Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
The House and Senate are both back in session this week. The Senate will continue to vote on and process nominations. House committees will begin marking up bills in earnest this week, with lots of committee action across the board. Undoubtedly there will be some drama on the House floor, as the House will debate and then vote on a bill to reduce inflation.
Speaking of drama, the cable news networks and the pundit class are hand wringing over a “new” asylum rule the Biden Administration is proposing. In order to prepare for the end of Title 42, the Biden Administration is rolling out a package of proposals, including this rule, to try and deal with the crisis on the Southern Border. “Biden to replace Trump migration policy with Trump-esque asylum policy” claims Politico. “Biden administration rolls out new asylum restrictions mirroring Trump-era policy” frets CNN. “Biden Administration Announces New Border Crackdown” exclaims NYT. But as actual immigration experts would warn you, do not believe everything you read on the internet.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the new rule is designed to “incentivize the use of new and existing lawful processes and disincentivize dangerous border crossings, by placing a new condition on asylum eligibility for those who fail to do so.”
Mark Kirkorian writes at the New York Post that “The ‘ban’ won’t apply to illegal immigrants who bring children with them. It won’t apply to anyone who schedules an appointment at the U.S. border through the CBP One app (which is like the OpenTable reservations app, but for people whom the government has no legal right to let into the United States). And you don’t even have to actually schedule an appointment with CBP One if there is a language or technical barrier that’s a “severe obstacle” to using it.”
As former Trump Administration Official Stephen Miller points out, this exception for the rule – as Mark Kirkorian also identifies – not applying to children is “taking record numbers of UAC from the smugglers/cartels & transporting them to pre-selected destinations across the U.S.”
As NumbersUSA, a pro-America immigration organization analyzed, “…this is simply a temporary proposed rule to require scheduling, if possible, for your entry at the border. Here’s a good rule of thumb in measuring the effectiveness of a rebuttable presumption: if you can defeat it by downloading an app on your phone, it is not effective.”
The media would like to have you believe that this will incentivize “legal” immigration, but as the experts have pointed out, this is merely trying to schedule illegal immigration. A return to Trump-era immigration policies would lead to a serious decline from the over 4,400,000 CBP “encounters” at the southern border since Biden was sworn in.
Time will tell whether this has a remarkable reduction in the number of illegal immigrants streaming across our southern border, but many of the experts are dubious.
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One More Thing…
The National Park Service and those in charge of the Cherry Blossom Festival will be announcing when the “peak bloom” will be for the Cherry Blossoms on Wednesday.
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