In the Biden White House, illegal immigration is simply politics: The politics of broader electoral viability, the politics of future voting demographics, the politics of appeasing the base, and most recently, the politics of retribution. This latest phase entered the scene this week, with the administration’s reported plan to force the millions of illegal immigrants streaming over the border to remain in Texas.
But the politics goes back to the beginning when the former vice president was sharing a debate stage with the next generation of Democrat leaders. His old boss had put a boil under the long-simmering issue with his extra-congressional amnesty for “dreamers.” President Barack Obama empowered radical immigration activists who would eventually shout him down in his own White House — and push the party’s national slate hard to the left. By the time of the 2020 primaries, Joe Biden alone stood against all of their wildest reforms, including decriminalizing illegal crossings and abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Though he was old, noticeably slowing down, and had been repeatedly passed over by President Barack Obama and the rest of the poobahs, party leadership knew they needed to play on more centrist positions to compete in the general election. Aged and unwanted would take a backseat to hard power: Joe Biden was their man.
Of course, expanding third-world immigration had long been part of the Democrats’ plan. Decades before Tucker Carlson was excoriated for pointing it out, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s smash book, The Emerging Democratic
