The Biden administration is at risk of squandering much of the moral capital it gained in early 2021 undoing Trump’s anti-immigrant policies by signing an asylum ban.
I flew into San Diego airport at 11 pm last week. Throughout the public area of the terminal, around the baggage claim carousels and on the seats in the waiting areas, dozens of people were camped out. They didn’t look to be regular airport travelers who had missed the last flight out and were waiting overnight for an early morning connection; rather, they came off as desperate, their possessions in plastic or cheap tote bags instead of rolling suitcases, with nowhere to go.
A quick Google search revealed that hundreds of asylum seekers, dumped on San Diego’s city streets without any resources to fall back on, now bed down in the airport each night. They have been doing so since late last year. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that more people are now crossing the border at San Diego than anywhere else in the country—and that county resources to help these migrants have largely dried up, leaving volunteers to desperately try to fill the gap.
Similar chaotic scenes are playing out around the country, prompted by the exodus of despairing families from countries riven by wars and gang violence, the dislocations of climate change, and the corruption and incompetence of failed governments often controlled by narco-traffickers. Increasingly, large parts of the world are becoming literally unlivable for the poor—and, as they have done throughout recorded history, the downtrodden are voting with their feet and seeking to better their lives in other locales.
By the millions, they are heading toward wealthier, more stable countries, where they hope for miracles. Too often, however, they enter into a world of renewed uncertainty and refashioned deprivation. Instead of a pot of gold, they find a cold, uncomfortable seat in an airport terminal to bed down on for the night—or the week, or the month. And, increasingly, instead of countries willing to take in the world’s poor and huddled masses yearning for freedom and a new start, they run up against an inward-looking, angry, and unforgiving politics.
Three and a half years ago, Joe Biden won against Donald Trump in part by running as the antidote to the administration’s loathsome and xenophobic policies against migrants. Biden promised that, beginning on day one, he would end a tranche of Trump-era policies on everything from family separation to religious-based travel bans, that he would roll back new regulations intended to exclude immigrants from all parts of the social safety net, that he would once again open the country to refugees. And, to his credit, when he came into office, he fulfilled many of those promises. When Trump left office, for example, the cap on new refugee admissions had been set at 15,000 for fiscal year 2021, and Trump’s noxious adviser Stephen Miller had proposed zeroing out all admission
