No. of Recommendations: 12
The article stated that Biden ran on ending Title 42. That is the point being made and is evidence that Biden is soft on the border. Despite his defenders trying to convince us of his hawkishness.
I don't think anyone's trying to convince you that he's an immigration hawk - just that the caricature of him being in favor of open borders and being 100% in favor of wide open entry is false. He's no Tom Tancredo. But being an old-time Democrat, and being from the Labor side of the party all those years back, he's going to be well to the conservative side within the Democratic caucus, and definitely wants to solve the current critical problems to lower the temperature on the issue.
As we've discussed before, modern political parties are coalitions. The Democrats definitely have a faction within the party that favors immigration liberalization - but it's not an especially large or powerful one. It's large enough to crater immigration deals (just like the House Freedom Caucus can crater almost any legislation they want), but it's not large enough to actually get any immigration policy enacted. Which is why immigration reform never gets prioritized when Democrats have the trifecta, why Obama ended up being the "Deporter in Chief," and why the DREAMERs still don't have any formalized legal status. In terms of political priorities, Biden favors Labor, the Greens and the Black vote within the coalition - not the immigration advocates.
Which is why Biden's been trying to fix this terrible political problem, and has been telling the immigrant faction within the party to pound sand. He's already tried to re-adopt the "First Safe Country" administrative rule that Trump tried (and was voided by the courts) - even though the advocate community hates that policy. As has been pointed out a few times, deportations are much higher under Biden than Trump - even though that's certainly going to get him a "Deporter in Chief" label like Obama. And he's basically told the immigrant faction to eat dirt in the negotiations with the GOP for the border bill - he's planning on trading away immigration policies that the GOP wants in exchange for nothing on immigration, just Ukraine funding. Which is literally a disaster for immigration advocates within the party.
So, again, he's no Trump or Tancredo or Buchanan (oh, the irony of those last two) on immigration - but neither is he the caricature that conservatives have constructed of him.
