Biden’s ‘Illegals’ Gaffe During the State of the Union Was Bad. His Immigration Policies Are Worse.
517SHARESPresident Joe Biden, during Thursday’s State of the Union address, clearly prioritized reminding the audience that he was not his political opponent, former President Donald Trump. That is, until he made the politically incorrect gaffe heard ‘round the world.“Laken Riley—an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” he said, addressing those who are blaming the recent murder of 22 year-old nursing student Laken Riley on Biden’s lax immigration policies at the border, given that the suspected killer is an undocumented man from Venezuela.“But how many thousands of people are killed by legals?” he continued. “To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you—having lost children myself, I understand.Democrats and immigration advocates alike are up in arms over his painfully outdated choice of language, going on talk shows and social media platforms to air their outrage over the fact the president used the term “illegal” to describe an undocumented immigrant, particularly when the Biden administration made a point of removing the term “illegal alien” from government communications at the beginning of his term.“Manipulating a personal tragedy for political gain in this way is dangerous,” the National Immigrant Justice Center wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Conflating immigration status with criminality is racist and disgusting.”But as important as language is—and as hurtful as the president’s particular choice of language was in that moment—we should resist the tempting urge to feed the outrage machine, and instead consider what makes immigration illegal in the first place.“…not so very long ago—the turn of the twentieth century to be precise—the U.S.-Mexico border was just a line in the sand, marked with concrete blocks.”As Biden mentioned during his State of the Union address, during his first day in office he signed an Executive Order overturning Trump’s infamous Muslim ban and vowed to put together a task force to reunite separated families. However, he failed to mention that he also deported more than 2,700 Haitian immigrants back to a country deemed too violent for U.S. citizens to visit, and kept pandemic-era policies like Title 42 in place long after they were necessary to protect public health.