(ROBERTO SCHMIDT / Photo)
Democrats have spent the past three years accusing their Republican colleagues of exactly what they are doing themselves. Republicans might fall for the occasional silly meme, but it is Democrats who spread massive, worldview-defining Big Lies: systemic racism, the denial of biological sex, the necessity of COVID tyranny — the list goes on and on. Yet their Big Lie on the U.S. Southern border just fell apart in real-time.
For years, the Biden administration has lied and said there is no crisis on America’s southern border. They lied through their teeth, and assured us the border was secure. “The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in an interview in September 2022. “Our approach to managing the borders securely and humanely — even within our fundamentally broken immigration system — is working,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a 2023 statement to Congress.
Yet out of political desperation, Biden reversed course and in one line exposed this lie for exactly what it is. “If you’re serious about the border crisis, pass a bipartisan bill and I will sign it,” he said in a statement regarding the border funding bill, which was killed by Senate Republicans on Wednesday. But Biden cannot take back this admission. We are now operating in a world of admitted crisis; the border is not secure.
He doubled down in a press conference Tuesday. “The American people are going to know why [the bill] failed . . . The voters are going to know. . . just at the moment we were going to secure the border and fund these other programs, Trump and MAGA Republicans said no —because they’re afraid of Donald Trump.”
“Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends,” he reiterated, as forcefully as his frail mind and body could muster.
This is the central point. With immigration becoming voters’ top concern and the widespread view that Biden is untrustworthy to handle the border, the “border crisis” has indeed become undeniable. Democrats could no longer afford not to pivot, so they fell back on their second safest bet: blame Republicans. If they cannot escape voters’ ire on the border, then want to ensure that Republicans at least share in the blame.
The border bill, if passed, would have done just that. Whatever high-profile failures occurred at the border after the bill passed would have been a “bipartisan” outcome. Weak as it was, the crisis would have surely continued, except in a more nebulous form — a generic failure of Washington gridlock, an inability of Congress to take decisive action. Aided by the media, this would have been the best-case scenario for Democrats. Even now, the failed bill still gives Democrats a talking point that they will beat to death until November: “Don’t blame us, we signed onto a solution; it’s Trump who blew it up.”
This is all meant to obscure one simple fact that Democrats cannot ever admit, the real Big Lie at the border that voters truly understood would make the Democratic Party virtually unelectable. The Big Lie is not that the “border is secure;” that’s a mere surface-level conceit meant to hide the ball. The true Big Lie is that Democrats have no interest in securing the border at all, at least in the way normal people traditionally understand it.
What does a “secure” border look like? Well, ideally it’s a border that doesn’t have the unwashed masses of Central America — and really, the entire world — pouring across every day through explicitly illegal means or dubious asylum claims. It means an orderly system where a relatively small number of merited individuals immigrate to the country each year through clearly defined and agreed-upon legal means. Yet the Biden administration’s idea of a “secure” border appropriates the optics of the latter to quietly facilitate the same type and level of immigration under the former.
“Reforms” put forward by the Biden administration thus far have made this clear. The “expansion” of “lawful pathways,” like additional migrant processing facilities abroad that the DHS laid out last year, does nothing to cut down on the overall number of migrants entering the country. It merely streamlines their entry, making the sham asylum process more efficient. The same goes for the new bill: it would make the process marginally more orderly, and less appalling to witness, but still allow in over a million immigrants per year with plenty of loopholes for both the left and Mexican cartels to manipulate. In other words, it’s all about the optics —a bait and switch.
So this all becomes just another way for Democrats to obfuscate their true Big Lie. It doesn’t just give them a tool of attack against Republicans but continues to distract from the truth that Democrats do want millions of migrants coming here each year to live off of government largesse. Biden finally admitted to caring about border security — but it’s only to make the border less secure.
