Biden’s Open Border

Willem van Spronsen, who died in 2019 while attacking a migrant detention facility.

1,603 words

Todd Bensman
Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History
New York & Nashville: Post Hill Press, 2023

Many on the Left, especially liberals, are bedazzled by men who commit violence in the name of Left-wing social theories. One such man was a Dutch immigrant to the United States named Willem van Spronsen. Van Spronsen attacked an illegal immigrant detention facility in Tacoma, Washington on July 13, 2019 with Molotov cocktails and an AR-15 rifle — but not, as one might assume, as a protest against illegal migration. Rather, he believed he was saving the migrants from the immigration officials, who were “Nazis,” as well as Trump, who was “literally Hitler.” Fortunately, no one was injured apart from von Spronsen himself, who was shot and killed by responding police.

The attack was terrorism, pure and simple, but it was celebrated by many on the Left at the time, including Shaun King. After President Kennedy was assassinated by a radical Left-wing gunman, liberals didn’t reject the beliefs that had motivated his killer; rather, they started to wear Che Guevara t-shirts and read up on Maoism. Van Spronsen was attempting to inspire liberals in the same way. After his attack, pro-immigration liberals abandoned all their earlier positions on immigration enforcement and decided that all enforcement of restrictions was wrong. In his book Overrun, Todd Bensman writes:

It almost seemed as though van Spronsen had not died in vain. Democratic pollsters and strategists were repackaging antifa and BLM street graffiti, placard slogans, mob chant lines, and dark world visions for the Democratic Party debate stage, televised globally. They also filled a dozen presidential campaign websites, appeared on all the Sunday news shows, and informed the party’s official 2020 platform. (p. 99)

But the devil is in the details — in this case policy details, including legal loopholes that Third World migrants are adept at discovering. Bensman describes the various policy details which helped fuel the border rush.

One such relevant policy allows for claims of “asylum.” Such a request means that any foreign person can come to the United States and claim that they are being oppressed in their homeland. The United States government is then obligated by various laws and international agreements to hear the case. Then there is the “Flores loophole.” In 2015, a liberal judge named Dolly Gee ruled that illegal migrants with children had to be released from detention within 20 days. This may sound reasonable, but it is impossible for officials to validate an asylum claim in such a short period of time. As a result, any immigrant with children can come to the US, claim asylum, get released after 20 days, and never leave the US — even though his asylum claims were bogus in the first place.

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Every legal ruling, change in regulation, or change in policy is soon discovered by would-be migrants and exploited. When “migrant caravans” first became an issue in the United States, the Mexican government was compelled to stop them. The caravans then simply broke up into smaller groups and continued to head north without any opposition from the Mexican government. Asylum-seekers also have a tendency to suddenly uncover “repressed memories” of oppression they experienced at home if they realize they had initially failed to mention this during their processing.

Another source of America’s immigration problem is a constellation of far-Left “faith based” charities and non-government organizations that are able to secure funding by resettling refugees and managing immigrants. During the Clinton administration, these agencies received little government backing. President Clinton in fact carried out many pro-white policies that went unrecognized at the time, one of which was criminalizing illegal border crossings and denying social services to those who did so.

Clinton’s reforms were completely reasonable, but the far Left and their ranks of charities and NGOs are motivated by an insatiable alienation from everything beautiful or natural. They don’t want a solid border or an orderly society. Far-left progressives thus embarked on a metapolitical campaign to push their semi-theological vision  upon all of American society starting in 1996. After the failure of amnesty in 2007, they then created an entirely new language of immigration which sought to erase borders altogether. Bensman writes:

New encrypted synonyms described radical ideas to eliminate detention and deportation; “humane,” “fair,” dignified,” and “compassionate treatment” meant free flow over borders. Conversely, “cruel,” “inhumane,” and “racist” became synonyms for any immigration law enforcement and deterrence policy at all. With the new double entendre words, candidates could dog-whistle to far-left constituencies in the tribal moral community that they sympathized with the new ideas at little to no risk of causing regular voters to recoil in alarm. (p. 103)

There was real money behind this wordsmithing. Between 2002 and 2020 various foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, invested more than $400 million in messaging to promote the idea that any immigration enforcement is a crime against “civil rights.”

Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 infused the far Left with even greater energy. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was also a factor. Sanders had held reasonable views on immigration for most of his career — he rightly saw immigration as capital working against labor — but after Trump’s victory, he began to change his tune as his base of supporters became convinced that they had to protect America from “Nazis.” Trump’s immigration policies were the perfect target.

Then, after Biden usurped the presidency, the border rush began. This was fueled by the desire of the Mexican government, as well as that of the people of northern Mexico, to get migrants off their hands. Trump’s immigration policies had led to the establishment of large migrant camps along the border which the Mexicans had to police and feed. After Trump left office, the Mexican government passed a law similar to the Flores loophole in secret, knowing that the detained migrants would then head north:

Mexico would never have tried tossing that hot potato at Trump. As president, Trump had proven willing to economically thrash longstanding allies to achieve a range of wants, from forcing Europeans to pay back balances on the cost of NATO to slapping tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports. The Mexicans saw Trump’s threats of imposing debilitating tariffs on Mexican exports as entirely credible. As a result, they accepted his expulsions to avoid economic ruin. But Joe Biden? The full story is not known but the Mexicans must have reasoned that Biden was a more docile sort or a very willing victim of the intrigue. (p. 173)

Many of the migrants from Central America are not motivated by political repression or economic hardship, but rather want to make US dollars which can then use to improve their lives back at home. This form of migration does not in fact contribute to the Great Replacement, as it instead brings wealth to Central America — and in fact could ultimately reduce migration. This reality is something which white advocates should consider harnessing to the benefit of both North and Central America.

But the biggest migration problem in the Western hemisphere is not in fact Mexican or Central American workers, but Haitians. A large Haitian migrant camp was established in Del Rio, Texas during the border rush. The Biden regime was forced to act due to the bad publicity they were receiving as a result of maintaining it, as well as the usual social pathologies the Haitians brought with them. The Department of Homeland Security finally closed the camp and deported some of the Haitians in September 2021 (some 12,000 were allowed to remain in the US pending review of their asylum claims). Many of them hadn’t gotten to Del Rio directly from Haiti, but had been working in the First World country of Chile, a white nation, before making their run to the US. The Haitians rioted when the realized they were being returned to Haiti instead of Chile.

This story is a perfect example of the Biden regime’s failure to deal with known, preventable problems. The best approach would have been not to allow such a migrant flow to develop in the first place. In the end, this failure led larger consequences as well. To facilitate deporting the Haitians back to their homeland, for example, the Biden regime gave its support to an autocrat, Areil Henry, who became President in July 2021 and is suspected of having been complicit in his predecessor’s assassination.

The 2021 deportation of the Haitians reflected a shift in the Biden White House. Reasonable Democrats came to realize that the border crisis was real and required a new policy. Other deportations and crackdowns followed, but not a genuine resolution of the problem. Texas Governor Greg Abbott took matters into his own hands by making things tougher for drug smugglers and human traffickers at the border by holding up Mexican trucks for inspections. This resulted in huge backups. He ended the policy when the Mexican government agreed to take migrants back and promised to make more effort to stop drugs and migrants from entering the US. While positive, this is a job that the US federal government needs to be doing.

There are several strategies to regain control over our border. The first is to defeat the theology of open borders. Get those who believe in it out of power. Then, America needs to completely overhaul its asylum laws, including withdrawing from the United Nations Convention Related to the Status of Refugees. Americans must close all immigration loopholes and lean on America’s allies in Central America and Colombia to cease their policy of “controlled flows” of migrants that pass through their countries headed north. And finally, immigration law must be consistently enforced.

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