We’re closing: Such is the election message that Joe Biden sent on Tuesday, June 4, on the Mexico border. The president has long blamed the long-running migration crisis on Republican members of Congress, but the president has faced too much criticism on the issue.

By executive order, Biden immediately restricted the right to asylum. The border with Mexico will be closed as soon as the number of illegal entries exceeds an average of 2,500 people per day for one week. Migrants arriving hoping to seek asylum will then be deported without being able to file their application. The right to asylum will be granted once the number goes down to around 1,500.

“The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis,” Biden explained in an address at the White House, “and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here.” The president said he was making this decision “not to walk away from who we are as Americans but to make sure we preserve who we are for future generations to come.”

Even the temporary suspension of the right to asylum marks a political turning point for the US president and party. “Doing nothing is not an option,” said Biden. His administration waited until the presidential election in Mexico, with the unprecedented victory of a female candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, to announce this tightening. Biden promised that the two countries would work together as “equal” partners, and pledged not to separate adults from their children, unlike his predecessor.

“The Trump administration attacked almost every facet of the immigration system, and did so in a shameful and inhumane way,” a senior official told reporters. The main problem with the Biden administration on the immigration issue has not been its permissiveness, but its illegibility, and sometimes contradictory nature. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Biden has been an extremely active president, taking 535 executive orders through mid-January. But the feeling of a large majority of Americans is one of impotence and indecision, as immigration follows inflation in the list of their concerns.

Biden in the thick of it

When he took office, the Democratic president presented an immigration system reform plan, breaking with the era of Trumpist expedients. A familiar failure. For nearly 30 years, successive administrations only acted on operational measures, without overhauling the federal parameters for processing migrants or reviewing the right to asylum. However, in early February, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate, providing for a tougher path to asylum, increased border security, and pre-deportation detention capacity. But, following Trump’s instructions, Republican members of the House of Representatives chose to keep the crisis open rather than offer a winning compromise to Biden in an election year.

You have 65.78% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.