SAUNDERS: Biden urged oppressed to cross border. Now there are caravans.

WASHINGTON — Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. You just might get it.

During a Democratic primary debate in 2019, Joe Biden said that if he were elected president, he would invite migrants seeking asylum to surge at the border. “If you want to flee and you are fleeing oppression, then come.”

Many saw it as an invitation for those who want to live in America to flout federal immigration law. Because it was.

On Monday, nearly four years after Biden made that statement, his Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, stood before reporters in Eagle Pass, Texas, where illegal border crossings have hit record numbers. There were nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters along the border with Mexico in fiscal year 2023. In December, there were some 302,000 encounters.

According to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, 45 percent of Americans consider the situation at the Southwest border a crisis, while 30 percent see it as “very serious.” An understanding public is watching cable TV and getting nervous.

Mayorkas blamed a “broken system,” not his department’s failure to enforce federal law. “Congress has failed to act,” he said.

The Biden White House loves to blame House Republicans when it can’t get a job done. But Democrats failed to pass so-called comprehensive immigration reform in 2021, when Democrats controlled the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.

When a reporter challenged Mayorkas by noting it was “easy” to enter the United States illegally, Mayorkas bristled. Those who cross the border and encounter immigration authorities, Mayorkas offered, are “released into immigration enforcement proceedings.”

“He comes up with these euphemisms to make it sound like it’s some kind of legal process,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, responded. But if the legal process were serious, you wouldn’t see caravans heading to Eagle Pass.

“No one has found a way to make them enforce the law,” Vaughan said of the political class. “They know they can get away with it for another year. There’s no reason for them to stop.”

There’s clearly a difference of opinion here. Vaughan sees a blob that doesn’t want to enforce the law; Mayorkas attributed the mass of migrants at the border to a world that is experiencing “an unprecedented number of displaced people fleeing poverty, authoritarian regimes, homes destroyed by extreme weather events, corruption and violence.”

While Mexico used to be the most common country of origin, the Pew Research Center reported, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico dropped by 900,000 — to 4.1 million — from 2017 to 2021. The new waves are coming from Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. The family ties that spurred illegal immigration in the past aren’t there.

“Not everyone is a taxi driver from Turkey,” Vaughan noted. “There are people who are coming here for dangerous reasons.”

I want to be very clear about this. Most immigrants who come here are motivated by a desire for a better life and a safe place to raise a family.

Back in 2019, were they all, as Biden suggested, “fleeing oppression”? No. And he knew it. But he also knew he had to soft-pedal his open-door inclinations. And this is the result.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.