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Joe Biden and “Open Borders”: As If

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The Stature of Liberty. Photo from MaxPixel's free collection.

On February 9, more than 50 Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent President Joe Biden a letter decrying his “open border” policies. Of all the hyperbolic claims I’ve read regarding the Biden administration since Inauguration Day, that one takes the cake. In neither word nor action has the new president come within a country mile of supporting “open borders” in  principle or in policy.

As the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier notes, “Biden has been in office for less than a month. Many people keep saying ‘give him time.’ But what’s concerning isn’t that Biden hasn’t ‘gotten around to immigration yet.’ It’s that he has, and is intentionally choosing to perpetuate one of the worst immigration regimes in American history.”

That’s true of both his early executive orders (yes, he cut off misappropriated funding for Donald Trump’s “border wall” boondoggle, but boondoggles being boondoggles, the wall wasn’t stopping anyone anyway) and the legislative proposal he unveiled on February 18 (he wants a “path to citizenship” and is asking for some visa caps to be raised, but not for immigration freedom).

For the most part, Biden’s just carrying on in the Obama/Trump tradition of gaming immigration to satisfy authoritarians on both the “right” (the “won’t say we’re white nationalists, but you get it” wing of the Republican Party) and the “left” (Democrats beholden, like Biden himself, to the corrupt remnant of what was once a vital, universally pro-worker “organized labor” movement but over time became a protectionist racket).

House Republicans have mistaken a fellow authoritarian “border security” cultist for a pro-freedom activist. And they think that’s a bad thing!

Would you like to know who DID support “open borders?”

The framers of the US Constitution,  in Article I, Section 9 forbade the federal government to regulate immigration for 20 years, after which a constitutional amendment would have been required to create any such federal power (see the Tenth Amendment). It never was so amended, but in 1875 an activist Supreme Court miracled the power up out of whole cloth in Chy Lung v. Freeman.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (some Republicans may remember them) also supported “open borders,” in those words, during the the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. And eight years later, even after mass migrations from Vietnam and Cuba, Reagan still supported “open borders” in his farewell address:

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life …. a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

Immigration freedom has always been an unalloyed social and economic good. When a politician supports anything less, he outs himself as an enemy of both human freedom and economic prosperity.

Republican politicians abandoned “open borders” for Joe Biden’s long-time position. Now they accuse him, essentially, of being a closet Reaganite! It doesn’t get much sillier than that.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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What Happened to “We The People?”

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The White House "We The People" Page Before the Biden administration memory-holed it
The White House “We The People” Page Before the Biden administration memory-holed it

“The will of the people has been heard,” said President Joe Biden in his inaugural address on January 20, “and the will of the people has been heeded.” Later in the speech, Biden told us that “the American story” depends on “‘We the People’ who seek a more perfect union.”

At some point on that same day, Biden’s incoming administration shut down “We The People,” a section of the White House web site launched by the Obama administration.

“We The People” brought the First Amendment’s right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” into the digital age, with the promise of official responses to petitions receiving 100,000 or more signatures within 30 days.

So, why is it gone? As of this writing, I’ve been unable to find any public comment from the administration. They seem to have simply memory-holed “We The People.”

Maybe they’re just working on a site upgrade, but if so one might reasonably expect a placeholder page saying so. Instead, visitors to the site are redirected to the main White House page.

Or maybe the administration considers listening to “We The People” and responding to our concerns an embarrassment and/or a waste of time.

Granted, some past petitions have been a little silly (for example, one urging the US government to build a Star Wars-style Death Star), while others have been embarrassing to the president in power (more than a million signers sought the release of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns).

That last one may be a clue as to the administration’s motives. If Americans have an easy mechanism for demanding a presidential response to our grievances, and if the president doesn’t want to do what we’re asking of him, it puts him on the spot. He can tell us to buzz off, which no president really wants to be heard doing. He can offer a response that says nothing but feels good, or just ignore us, but we’ll notice.

For all his “We the People” guff, Joe Biden seems far more focused on “unity,” by which he seems to mean everyone doing what Joe Biden and his party tell them to do. In this, he’s not unlike his predecessors.

My columns don’t usually include a call to action, but this one’s an exception. I’ve created a petition at Change.org asking the Biden administration to restore “We The People.” I hope you’ll sign it at Change.org/RestoreWeThePeople.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Why I’m Still Not Worried about Biden’s “Gun Control” Proposals

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Gun photo from RGBStock

In a column last November, I dismissed worries that the incoming Biden/Harris administration would — or, rather, could — successfully implement a more aggressive victim disarmament (English for the euphemism “gun control”) agenda than previous administrations.

On Valentine’s Day, Biden cynically exploited the third anniversary of a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, asking Congress to pass laws making it even more difficult for people like the 14 unarmed students and three unarmed educators who were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (while an armed cop on campus hid and failed to defend them) to defend themselves.

I’m still not worried. It’s unlikely that the laws will pass and impossible for them to be enforced if they do.

The proposed laws won’t make people like the Parkland victims any less vulnerable to criminals, but it won’t make them any more vulnerable, either. Government schools are already clearly marked by “Gun Free School Zone” signs as open playgrounds for mass shooters, and have been for decades.

What kind of legislation is Biden asking for?  “Commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.” Let’s take those one at a time.

With more than 400 million guns in the hands of more than 100 million Americans, background checks are silly dramatic flourishes. People who don’t want to submit will simply buy and sell one-on-one, ignoring the requirement. People who really want new guns from shops but who would be forbidden to buy one under existing (unconstitutional) law will have friends, spouses, etc. buy for them.

Actual “assault weapons” — fully automatic weapons — have been (unconstitutionally) banned for general ownership for decades. The current use of the term means “ugly, military-looking versions of standard hunting and sporting weapons which have been in public circulation for more than a century.” As for “high-capacity magazines,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates about 80 million of them in circulation. They can be built or converted with generally available machine tools. The absolute maximum effect of such legislation would be people getting  guns in wood-grain finish instead of black. Big whoop.

And as for “eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” no such gun manufacturers exist (see “assault weapons” above).

The laws Biden wants are stupid and would, thankfully, be ineffectual if passed. But most Republicans and several Democrats would vote against them, making them dead on arrival in the US Senate.

All Biden is accomplishing with his statement is outing himself yet again as someone who’s more than willing to dance in the blood of dead children to score cheap political points.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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