Can Joe Biden bring order to the southern border without Congress?
EVEN BACK when it looked as if the bipartisan border-security bill would get a fair hearing in the Senate, the Biden administration insisted that it was working on a Plan B. Then the bill fell apart, owing to Donald Trump’s desire to deprive Joe Biden of any accomplishments to campaign on, and Plan B became Plan A.
A month on Mr Biden has yet to roll out an executive order for the border—for two reasons. Politically, the border bill’s death revealed just how little congressional Republicans care about governing these days. Their intransigence gives Mr Biden an opening to try to convince voters that the Republican Party are the agents of border chaos. Practically, there is very little the administration can do to restore order at the southern border without money from Congress. Presidents are not powerless when it comes to immigration: Mr Biden’s liberal use of parole proves that. But in reforming the asylum system, the president is constrained by four things: the courts, a lack of cash, international law and Mexico.
Congress has not passed substantive immigration reform since 1990, leaving presidential administrations to govern by executive fiat. The legality of these orders is increasingly challenged in the court system. The Biden administration has reportedly floated two ideas. One is an executive order that would further restrict the ability of migrants to seek asylum if they crossed the border between ports of entry. Yet Mr Biden implemented a version of that last year, and its effectiveness has been limited because of litigation and a gummed-up immigration-court system. The snag is not that crossing between ports is legal (it isn’t), argues Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group. The problem is the inability of immigration courts to process people quickly. It takes more than four years on average just to get an asylum hearing. Staffing…
2024-03-07 09:16:51
Article from www.economist.com