The end of Title 42 migration controls on Thursday, the 11th of May will unleash the ‘Merkel Madness’ of the 2015-16 migrant crisis on the United States. Despite this self-evident disaster at the U.S. border, President Joe Biden appears unwilling to do anything that would curtail what many are openly describing as an “invasion” with drastic consequences.
Invoked by then-President Donald Trump under public health legislation dating back to the 1940s at the onset of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, Title 42 expulsions have been the primary means by which asylum seekers – an astonishing three million of them – have been kept out of the U.S. while any genuine claims were assessed.
Biden, despite running on a platform of engineering a “surge” of asylum seekers at the border while seeking the Democratic nomination for 2020, initially maintained and even expanded the Title 42 regime. Yet, he moved to dismantle America’s border protections in 2022.
Republican-led states have fought successful rearguard legal actions against this effort to open the floodgates ever since, but now they are out of time, with the controls due to naturally expire on May 11th, and a proverbial dam poised to burst and completely overwhelm the southern border.
Officials in Arizona claim to have seen Border Patrol intelligence indicating that that there “are approximately 700,000 [migrants] in the shelters in Mexico waiting to come into the United States” once Title 42 is allowed to expire. El Paso alone faces some 12,000 to 35,000 migrants waiting across the Rio Grande to descend on the city, with Mayor Oscar Leeser lamenting: “There is no light at the end of the tunnel.”
Even the likes of CNN say federal government sources are telling them of “more than 150,000 migrants… waiting in shelters and streets in northern Mexican states”.
Some of these migrants are not waiting for the starting to gun to fire, with up to 150 being found crammed onto just one train that had crossed the border into Texas on May 5th.
The speed and scale of the impending influx is such that it will likely come to define the Biden administration and redefine the 2024 presidential race – in much the same way as the 2015-16 migrant crisis came to define the Angela Merkel administration in Germany, and transformed the political landscape of the European Union at large.
Joe Biden stood on a debate stage and said he would encourage a MASSIVE border surge. And here we are. pic.twitter.com/NXaPbn8dYh
— Raheem. (@RaheemKassam) May 8, 2023
American Merkel.
Just as Biden pledged to “immediately surge to the border all those people who are seeking asylum” as he sought the 2020 nomination, Merkel, who won admirers on the right by declaring that multiculturalism had “utterly failed” in 2010, pledged “no limits” on the number of asylum seekers Germany would attempt to absorb in 2015.
With her country lying at the heart of the European Union, the result was that migrants from Syria but also the wider Middle East, Africa, and Asia stormed into the bloc by the hundreds of thousands, chiefly via small boats launched from Turkey for the islands of Greece, an EU border state.
From there, they crossed to the Greek mainland marched north in massed, military-style columns – providing fodder for a poster campaign that would help to secure the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom – with some of the radical Islamic terrorists who would go on to murder dozens in Paris, France hiding among them.
Not all of them reached Germany or other northerly welfare states, however, for as leftist politicians in American states far from the southern border, such as New York, often sour on open borders once the incomers begin arriving on their doorsteps, so did the Germans attempt to turn off the spigot after being overwhelmed by around a million “New Europeans”.
This left many EU member-states stuck with huge numbers of migrants they never asked for who had been en route to Germany when its policy changed, radically transforming demographics and destroying the tourism industry on many Greek islands and creating huge, ongoing tensions between Germany and its allies and conservative-led states like Poland and Hungary.
Both countries, along with near-neighbors such as Czechia and Slovakia, openly defied efforts by the European Union to clean up the mess Merkel created by enforcing the compulsory redistribution of migrants across the bloc, opening still-festering wounds in its body politic.
Even with Title 42 still in force, America’s simmering border crisis is already opening similar fissures between the Republic’s states, with conservative-led border states facilitating the transportation of large numbers of migrants to left-led states – and those left-led states are proving less enthusiastic than might be expected about these movements, given their pro-migration rhetoric.
Whether these fissures will widen into chasms once the “Bidenvasion” begins in earnest from May 11th remains to be seen.