The New York Times is running an article, “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration”
It’s one of those articles that tells the story of the Covid and post-Covid immigration surge at U.S. borders and how the former-president Biden administration was late to stop it. As usual, the article contains a battological section about how Biden was old and couldn’t talk well.
A glaringly unexplained sentence in the article was, “Aides stressed that the Biden administration faced a steep challenge addressing a border crisis while adhering to outdated immigration laws.” Indeed, there was a “steep challenge” from large immigration surges. During the period, I spoke with NGO (Non-governmental organizations) leaders who were despairing over the huge number of non-citizen asylum seekers showing up and needing assistance every day.
The phrase in the sentence, “outdated immigration laws,” went undefined and unexplained. The immigration laws the author, Christopher Flavelle, is referring to, I assume, means laws that allow people fleeing persecution based on at least one in five nexuses, their race, religion, nationality (ethnicity!), political opinion, or social groups to receive protection in the United States. Post-World War II there obviously was a sense of generosity to refugees (people with a well-founded fear of persecution on account of those five bases). It was this generosity that I suppose is the “outdated” law. With the United States now cutting health benefits, food aid, foreign aid, academic freedom and research, and imposing a standing army on its citizens in a fake wartime, generosity most certainly appears to be an outdated concept.
If that is what the article’s writer, Christopher Flavelle, meant, the point is well taken. President Biden misjudged human nature. In general, people are generous up to when it impacts them. When charity solicitors tell us to “give until it hurts,” they’re joking. Find me someone who gives until it hurts and I’ll show you someone who likely has had a feature article written about them because of their oddity. We are all in favor of protecting refugees as long as they don’t strain resources of change the complexion of our communities.
The article seems to say (again, we are left reading between the lines) that Biden should have just shut down the border and damn the retched refuse (ok, huddled masses) and not seek means to stem the flow without abandoning those pesky, “outdated,” protections for refugees. As Michael Scott would have put it, “To President Biden, the ends did not justify the mean.”
In my view, it was not President Biden’s challenges with the refugee surge that were his big immigration failure – it was everything else. Immigration law is controlled by three Department of Homeland Security bureaus, USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and CBP (Customs and Border Protection). The Justice Department controls the immigration court system, The failures of these departments and bureaus was the real Biden failure. After the first Trump term, Biden reversed some of the Trump policies that caused hardships to non-citizens like onerous financial paperwork that accomplished little and some racist bars to admission. However, the organizations did not resolve their issues of efficiency and fairness. It seems that at every turn, fears of accusations of not fighting fraud or not adequately vetting non-citizens stopped the organizations from improving their performance. Wait times for benefit adjudication grew, leaving many in years-long limbo with many families separated and employers in the lurch. Some benefit applications were purposely allowed to sit untouched for decades. USCIS explains some of these decades-long processing times, “This processing time reflects statutory constraints on available immigrant visas, for which the wait times are typically much longer than the time it takes for USCIS to adjudicate the form. USCIS service centers prioritize the processing of Form I-130 preference petitions for which an immigrant visa is available according to the Department of State Visa Bulletin.” While USCIS increased liaison activities under Biden – meeting with its customers’ agents (attorneys, NGO’s) – actual case assistance remained languid. We would meet with very kind, well-meaning senior bureaucrats unable to move cases faster and fairer, but appearing to at least feel our pain.
To reduce backlogs in the immigration court system, courts and ICE prosecutors were encouraged to close low-priority cases. Nonetheless, ICE and CBP remained largely hostile to immigrants and unapproachable by stakeholders. The older immigration-lawyer practice of vainly gathering useful phone numbers to reach immigration authorities in devices called Rolodexes, meaning that the call would actually be answered, morphed into vainly seeking emails that would be answered. What we are seeing on the streets from ICE and CBP nowadays is not new in kind from the Biden years, just in magnitude.
Most disappointing, the asylum system got worse under Biden. Instead of figuring out how to get cases decided faster to reduce decade-long backlogs, the adjudication process bogged down worse. Asylum office denials were for inane reasons and the shabby treatment of applicants (hours-long waits to be interviewed on appointment day) the norm. The asylum program’s concern for its integrity has resulted in a program with no integrity at all. If some political scientist or sociologist is looking for the great article or book subject on par with “The Silent Spring,” or “Unsafe at Any Speed,” it would be a study of the United States asylum system. Though nothing done to non-citizens seems unfair enough to shock the collective conscious, this subject at least stands a chance.
The Biden administration is condemned by the New York Times and, apparently, the electorate, for blowing its refugee policy by trying to have one. What it deserves to be condemned for is blowing the rest of its immigration functions. For all the caution the Biden administration used in vetting cases, resulting in abysmal customer service, it did not insulate itself from accusations of laxness as if vetting could protect against every last lunatic. The lesson: If you are going to be blamed for whatever you do, do the right thing. Posted December 7, 2025.