One word says a lot about the Democrats’ shift on the border

“Do not send your children to the borders,” Obama told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”

He also warned that much worse fates could await along the journey.

Today the Biden administration’s new Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, has offered a warning that differs mainly in one word, but also hugely in emphasis. In an interview with the same ABC host Tuesday, Mayorkas said that people shouldn’t come to the border … yet.

“We are also — and critically — sending a message that now is not the time to come to the border,” Mayorkas said, adding: “Do not take the journey now. Give us time to build an orderly, safe way to arrive in the United States and make the claims that the law permits you to make.”

The comments are clearly the administration’s talking point, as Mayorkas said much the same thing two weeks ago.

“We are not saying, ‘Don’t come,’ “ Mayorkas said at a White House briefing. “We are saying, ‘Don’t come now, because we will be able to deliver a safe and orderly process to them as quickly as possible.’ ”

Stephanopoulos pressed Mayorkas on this talking point, asking whether the better message might not be “don’t come, period” — the same thing Obama said seven years ago. But Mayorkas made clear he was pleading for time rather than a full-on change in plans.

“Well I think, actually, do not come now,” Mayorkas said. “Give us the time to rebuild the system that was entirely dismantled in the prior administration. And we have in fact begun the rebuild that system.”

There are myriad nuances in immigration policy. In this case, that begins with whether the unaccompanied minors arriving at the border might have legitimate asylum claims or might have family in the United States with whom they could be matched up. It’s not simply a matter of whether you let all undocumented immigrants into the country, as some of Biden’s critics suggest.

But that nuance wasn’t so heavily featured seven years ago. And there is a clear shift in emphasis — and not for the first time between the Obama administration and the Biden administration, or between what Democrats said about this several years ago versus what they say now.

Around the same time Obama sent his stern message to would-be migrants in 2014, former secretary of state and later 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton echoed his comments in a CNN town hall. When it was noted that conditions here were safer than in their home countries, Clinton responded that “it may be safer, but that’s not the answer.”

Asked whether she was saying they should be deported, Clinton agreed that was the preferable course, though not always practical.

“They should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are, because there are concerns about whether all of them can be sent back,” Clinton said. “But I think all of them who can be should be reunited with their families.

Again, saying you don’t yet have the facilities and processes in place to deal with the influx is not the same as saying you will welcome everyone. But Mayorkas’s comments are hardly the only ones that suggest a more welcoming posture toward people aiming for the border. And the Biden administration has effectively acknowledged that.

At a briefing last week, the ambassador to the Southern border, Roberta Jacobson, acknowledged that the administration’s more, in her words, “humane” approach might be drawing people northward in high numbers.

“Surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent-up demand,” Jacobson said, referring to the Trump administration’s hard-line policies which included controversially separating families at the border. “So I don’t know whether I would call that a ‘coincidence,’ but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision.”

Jacobson added that smugglers were allegedly using this to spread misinformation about people’s actual hopes of being able to enter the United States.

Credit to the Biden administration for acknowledging that its policies might have contributed to the border surge; transparency is great, and it’s a rather obvious conclusion. That said, that’s not the same as smart politics, given Republicans have sought to raise this as an issue whenever possible. And Republicans are already using and are very likely to continue to use Mayorkas’s and Jacobson’s comments to argue that the Biden administration is welcoming people to the border — whether that’s now or later.

The Democratic Party’s vision of what smart immigration policy is and should be has definitively evolved over the last two decades. Many of its leaders, including Clinton and now-Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), were rather hard-line on the border in the mid-2000s, saying things that echo much of what the Republican Party says today. The party has since become much more concerned about what its more liberal supporters and the increasingly important Hispanic demographic think, though they backslid a bit with that latter demographic in 2020.

The question for Democrats now is whether saying people should proceed with plans to come to the border — whether now or later, when the system can better deal with them — is what Americans want to hear when we have a brewing crisis on the border.