Keep Those Nasty Immigrants Out - Biden's Craven Election Year Volte Face

'Let 'em in', said the President to his senior staff on Inauguration Day 2021. 'Diversity is good for America', and with that fell swoop, the doors to all comers on the southern border were thrown open. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  The President had been elected on a rush of good feeling - at last the country would be out from under the yoke of The Demon Of Fleet Street, the bloodletting barber of Washington, the former President, Donald Trump. It was not only Joe Biden who was being inaugurated but  a new era of compassion, ethnic and racial collegiality, and a bright new future. The country would be filled with brown- and black-skinned people seeking a new home and a new life in the land of opportunity. 

 

It turned out to be a bit less of a rosy state of affairs when tens of thousands of free riders crossed the Rio Grande to El Norte where, their cousins had told them, accommodation in four-star hotels, all expenses paid, and the finest amenities awaited them. 

The Border Patrol was incidental as all conditions, codicils, and caveat were lifted by presidential order.  A few bad apples might be rolling around loose in the bottom of the freedom busses headed north, but how rotten could they be? All in all, the waves of immigration would flood the land with deserving people, eager for a chance to live life as it should be led, not in the abject poverty forced on them by corrupt political regimes. 

Of course this was all nonsense.  Immigrants from the worst, rat-infested, drug-running, pestilential slums, ex-combatants from bloody civil wars, gang-bangers from Managua and San Salvadoran slums, on-the-run Amazon terrorists from Brazil, crooked Argentinian Bernie Madoffs, and Quechua Indian thugs all came running. The Biden policy was the best thing that ever happened to wannabee wetbacks who could now cross over without fear of La Migra.  It was a free lunch with all the fixin's. 

The mayors of sanctuary cities called foul.  We never intended to be everybody's soup kitchen. Compassion has its limits.  Few New Yorkers wanted to house Mara Salvatrucha gang members, and when tacos, beans, and rice were elbowing out pastrami, lox, barley soup, and onion rolls, enough was enough.

The economy showed some upward blips - fast food chains had a limitless supply of cheap labor, and upscale neighborhoods saw prices drop for nannies, leaf-blowers, and house-painters - but the cost of housing the undocumented thousands far exceeded the minor economic boon to the service industry. 

Then came the election year, and the President was hurried to the border.  The American people, in a shameful display of retrograde right wing behavior was turning its back on the needy, the desperate, and the hopeless, and they needed their president now.  Even dyed in the wool Upper West Side Jewish liberals were having second thoughts. They now wanted no more brown-skinned freeloaders in their necks of the woods. 

'We love you', the President said, waving his arms in an air-kiss gesture from El Paso across the Rio Grande to the Latino homeland.  His closing of the border was only temporary to give time to prepare more properly for new arrivals.  It had nothing to do with tacos or enchiladas, but logistical order.  

'You will always be welcome here', the President went on, 'today, tomorrow, and forever'; but nonetheless the border doors once again clanged shut, KEEP OUT! signs replaced rainbow ones, and Dobermans and Pit Bulls patrolled the lines in place of Labs and Portuguese Water Dogs. 'We mean business', the President said, 'but not necessarily you'. 

 

Politics is a venal business in the best of times.  Promises are made and never kept, assurances go by the wayside, and good intentions are left on the curb; but this volte face, this complete turnabout in policy was stretching the limits of disbelief.  Was the most enthusiastic, committed supporter of open immigration now ready to turn the Pit Bulls on the crowd? let them founder and drown, turned back by jackbooted American storm troopers? 

Anything to get re-elected; anything to turn the tide and to reverse abysmal poll numbers; yet this time the American electorate was not falling for such bald election year tomfoolery.  The man is nuts, more and more Americans were saying.  Time for the old coot to go. 

Biden's handlers knew that spinning the border reversal would be a challenge, but after all, 'temporary restraining orders' were well known to abusive husbands and stalkers, and so in play here.  Good people in need of some vetting, they said, sifting the best and the brightest from the chaff, finding the diamonds in the rough.  

The Vice President, named by the President to be his chief interlocutor and Border advisor on immigration policy cackled her way to a park bench while she dithered and demurred; but his advisors thought that now was her time.  A Biden re-election meant an automatic Harris presidency no more than a year into office, so all the more reason to tout her credentials.  

"I am one of you", the Vice President said to that invisible caravan coming north to the border.  "I am a woman of color, child of immigrants, a person on the march, a doer, a shaker, and an American of the people".  Here she spread her arms in an airy embrace of all those comers, still in the Sonoran desert but soon to arrive. 'Solidarity! Solidarity! Solidarity', she shouted, laughing, smiling, and nodding.  "La lucha continua" and with that she was shuttled off stage and back into the anteroom of power 'where she belongs' said one advisor, suspicious and disbelieving of her airhead performances and disingenuous people talk. 

So the Kammy and Joe Show lit up the lights for a while until he stumbled and she veered and wandered into some melancholy, diverse landscape.  'Get them both out of sight', another handler suggested with more vim than ever before; but like battery-powered toys they kept on talking, making no sense, fooling no one, and paving way for a second Trump presidency 

"They are not immigrants", said the President.  "They are already Americans in hope and spirit, and we welcome them....although not right now and not immediately, but certainly" and before those last words had drifted off into the soft Texas breeze, the election was lost.  The doddering old fool was history.