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President Joe Biden’s evolution on the key election issue of immigration entered a new phase when he promised to “shut down the border right now” if given new powers by Congress.
The deeper policy context of the comments, delivered at a campaign event in South Carolina Saturday and in a statement from the White House on Friday, is that Biden wants to resuscitate a bipartisan deal to pair new border powers with additional military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
But the Trump-like rhetoric from the Democratic president – and the fact that Democrats are not even talking about a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently in the country – is also an important political admission as immigration-focused Donald Trump zeroes in on the Republican presidential nomination and the border crisis reverberates through the country and into Washington, DC.
Biden is willing to offer concessions so he can make deals, and Trump wants to keep this as a campaign issue.
“As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible, open-borders betrayal of America,” Trump said in Nevada on Saturday, although future Republican presidents would also benefit from the new power Biden is seeking.
Trump doesn’t think the president needs new power to shut the border. He has promised that, if elected, he will act as “dictator for one day” to do it, and he’s actively working against the bipartisan effort even though parts of it are straight out of his policy playbook.
“The reality is that this includes many provisions that when Donald Trump was president, he hoped would be made into law,” said CNN’s Lauren Fox, appearing Monday on “Inside Politics.” These Trump-friendly priorities,…
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