(Coleman Hopkins, Headline USA) Former President Barack Obama slammed the current Biden administration’s failure to secure the US–Mexico border, calling the current open-borders crisis “unsustainable” as crossings hit their highest level in at least two decades.
In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, Obama appeared to undermine the present policy, saying that while the situation along the border was “heartbreaking,” those trying to enter into the US “don’t have this right yet.”
A porous border is a problem on its own, but heightened concerns over the coronavirus pandemic and Middle Eastern terrorism from groups like the newly resurgent ISIS have only exacerbated the problem as President Joe Biden’s leadership failures compound atop one another.
Despite his own past track-record with failing to uphold existing immigration law, Obama emphasized the need for “comprehensive immigration reform” to address what has proved to be an enduring issue.
That likely signaled his support for another amnesty push as congressional Democrats seek to slip into pending budget legislation a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents including so-called “Dreamers,” agricultural workers and those with special immigrant visas like many recent Afghan refugees.
On Thursday, the Senate parliamentarian dashed hopes that the measures might be passed using the budget-reconciliation process to avoid bipartisan consensus.
Nonetheless, Democrats are likely to remain steadfast in their effort to convert the illegals already admitted into the country through their own negligence into full-fledged, voting citizens.
At the same time, however, Obama seemed to break with the current Democrat party line in supporting stronger security measures and reaffirming America’s sovereign right to determine who enters into the country.
“We’re a nation-state,” he told Good Morning America. “We have borders. … The idea that we can just have open borders is something that … as a practical matter, is unsustainable.”
Obama’s blunt talk on immigration is perhaps the latest sign that a growing number of Democrats are not wholly comfortable with the Biden administration’s capitulation to radical leftist policies.
Whether this discomfort arises from sincere policy differences, political opportunism or concern over the looming 2022 midterm elections is unclear.
While allowing the border fiasco to continue unabated may pose its own political peril for Democrats, many must also walk a delicate line to avoid the appearance that they are now doubling back to former President Donald Trump’s successful handling of the crisis.
One of Trump’s signature achievements in office was resolving many of the problems along the southern border by leveraging US resources to force compliance from the leaders of countries that immigrants both left behind and traveled through.
By contrast, the Biden–Harris policy has allowed the “carrots” to remain in place, funneling substantial US tax dollars into helping develop commerce and infrastructure in Central America’s Northern Triangle, while taking away the “sticks.”
It is less than a year into President Biden’s presidency, and it appears immigration could be a crisis that the new administration is not fit to handle—at least if its goal is to abandon every solution that the previous administration implemented.
