept screaming the lie that it was opening wider than ever.

I mean to say,  I'm kind of unhappy with Biden myself on this, and the ACLU, which has sued to block the new rule, is unhappier still:

The challenge was filed swiftly after the new policy’s unveiling. The ban largely mimics two Trump-era policies — known as the “entry” and “transit” bans — which were blocked by the courts. It prohibits asylum for everyone at the border who transited through another country en route to the United States (i.e., people from countries other than Mexico) except for those who are able to obtain a scarce appointment to present themselves at a border port through a flawed mobile application; the rare person who first sought and was denied asylum in another country; or those who can prove that they qualify for one of a few other extremely narrow exceptions.

“The Biden administration’s new ban places vulnerable asylum seekers in grave danger and violates U.S. asylum laws. We’ve been down this road before with Trump,” said Katrina Eiland, managing attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “The asylum bans were cruel and illegal then, and nothing has changed now.”

The Biden administration argues that it is not breaking US law the way the Trump policy did because the ban is not a categorical one, and that it was also legally obliged to do something to control the situation at the border, since Congress is unable to do its job—

Administration officials also used Tuesday’s announcement to criticize Congress, arguing that the White House has been left to roll out new policies to fill the “void” left by inaction on the Hill.

“To be clear, this was not our first preference or even our second. From day one, President Biden has urged Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures to ensure orderly, safe and humane processing of migrants at our border,” a senior administration official said.

That's absolutely the truth, anyway, and it's certainly on the same Republicans as the ones who have devoted themselves to telling lies about it rather than legislating anything. 

The truly depressing thing is how successful they've been in manipulating the situation and maneuvering Biden into doing the wrong thing, alienating the Democratic "left" and large parts of the putatively not-so-left Latin community at the same time, while they continue to scream the particular Big Lie of Biden's "open border" policy.

This has been the Republican plan for the last 10 years, since Senator Marco Rubio first fled from the comprehensive immigration plan he'd once backed, as he positioned himself for the 2016 presidential campaign, and Trump's writers picked it up as his major "issue" from the moment he came down that escalator and began hurling imprecations against Mexicans (Mexican citizens weren't even a significant part of the masses surging onto the border, refugees from the Northern Triangle countries in those days and from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti today). Just as they are working to create the biggest crisis they can over the stupid debt ceiling, so they are working to create the biggest crisis they can over immigration from the Mexican border because they hope that will do them some good in next year's election. That's the story.