President Biden made only passing mention of the raging US-Mexico border crisis when he welcomed Mexico’s president to the White House on Thursday — and with apprehensions of illegal border crossers at a 35-year high, his guest actually urged him to further relax immigration rules
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador seized his moment in the spotlight, urging new US migration rules to facilitate legal labor exchanges. And he called on Congress to approve Biden’s plan to grant conditional amnesty to most of the estimated 11 million people living in the US illegally.
“Why not study the workforce demands, the labor demands and open the migratory flow?” Lopez Obrador said in the White House East Room ahead of a three-country meeting that also featured Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
He added: “President Biden, no president in the history of the United States has expressed as you have such a clear and certain commitment to improve the situation of the migrants and thus I wish to express my acknowledgement.
“And I particularly refer to your proposal to regulate the migratory status of 11 million people who live and work honestly in this great nation. I hope that you have the support of Congress and the members of both Democrat and Republican parties.”
Biden does not have the support of Congress for such proposals.
House Democrats in March approved more narrow bills with significant Republican support to grant pathways to citizenship to young people brought to the US illegally and certain farmworkers. But Democrats in the House scrapped plans to pass Biden’s more ambitious amnesty proposal because of dissent from centrists and the narrowly divided Senate didn’t act on the more tailored House-passed bills.
Biden’s avoidance of the border crisis was intentional, officials said.
“There’s not a real focus, this time around, on our borders,” an administration official told reporters on a preview call ahead of the talks.
When reporters asked about the “Remain in Mexico” policy, the official said “it’s not actually one of the themes or focuses of [the meetings].”
Biden’s deputies made a point of saying the men would not discuss — even in private — the pending court-ordered resurrection of the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that required most asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while US courts reviewed their claims. The program, which Biden still hopes to scrap, can’t resume without Mexico agreeing to it.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that the meetings would touch on migration and its causes — even if border policy itself wasn’t the focus.
“Migration, addressing the root causes, ensuring we’re doing it in a humane way, but reducing the number of people who are coming to the border will be part of the discussion,” she said.
Although the White House last week confirmed plans for a Biden-led press conference during Trudeau and Lopez Obrador’s visit, the plan was scrapped this week.
Illegal immigration into the US hit its highest level since the 1980s in fiscal 2021, with about 1.7 million arrests. Critics blame Biden’s messaging. Biden campaigned on welcoming asylum seekers and ended construction of the Trump administration’s US-Mexico border wall.
Although he praised some of Biden’s policies on Thursday, Lopez Obrador — a longtime left-wing leader often likened to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — in the past put some of the blame for the border crisis on Biden.
“Expectations were created that with the government of President Biden there would be a better treatment of migrants. And this has caused Central American migrants, and also from our country, wanting to cross the border thinking that it is easier to do so,” he said in March.
“We need to work together to regulate the flow, because this business can’t be tackled from one day to the next.”
Instead of border issues, officials said Biden planned to dig into issues such as global warming in talks with the neighboring countries.
“We closely track Mexico’s proposed energy reforms. And again, as I said at the beginning, given where the US economy is going to be going over the course of this administration and the priority that this president has placed on addressing the climate emergency, it is an area where we see great opportunity to partner with both Canada and with Mexico,” an official said.
The leaders also were expected to discuss COVID-19. The US helped both nations secure coveted vaccine doses when supplies were short earlier this year. And the US finally reopened its land borders this month, nearly two years into the pandemic.
The meeting of the three leaders comes as the border crisis persists despite recent monthly reductions in arrests. In October, US Customs and Border Protection reported more than 164,000 people were encountered along the US-Mexico border. While the number represented a decrease for the third month in a row, it is also still more than twice as many as encountered in October 2020.
The Biden administration has received bipartisan backlash for its handling of the border crisis. On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas suggested that not all of the estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrants in the US who have final removal orders should be deported.
Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden appointed to tackle the migrant crisis earlier this year, took months and heavy critical badgering to finally pay a single visit to the southern border, with both the veep and the White House insisting she will tackle only root causes of migration to the US.
Mayorkas admitted this week that Harris has not been “directly” involved in his department’s key policy decisions during her nearly eight months handling the issue.
And a Texas Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar, whose district sits at the center of the border crisis, said Wednesday he has given up on working with her to solve the migrant crisis.
“I’ve moved on from the vice president to say, ‘OK, let’s work with the ambassadors and let’s work with the State Department. Let’s work with the homeland secretary,’” Cuellar told the Washington Examiner.
“I think that’s the way to address it, but I know that the media has put a lot of focus on the vice president, but with all due respect, she was given that title. I don’t think she’s, with all due respect, put the effort in there … We’ve got to look at other folks that have the expertise on that.”
Trudeau, meanwhile, has been one of the closest world leaders to Biden — with Biden placing his first presidential call to the fellow liberal. He narrowly won re-election in September amid a worsening scandal over photos showing him wearing blackface.
Canada hosted the last North American Leaders’ Summit in June 2016. Trudeau received President Barack Obama and then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in Ottawa.
