Bidens border plan drapes Trump policies in liberal rhetoric

[ad_1]

As the Texas National Guard closes a breach in the US border wall, migrants wait on the banks of the Rio Grande on December 20, 2022.

Photo: Morgan Lee/AP

Cruelty is the point where a phrase coined by The Atlantics Adam Serwer has become a popular liberal refrain to describe the motivations behind what, at the time, Democrats called the intolerable policies of the Trump era. President Donald Trump’s actions to detain and deport immigrants at the southern border, including family separation as a policy, have been highlighted as key justifications for the slogan.

There is no doubt that a cheerful nastiness has accompanied the Trump administration’s decisions to round up, cage and deport desperate, non-white migrants.

Cruelty, however, is more than an affect.

The US border regime is cruel, whether or not its continuation is enforced by a president spouting racial slurs or a president appealing to the need for safe and orderly treatment as he announces a plan to push back mass thousands of migrants as President Joe Biden did. Thursday.

The Biden administration unveiled a sweeping policy to immediately deport asylum seekers from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico without first seeking asylum in a third country, which means getting a financial sponsor in the United States and go through a check background.

The same transit ban policy is already in place for migrants from Venezuela, an extension of the Title 42 measure deployed by the Trump administration in the first year of the pandemic as a way to turn back migrants under cover of public health. In about nine months under Trump, nearly half a million people have been deported under the law; by maintaining the law for two years, the Biden administration has already used it to deport more than 2 million people.

It should be obvious that no amount of anti-immigration policy will be enough for the white supremacist right.

Bidens’ border regime would no longer be acceptable if it were a political ploy to insulate Democrats from attacks on law and order by the right, but it’s not even that: Republicans made it clear that they would portray Biden as a president with open borders, regardless of how harshly Trumpian his border policy remains. It should be obvious that no amount of anti-immigration policy will be enough for the white supremacist right.

Yet it would be misplaced to understand the anti-immigrant actions taken by Biden’s White House as merely failed efforts to appease the right. Democratic presidents, especially self-styled ejector-in-chief Barack Obama, have long opted for a hardline border regime.

Democrats frame their border logics in the neoliberal language of management and order, rather than explicitly racist America-first slogans. Maintaining the border as a racist and spatial solution for capital has the same disastrous and murderous effects, however, no matter what rhetoric it is justified with.

On Thursday, Biden presented his border plan as a way to bring order to chaos, with between 7,500 and 8,000 refugees crossing the US-Mexico border every day in December. The world’s wealthiest country could respond to this mass movement by working with direct service providers on the ground and providing sufficient resources to quickly resettle those fleeing political unrest for which the United States bears significant historical responsibility. .

Instead, the burden of this order is placed on those fleeing for their own survival, with the purported right to seek asylum at the port of entry being reserved only for those with the ability to seek and obtain asylum. American sponsor before reaching the border.

The right to asylum should not depend on how you escape danger or how financially you can afford it, said Mary Miller Flowers, senior policy analyst at the Young Center for Immigrant Childrens Rights, in a statement. Yet for too long the pursuit of security has been treated as a privilege reserved for a select few, and the Biden administrations’ selection of who can and cannot access protection proves it.

The latest White House policy includes a carrot next to the stick of mass and immediate expulsions. The United States will offer humanitarian parole to up to 30,000 asylum seekers per month from Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela who have already sought asylum by crossing into Mexico, before reach the border; gone through a background check; and obtained a US tax sponsor.

As Jonathan Blazer, director of border strategies for the American Civil Liberties Unions, said in a statement Thursday: There is simply no reason why the benefits of a new parole program for Cubans , Nicaraguans and Haitians are conditioned to the expansion of dangerous evictions.

The Biden administration continues to claim to oppose Title 42. Minutes after announcing his latest deportation plan based on Title 42, Biden told reporters Thursday, I don’t like Title 42. government also fought to end the measure in court. which was last rejected by the Supreme Court at the end of December.

The danger of government border policy lies in what it serves: an ideological commitment to deterring immigration.

At the same time, however, the administration has deployed and continued to expand the use of Title 42 to expedite the deportation of migrants.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Title 42 last week did not order the Biden administration to apply Title 42 deportations to more people, immigrant rights group Freedom for Immigrants noted, calling the administrations title 42 hypocrisy.

Such hypocrisy has been the modus operandi when it comes to the approach of Biden and his Democratic predecessors to the border, and hypocrisy itself is not the issue here.

The danger of the administration’s border policy lies in what it serves: an ideological commitment to immigration deterrence, not a prevarication of the judicial process, but a choice to condemn millions of people to black and brown predominance to suffering and near death. Cruelty is the constant.

[ad_2]