I Blame Eleanor Roosevelt for the Chaos at the Border
It's high time someone knocked her down a peg
The situation at the border is suddenly Biden’s biggest electoral liability. And that’s probably why Democrats are pushing a fix that appears to incorporate a lot of Republican ideas. Trump and the right are trying to scuttle the deal, thus providing a stark example of the Republican penchant for sowing chaos when a Democrat is in the White House. You know how forest fires are sometimes started by a guy who wants to get hired to fight the fire? That’s Trumps strategy. Probably the only thing keeping Trump from making his 2024 slogan “Elect Me Or I Burn This Fucker Down” is that that’s a lot of words to put on a hat.
Of course, Democrats wouldn’t be in this situation if they had admitted earlier on that our asylum policy is flawed. The Biden administration and Congressional Democrats now call the asylum system “broken”, to which I say: duh. “Duh” to you, sirs and madams. The number of people seeking asylum in the US has increased roughly tenfold in the past decade. The backlog of asylum cases is ridiculous. Since our system is in shambles, many aspiring migrants have decided to run this play: Get to American soil, claim asylum, be given a court date so far in the future that you’re more likely to perish in the Clone Wars then you are to get deported, and take your chances from there.
Similar situations are happening all over the developed world. Japan has more refugee applications than ever. Europe is responding to asylum seekers with a mix of open arms, staunch resistance, and dickish hijinks (I’m looking at you, Britain). The system isn’t working. And I think a major contributor to the chaos is a conceptual flaw in how our asylum and refugee1 system was conceived.