John Derbyshire: If Trump Has Lost—A “Biden Rush” For The U.S. Border?
11/14/2020
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[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

The fog of battle surrounding the November 3rd election has cleared somewhat, but there are still uncertainties about the consequences. Plainly there was much more than the usual amount of skullduggery in the registering and counting of votes, and it all seems to have favored Joe Biden. Whether much of it can be dealt with in the courts; and whether, if it can, the judgments will be enough to swing the result back to Trump; these are open questions.

As best I can predict, we'll be looking at a Joe Biden inauguration in January. It's not certain, and I'm glad the President and his team are fighting for what's right—all strength to them. It's probable, though, and I base my commentary on that.

So what shall we get from Biden administration? One thing we are sure to get is open borders.

As VDARE.com's correspondent Jack Dalton noted on Thursday, a Biden administration will go full-bore Open Borders, jumping to the whips cracked by Cheap-Labor business lobbies and anti-white ethnic grievance activists.

The dribble of reforms and improvements made by the Trump administration's Executive Orders will all be canceled. If we're lucky, the new stretches of border wall will not be dynamited; but no more will be built.

The Biden people are perfectly open about their intentions. CBS News ran a report on Tuesday, presumably sourced from Biden campaign insiders, spelling it all out.

  • The eleven, or twenty, or thirty million non-"DREAMer" illegal aliens living here—nobody really knows the number—will also be given permanent residence, likewise leading to citizenship.
  • There'll be a hundred-day freeze on deportations of illegals.
  • Illegals not targeted by ICE—that is, they are just here illegally but aren't suspected of any other criminality—won't be arrested.
  • The policy of requiring non-Mexican asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are decided will end.
  • The ban on entry from terrorist-friendly nations will end.
  • The Trump administration has negotiated agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras that allow us to send rejected asylum-seekers to those countries to argue their cases. The Biden administration will pull out of those agreements.
  • The Public Charge rules this administration has implemented to deny permanent residence to aliens using, or likely to use, government benefits, will be scrapped.
  • The limits on guest-worker visas imposed this spring will be lifted. In an ongoing pandemic with widespread unemployment, the gates will be opened to cheap foreign workers.
  • There will be huge increases in numbers of so-called "refugees."
  • Aliens given Temporary Protected Status, often decades ago, because of some crisis in their home countries, will not be forced to leave next March, as a court said they should be. "Temporary" will not, after all, mean temporary; it will mean permanent.

[Biden plans sweeping reversal of Trump's immigration agenda, by Meg Kinnard, CBS News, November 11, 2020] And so on.

Biden's victory is very disheartening to those of us at VDARE.com and like-minded groups, who have been toiling away for years—for decades now—to bring the true facts about immigration to public attention, to expose the carefully concocted blend of misty sentimentality and cold cash racketeering that guided the immigration policy of Presidents from LBJ to Barack Obama.

We advocate for a rational immigration policy: one to the advantage of American citizens in general, just as Japan's immigration policy is designed for the advantage of Japanese citizens, just as Israel's immigration policy is designed for the advantage of Israeli citizens. It can be done, as those countries have shown.

Immigration is not some kind of natural force against which resistance is futile, or immoral. It's just a policy, like tax rates, farm price supports, or how many aircraft carriers we need.

Donald Trump was the first President in sixty years who seemed to understand that.

Now, apparently, we're back to sentimentality and racketeering, to the delight of the Koch brothers, the Chamber of Commerce, Silicon Valley billionaires, and the refugee resettlement scammers—but to the further impoverishment of the American middle class.

And while Trump has done much with executive actions and appeals to the courts, we shouldn't let him off the hook for his administration's failures. We've heard a lot about his problems finding staffers who are on board with his policies. Yet when capable, reliable people were available—I'm thinking of Kris Kobach, Steve King, Jeff Sessions—they were discarded and humiliated by Trump, the jobs they should have had given to mediocrities and anti-Trumpers.

Above all, there was that wasted two years when Trump's party controlled Congress. Real immigration reform needs legislation; legislation needs congressional action.

To be sure, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were much more interested in feeding their business-lobby donors with cheap foreign labor and virtue-signaling their anti-racist piety than in enacting Trump's policies; but with energy, determination, and the negotiating skills he boasts of, Trump might have gotten something done. He didn't even try.

The future, however, isn't completely dark. Quote from that CBS report on Biden's plans:

While Mr. Biden's team will have the legal authority to overturn Mr. Trump's policies, Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), said it will not be an easy endeavor, given bureaucratic requirements, the ongoing COVID-19 emergency and the volume of changes implemented over the past four years.

"The Trump administration had an extraordinary preoccupation with immigration issues and they invested an enormous amount of attention and single-minded focus on immigration … An administration that wants to undo those changes would have to devote a similar amount of time and effort."

If the lady is right, Trump's actions on immigration won't all be swept away with a stroke of the pen. Some of them may survive.

And then there's the Biden Rush. American voters may not give immigration the attention it deserves, but elsewhere in the world, interest is very keen. Hundreds of millions of people in crap-hole countries worldwide have been watching this recent election intensely. They believe a Biden administration will throw the borders wide open, and they are packing their bags to make their way to those open borders.

If this develops into a real human tide, as it well might, immigration will be front and center of the national consciousness, with strong public pressure to re-impose controls.

"Numbers are of the essence," said the great British immigration patriot Enoch Powell. Indeed they are; but the sheer stupendous numbers of people who want to come and live in America is the hardest thing to get across to ordinary voters.

With the encouragement of Biden and his people, those numbers may be clearly visible on our TV screens a few months from now … or perhaps in the run-up to the 2022 mid-terms.

This could get interesting.

John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.

For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.

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