I’m guessing some of you expected us to be overrun by now.
That our once prosperous nation would have been reduced to a torn and twisted debris field after a hurricane of migrants blew across our southern border, flooding our cities, drowning our democracy.
This is what some predicted with the elimination of Title 42.
But … it has not happened.
At all.
Title 42 was never immigration policy
The migration restraints of Title 42 are part of a 1944 public health law that allows us to immediately toss migrants back across the border, no matter their reason for crossing, in order to protect public health.
It was never meant to be an immigration policy.
What I saw at the border after Title 42:At border, I met mothers who asked US for help. Biden is sending them back to danger.
Former President Donald Trump implemented it and the policy carried over into President Joe Biden’s term, with him promising to end it.
That happened on May 11.
Trump and his minions predicted that doing so would end life as we know it.
Trump and Biggs predict the apocalypse
On CNN Trump said terminating Title 42 restrictions at the border would be “a day of infamy” and that the Democrats who agreed with Biden and allowed the program to expire were “destroying our country.”
Arizona’s own Republican Chicken Little, Rep. Andy Biggs, a merchant of doom for anything not MAGA, went even further.
What if Trump was right on immigration?Republican border policies have been so successful, Democrats are adopting them
Joe Biden is definitely going to prison!As soon as the GOP finds its missing informant.
Speaking to the right-wing conspiracy peddler Steve Bannon, Biggs said, “I just got off the phone with a county supervisor from my state, sits right on the border.
“They just had a briefing with the sector chiefs from San Diego through Yuma to Tucson, and they are told that there’s between 700,000 and a million people massing south of the border that when Title 42 goes away, the cartels have planned to overwhelm the system.”
Instead, according to Blas Nuñez Neto, the Department of Homeland Security’s top immigration policy official, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded fewer than 4,000 migrant apprehensions in the first couple of days after Title 42 expired, a 60% decrease from the record daily border crossings before May 11.
Fear mongering doesn’t help border towns
Will that change? Yes.
Get worse? Probably.
But it’s not the end of the world.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “We have been planning for this transition for months and months. It is too early. But the numbers that we have experienced over the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42.”
What he’s saying, essentially, is what every politician should be saying: That we need to wait and see, and keep working at it. That there is no quick fix to our border problem.
What solves nothing, however, is cheap political fear mongering.
Like when Rep. Biggs told Bannon that ending Title 42 “will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen” and that border patrol officials were telling border residents, “I’m sorry. You’re screwed.”
With politicians like that, yeah, we are.
EJ Montini is a news columnist at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, where this column first ran. Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.
