Biden adds to Trump’s border wall

In 2018 and 2019, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate refused to spend the $5.7 billion that then-President Trump requested to “build the wall” along the U.S.’s southern border. The result was the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

In early October, the Democratic president Joe Biden announced his administration would spend about $1.4 billion to add 20 more miles to the wall to which he had pledged “not another foot” in his 2020 campaign.

Biden’s first piece of proposed legislation, “The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021”, a package for “comprehensive immigration reform” failed when Senate Republicans threatened to filibuster it. Like other pledges to liberals—for example, support for the $15 minimum wage—this one went into the file drawer. So, the administration could say it “tried”, while moving on to other matters in which it was more invested.

In the most recent episode, the Biden administration signaled its intention to add to Trumps’ wall when the Department of Homeland Security announced it would override 26 federal regulations, including those related to clean air and water and indigenous sovereignty to push forward with the wall. Biden claimed his “hands were tied” because the Trump-era Congress had appropriated money for the wall. But the executive actions of his administration belied that. Biden could have gone to court to overturn the congressional spending mandate, but the administration refused to do that.

Around the same time, it announced it would resume deportations of Venezuelans, thousands of whom have fled to the U.S. seeking relief from the terrible conditions in their country. Only in May did the Biden administration lift the Trump-declared regulation that allowed the U.S. government to deport migrants under a public health emergency. When it lifted the deportation order, it publicly floated the idea of detaining migrant families, a policy Biden denounced when Trump implemented it.

Biden’s policies towards migrants haven’t been a complete copy of Trump’s, but they have started from the premise that migration is a problem that needs to be managed. The administration announced that migrants will be presumed ineligible for asylum unless they have already used the U.S. Border Patrol’s app to request an interview. If they have applied, the administration will issue a “parole” to allow migrants to stay in the U.S. for up to two years while the immigration bureaucracy works on their applications for asylum. The aim seems to be to alleviate pressure at the border and to avoid images of large numbers of migrants appearing on Fox News.

So, we’ve come full circle. The Democrats campaigned against Trump’s cruelty and capitalized on outrage towards his racist policies to win elections in 2018 and 2020. But once in office, the Democrats deliver not the sharp break with these policies their supporters expect, but a “lesser evil” that shaves off the roughest edges, applies some liberal rhetoric, and ends up normalizing the policies it claimed to oppose.

The current crisis represents the coming together of many long-festering problems, many of which can be laid at Washington’s door. The first is what many call the U.S.’s “broken” immigration system. The far right may think it’s broken because it’s too permissive. But the reality is that legal immigration to the U.S. “occurs through an alphabet soup of visa categories, but a small number of pathways,” according to the mainstream Migration Policy Institute. It’s an extremely class-biased and stingy system that allowed a little over a 1 million people to attain legal status last year, many of them after decades of waiting in bureaucratic limbo. In comparison, about 200,000 or more are arriving at the southern U.S. border each month to exercise their right to claim asylum in the U.S.

The decades’-long congressional deadlock over immigration policy has added to the disfunction. There aren’t enough immigration personnel to process applications, which are backlogged in the hundreds of thousands. But since both major parties agree on the necessity of “border security,” the border-industrial carceral complex continues to grow.

Outside of the realm of immigration policy per se, U.S. imperial foreign policy and its inaction on climate change come in for a large share of the blame for the migrant crisis. Since 2020, the U.S. has maintained crippling economic sanctions on Venezuela, exacerbating the country’s economic crisis that has driven much of its middle class to migrate. For decades, the U.S. has supported corrupt and repressive regimes in Central America that served the U.S.’s neoliberal trade and investment agenda. The U.S. claims to want an “Alliance for Prosperity” to raise living standards in Central America, but it pressures each country to increase its “border security” against migrants from other countries who might make their way to the U.S. Despite all of its rhetoric about wanting to improve economic development and “governance,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s message was more to the point, when she told Central American migrants in 2021, “do not come” to the U.S.

However, asylum-seekers arriving in the U.S. don’t cause a “crisis” if the government provides them with the resources they need to settle and find work in the U.S. Juan Gonzalez, author of Harvest of Empire, told Chicago’s WBEZ:

[A]s many Ukrainians roughly have come to the United States in the last couple of years, as have Venezuelans. There is no narrative in the media that the Ukrainians are creating a crisis. Why not? Because the government is quietly integrating them into the society, giving them work permits, giving them social benefits, and they’re in essence melting into the U.S. population. There are more Ukrainians that have come to Chicago in the last year than Venezuelans. But somehow, we see the Venezuelans in the police precincts, we see them in the shelters, we see the government claiming it has no ability to deal with them.

This is not just a racial distinction between white Europeans and brown and Black migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. It’s also primarily a political judgment about the priorities of U.S. foreign policy.

