Biden's diplomacy shift on immigration

Migrant families force Biden to confront new border crisis

President Biden’s first immigration crisis has already begun as thousands of families have surged toward the southwestern border in recent weeks, propelled by expectations of a friendlier reception and by a change in Mexican policy that makes it harder for the United States to expel some of the migrants.

More than 1,000 people who had been detained after crossing have been released into the country in recent days in a swift reversal from the Trump administration’s near shutdown of the border. Many more people are gathering on the Mexican side, aggravating conditions there and testing America’s ability and willingness to admit migrants during a pandemic.

New families every day have been collecting in Mexican border towns, sleeping in the streets, under bridges and in dry ditches, according to lawyers and aid groups working along the border. On Thursday in Mexicali, across from Calexico, Calif., desperate migrants could be seen trying to scale a border fence. A migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, just across a bridge from Texas, has boomed to 1,000 people over the past few weeks.

To guard against the coronavirus, health authorities in San Diego have arranged housing for hundreds of arriving migrants in a downtown high-rise hotel, where they are being quarantined before being allowed to join family or friends in the interior of the United States.

"You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not," she said as she hurried away, "but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it." New York Times

Risking Everything to Come to America on the Open Ocean

The fiberglass skiff Lazora idled on the darkened Pacific Ocean a few miles south of American waters. It was roughly 25 feet long and seven feet wide, unlit, overloaded and offering no shelter from the elements. Twenty people were crammed aboard. Most were seated on narrow benches. A few huddled on the vomit-splattered deck. Some had opened slits in plastic garbage bags and pushed heads and arms through, flimsy protection against the damp October chill. Few life jackets were visible. At the boat’s stern, two Mexican men tended a 200-horsepower outboard engine and 10 plastic barrels of fuel. They were in the final hour of ferrying a load of undocumented migrants toward American land, in waters nearly three-quarters of a mile deep: human smugglers, running a boat through a seam where black sea met black sky.

The boat operators, one a former commercial fisherman and the other his cousin, had picked up their passengers earlier in the night on a beach on Mexico’s coastline and worked their way offshore and northward. Shortly after midnight they arrived at a de facto loitering zone for maritime smugglers preparing for runs into the United States, a patch of ocean just south of the American line where Mexican law-enforcement vessels rarely patrol and American vessels have no authority. Now their uneventful ride was giving way to tension and fear.

The lights of San Diego and Tijuana twinkled in the eastern distance. The Lazora’s destination was the steep outcropping of Point Loma, beside the entrance to San Diego’s harbor, where the men running the skiff had been told a pickup crew would guide them to the beach with a flashing light. From there the migrants were expected to follow a Southern California human-smuggling routine — a leap into the surf, a scramble ashore, a rush to waiting vehicles, a drive to safe houses where they would be held until the balance of their smuggling fees had been paid. And then, if it all worked, if no one drowned, if the ever-shifting network of federal, state and municipal law-enforcement agencies did not catch them, they would embark on a furtive form of opportunity in the United States. New York Times

Biden’s Policies Are Popular. What Does That Mean for Republicans?

In a Monmouth University poll released last week, 42 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the right direction — considerably less than half, but still more than in any Monmouth poll going back to 2013.

The Quinnipiac survey found that more than two-thirds of Americans supported Mr. Biden’s coronavirus relief package, with wide majorities also backing certain key elements — including a permanent increase to a $15 minimum wage and a round of $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals. On the question of the stimulus payments, even 64 percent of Republicans supported them.

On a range of other Biden policies, the poll found widespread support: rejoining the Paris climate accord, opening a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and ending Mr. Trump’s ban on travel from some predominantly Muslim countries. New York Times