U.S.–Mexico border, Ariz. (Jonathan McIntosh)
Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times observes that since 2020—after hundreds of executive orders aimed at impeding immigration, a once-in-a-century bout of global travel limitations, and acute-onset economic pains—the foreign-born working-age population in the U.S. has fully recovered. This is an extraordinary thing and yet another demonstration of American exceptionalism: People the world over insist in their conviction that a life in the United States is a dream worth realizing.
The full picture, as usual, isn’t as beautifully unalloyed. The New York Times last week had the scoop:
Over the past two years, more than 250,000 migrant children have come alone to the United States. Thousands of children have ended up in punishing jobs across the country — working overnight in slaughterhouses, replacing roofs, operating machinery in factories — all in violation of child labor laws.
This is unacceptable, shameful stuff, and it doesn’t become us. It’s one thing for antiquated policy to misfire by making migration to the U.S a herculean feat for motivated and capable individuals, but it’s another thing entirely for it to misfire twice: allowing in unattended children (largely due to incapacity but also as a matter of policy) and then abandoning them to the maw of exploitation. You’re wise not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, generally, but in this case and by now, incompetence and malice have coagulated.
Again and again, veteran government staffers and outside contractors told the Health and Human Services Department, including in reports that reached Secretary Xavier Becerra, that children appeared to be at risk. The Labor Department put out news releases noting an increase in child labor. Senior White House aides were shown evidence of exploitation, such as clusters of migrant children who had been found working with industrial equipment or caustic chemicals. . . .
Jallyn Sualog was the most senior career member of the H.H.S. division responsible for unaccompanied migrant children when Mr. Biden took office. She had helped build the program after the passage of the 2008 law and, as a lifelong Democrat, had celebrated Mr. Biden’s win.
But soon, she said, she began to hear reports that children were being released to adults who had lied about their identities, or who planned to exploit them.
She warned her bosses in a 2021 email, “If nothing continues to be done, there will be a catastrophic event.” She continued to email about situations she described as “critical” and “putting children at risk.”
In 2021, Ms. Sualog was removed from her post. This week, White House domestic-policy adviser Susan Rice was removed from hers.
Susan Rice, between her stints in the Obama and Biden administrations, 2019 (LBJ Library / Jay Godwin)
The administration insists that Rice’s dismissal had nothing to do with her knowledge of what has been going on at the border, but the more the administration feels the need to say so—unprompted—the more one suspects otherwise. From the same Times report:
In 2021, as images of children sleeping under foil blankets in overflow centers dominated the news, Susan E. Rice, the White House’s head of domestic policy, told staff members she was frustrated with the situation, according to five people who worked with her. Ms. Rice vented in a note she scribbled on a memo detailing the position of advocates, who believed a pandemic-era border closure was compelling parents to send unaccompanied children, sometimes called U.C.s.
“This is BS,” Ms. Rice wrote, according to a copy of the memo reviewed by The Times. “What is leading to ‘voluntary’ separation is our generosity to UCs!”
Turning children over to adults who claim them only to put them to work isn’t generosity and it isn’t compassion. (The notion of a compassionate government, at any rate and in all cases, is to be taken with swig of doubt.)
Vanity Fair declares that Trump’s and Biden’s border-policy failures are becoming indistinguishable. The comparison cannot stand on its premises. There hardly is a border-security policy to speak of. There’s an incoherent, purposeless patchwork of ad hoc measures (the newest patch among which is 1,500 troops to the border with Mexico) sewn together hurriedly over the past few years by the two administrations.
There may be little agreement among partisans on how U.S. immigration and security policy should look, but we should agree without challenge on the idea that there ought to be an orderly immigration and security policy and—as an unenforced law is no law at all—that the state should play its proper role by fully carrying it out.
Nod in approval of:
The New York Times’ Hannah Dreier, for the aforequoted report and for giving us some reason to keep occasionally glancing at the pages of record, in their decline.
Customs and Border Enforcement officials in McAllen, Texas, who hosted Americans for Prosperity Foundation en route to the southwest border.
Squint skeptically at:
New York City mayor Eric Adams (featured in this section once again), who deduced that “the city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.” The city, bedeviled by chronic mismanagement, has no need for a migrant crisis to encompass its destruction. But the mayor has a point: There’s only so much local authorities can do. The federal government is being negligent of its central duties.
The advocacy group Housing Justice for All, a spokesman for which accused New York governor Kathy Hochul of being “like really conservative” (one could only wish) and concluded that “she does not like immigrants,” and “she really, you know, she’s racist.” Meanwhile, other members of the group charged that the governor is too generous to migrants, depriving native New Yorkers of the subsidized housing to which they’re entitled. All this because Hochul won’t support the humanitarians’ pet project. To think immigrants pure victims or takers is poor reasoning, and to think you know how government ought to intervene to solve the problem is poorer still.