A longer term, but growing, source of global migration is that from “climate refugees” who are forced to leave their regions or homelands as they become unable to support crops, suffer drought, or are subject to catastrophic climate-fueled disasters.

Imperial domination, the legacy of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and now climate disaster lies behind a global wave of migration that has provided right-wing, ethnonationalist politicians and parties across the world with scapegoats for the failures of their own policies. In Europe, anti-migrant politics have fueled the rise of politicians like Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni and Germany’s neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party.

In the U.S., the so-called “nation of immigrants,” the political impact hasn’t been as dramatic—yet. But it’s clear that opposition to immigration and the demographic changes in the U.S. population it implies, animates a significant part of the Republican Party’s “base”. Trump realized that and has ridden that wave since he entered GOP politics in 2015. It’s one reason why plans for “comprehensive immigration reform” have run into Republican opposition, despite the fact that U.S. business has been clamoring for more immigration to address the U.S’s “labor shortage.”

Amidst the growing humanitarian crisis, American politicians have reacted the way they usually do: with complete cynicism and opportunism. Start with right-wing governors of Texas and Florida. Although the huge increase in migrants arriving at the border began in 2020, when the Trump administration was in charge, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his “Operation Lone Star” of further militarizing the border in 2021—coincidentally when the Biden administration took over in Washington. Since, Abbott has poured more than $4 billion in state and federal funds into the project that is now under a Justice Department investigation for violating civil rights.

For all the money spent, Operation Lone Star hasn’t achieved its stated aims of stanching the flow of people and drugs across the border. But it has achieved a political goal that may have been its main purpose to begin with. The Texas government claims to have bused more than 50,000 migrants to “sanctuary cities” in the northern and western U.S.—Washington, DC; Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Denver, to name a few Democrat-controlled cities. This uncoordinated “dumping” of migrants in northern cities has strained their resources and has created a political crisis for supposedly pro-immigrant politicians.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis deceived dozens of migrants to transport them to the wealthy liberal enclave of Martha’s Vineyard earlier this year, liberals scoffed at DeSantis as a “small pathetic man.” While that may be an accurate description of DeSantis, the ploy of sending migrants to other cities has roiled politics in the receiving cities.

The right-wing Democratic mayor of New York, Eric Adams, predictably warned that migrants would “destroy” the city. He has called for budget cuts of up to 15 percent to fund migrant support. In Illinois, whose state government prides itself on “welcoming” immigrants, the city government of Chicago and the governor of Illinois are now locked in a war of words over whose responsibility it is to pay for migrant support. They agreed to point the finger at the White House.

This sort of zero-sum politics, where support for migrants is seen as making other working people sacrifice for them, opens the door to all sorts of reactionary politics. Of course, it’s a given that racists like Abbott and DeSantis, and Trumpets MAGA types like those organizing demonstrations against migrants in New York, would oppose migrants. Even in immigrant communities, right-wing forces are fanning the idea that these migrants are a threat or are getting something for free. In Chicago, plans to house migrants in buildings in historically neglected African-American neighborhoods has brought forth opposition from those who ask why the city hasn’t supported the homeless in those neighborhoods. But these are false choices—especially in a city that has lavished billions in subsidies to high-end developers.

“If we want something to change in our community, it’s not going to change by picking a fight or withholding resources from another oppressed group of people,” community activist Dixon Romeo told The Triibe. “It’s gonna come from us coming together and being very clear on the conditions we deal with and what’s going to lead us out of them. Replicating harmful systems, replicating the zero-sum game of us versus them is not going to empower Black folks it historically never has.”

In Chicago, the liberal administration of Mayor Brandon Johnson recently announced that it had contracted the global security firm GardaWorld to build “base camps” to move migrants from makeshift shelters in city police stations, airports, and shelters. These tent cities are reminiscent of those at the border in places like Texas and Arizona. The hiring of a firm that is credibly linked to a litany of human rights abuses, including the use of child soldiers in Sierra Leone and even helping DeSantis expel migrants from Florida, has opened a rift between Johnson and some of his grassroots supporters.

But at the time of writing, Johnson has not heeded calls to cancel the GardaWorld contract and the administration has instead pledged to hire local people to operate the tent camps, and to have strict oversight over the running of the shelters. If these plans take shape and the Johnson administration succeeds in persuading its allies to accept a fait accompli that’s “better than nothing,” it will have reinforced a “lesser evil” mindset that Canadian migration activist Harsha Walla urges activists to reject.

“If this is something that would’ve outraged us under a different administration, then it has to outrage us in this administration as well,” Walla told author Kelly Hayes. We have learned that lesson under so many different iterations of electeds. We do have to hold them to the same standards, and we do have to articulate our demands on our terms rather than concede our demands based on what electeds are telling us we should want.”