Immigration

While the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier has no formal role in devising the bloc’s immigration policy, his words this week have turned much of the Brexit debate on its head. In an interview on French television, he said that France should suspend non-EU immigration for three to five years — with the exception of students and refugees — and that the EU needed to toughen external borders that have become a ‘sieve’. Had those words come from the mouth of Nigel Farage, he would have been excoriated, not least by Barnier himself. How can any country (let alone a continent) manage in the modern world while shutting itself off to people from, say, India, Australia and America?

The Biden administration has twice extended the deadline for federal employees to volunteer for months-long deployments at the US-Mexico border, undermining the White House's attempts to downplay the recent severity of the migrant crisis. In a Department of Defense bulletin sent Friday and obtained exclusively by The Spectator, staff were informed that the deadline to apply to the Health and Human Services (HHS) volunteer program to assist with the influx of unaccompanied migrant children had been extended from May 7 to May 21. The deadline had previously extended from April 26 to May 7.

The Biden administration is asking US Department of Agriculture employees to abandon their day jobs and volunteer for months-long stints at the US-Mexico border, despite repeatedly insisting that the influx of unaccompanied minors has not reached 'crisis' levels. The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offered employees an 'informational unaccompanied minors' session last week 'to learn more about volunteer detail opportunities for employees', according to an email obtained by The Spectator. Volunteers would be responsible for working directly with migrant children to interview them for their legal cases and help connect them with adult sponsors residing in the United States.

Every Home Secretary is forced to confront the cold political realities of the office. What they set out to deliver – strengthening countermeasures in the aftermath of a terror attack, say, or taking steps to tackle a spike in violent crime – tends to be supported by swathes of the public at large. But though they can enjoy that currency of quiet public support, Home Secretaries of both major parties must then do battle 'inside the Beltway' with a vociferous legal and human rights establishment – and other vested interests ­– which seek to dilute their policy responses to the challenge of the day. To use a term of art, it is often a 'hostile environment' for holders of that least understood great office of State.

Joe Biden won’t go to the border, but the border is coming to him. The Northern Irish border, that is. On Wednesday, Biden, Kamala Harris (pronouns: she/her) and Nancy Pelosi marked St Patrick’s Day by talking with Irish politicians from both sides of their border. Afterwards, the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, thanked Pelosi for her ‘continued support’ on Brexit. It’s bordering on the ridiculous. Biden’s administration refuses to admit that it has a moral and humanitarian crisis on its southern border, but it makes time to create problems on the border between two close allies, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The administration insists it isn’t taking sides on Brexit, but the truth is that it already has.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

Ask voters what the most important issue facing Britain is and just 2 per cent say immigration. Even when you expand it to the most important issues, the figure only reaches 6 per cent. This is a dramatic turnaround from 2015 when 56 per cent listed immigration as one of the top issues facing the country. In my Times column today, I ask what explains this shift. The end of free movement and the resumption of border control has taken much of the heat out of the issue In part, it is Covid. Before the pandemic, net migration to Britain was running at 313,000. In the past year, though, hundreds of thousands have returned to their home country for lockdown. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the population might have fallen by 1.

While Donald Trump appears to have lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s agenda of populism focused on the working class and putting America first won, well, bigly. Contrary to the Democrats’ claim that Joe Biden’s razor-thin win gave them a mandate, the only mandate America’s voters gave this year is that they want more Trumpism. To wit, the swing of roughly the same number of voters in a handful of states by which Trump won in 2016 is the gap of Biden’s win. Going forward, Republicans must focus on maintaining that sentiment and fight off attempts by NeverTrumpers and Establishment Republicans to throw Trumpism out with Trump.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories.ArizonaI voted for Trump in 2016, and I absolutely cannot wait to vote for him again in 2020. The President has lived up to every expectation I had of him.

What does Stephen Miller really want? His immigration obsession has shaped some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive policies, and he has clawed his way from speechwriter to senior policy adviser. But is his dream a restrictionist immigration agenda or, as sources close to the White House tell me, the pursuit of power, not policy? Is he taking Lady Macbeth’s advice and playing ‘the innocent flower’ to mask ‘the serpent under’t’? Miller is a true believer in the Trump agenda: they say he even praises the President in private. That might explain his survival in an administration with a turnover rate higher than that of a cheap motel.