OPINION:
With the turn of the calendar and the unofficial start of the 2024 campaign cycle, President Biden took two steps designed to quell the growing furor over his handling of the raging, self-inflicted border crisis.
One was his long-awaited visit to the southern border, where he got a highly sanitized look at a situation that has led the leaders of the host city, El Paso, Texas, to declare a state of emergency. Despite the intense media coverage of the president’s three-hour stopover, the trip was just that: a photo-op. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world will little note, nor long remember, what he did there because he did absolutely nothing of importance.
What he and his administration did three days earlier, however, garnered far less attention but was exponentially more significant. Couched with the grayness of bureaucratic jargon, the White House unveiled what is essentially a parallel immigration system under which the administration plans to admit up to 360,000 otherwise inadmissible aliens every year.
On Jan. 5, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would allow the admission of 30,000 migrants each month from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua (this program was initially created for Venezuelans in late 2022) under an assertion that the president has virtually unlimited power to parole people into the United States. He does not. The statute that grants the president parole power defines clear limits on that authority. It may be exercised only on a temporary, case-by-case basis and only under circumstances where there are “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.”
The DHS program meets none of these criteria. Rather, it establishes an unconstitutional immigration channel for citizens of four nations that will continue in perpetuity for the sole purpose of making it appear that fewer migrants are crashing our borders illegally. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress plenary power to make immigration laws. The executive branch’s role is to implement and enforce immigration laws — a role it has willfully abrogated under this administration.
The scope of this extralegal program is staggering. The 360,000 migrants who will be admitted each year constitute more than one-third of the number of green cards issued annually under our statutory immigration system. When fully up and running, the number of people admitted under the Biden parole program will be more than double the number of employment-based green cards that are issued each year. This is all being done without any authorization from Congress.
Besides being unlawful, the abuse of parole authority also sets a dangerous precedent. The four nations covered by this program were chosen because, at the moment, their citizens constitute the lion’s share of the record numbers of migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally. It will not take long for people in other impoverished and dysfunctional countries to realize that flooding the zone will be rewarded with special privileges. As things go from bad to worse in Brazil — a nation of more than 200 million in our own hemisphere — it is not hard to imagine exponentially larger numbers of Brazilians turning up at the border and the Biden administration claiming ever-expanding license to allow them to enter.
The expressed purpose of our immigration laws is to establish criteria and set limits on the admission of foreign nationals because we recognize that our capacity to successfully absorb immigrants is not infinite. By definition, this means that not everyone who wants to come here will be able to. Furthermore, the argument that this parole program is needed to protect foreign nationals from persecution is false. We have a refugee program that allows 125,000 people a year who apply outside the United States and are vetted, and meet the legally defined criteria to settle here.
The Biden administration created the current border crisis by sending clear signals that our borders are open and that our asylum system can be easily abused (they even created a mobile app to expedite the abuse!). Rather than end the policies that have resulted in over 5 million illegal alien crossings since taking office, the administration is asserting powers it does not have to move 360,000 off the books.
With their newly acquired majority, House Republicans must block this usurpation of Congress’ exclusive authority to make immigration law and halt this illegal expansion of the president’s limited power to admit people under parole. We can be certain that the assertion of presidential authority to admit untold numbers of migrants will not end with the recent announcement.
• Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
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