The Democrats and the legacy media (but I repeat myself) are trying to pin the blame for the riots and rebellion in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere anywhere but where that blame belongs. They are blaming President Trump, they are blaming Border Czar Tom "The Hammer" Homan, they are blaming Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), and they are even blaming the National Guard troops and the Marines who have been sent in to re-establish order.
None of them, of course, are placing the blame where it belongs. None of them is looking at the root cause of this mess. As it happens, in my previous career, I spent a lot of years teaching the staff of huge medical manufacturing companies, many of whom you'd recognize, how to do root cause analysis. One of my key rules in cause analysis is that "root cause is always found at the point where some person or some group of people made a decision."
In our current mess with illegal immigrants, the root cause is due to a decision made by Joe Biden, or whoever was making decisions in his stead. An editorial published Tuesday over at Issues & Insights makes a few good points on that score.
The scenes in Los Angeles are disturbing. An assortment of thugs, screeching harridans, and nothing-else-to-do troublemakers have been blocking and physically confronting officers, hurling bricks and rocks at them, setting fire to private property, destroying taxpayer-owned property, taking over streets, looting, and terrorizing businesses.
Protests? An exercise in free speech? It feels like an insurrection. Or maybe an invasion, since some of the agitators have waved foreign flags. Or an attempted blue massacre. Whatever the terminology, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass admits that if the administration weren’t enforcing the law, there would have been no “disorder.”
Andy Ngo, who has for years documented violent mob behavior (and been a victim of it), sees what many fear, yet some (let’s call them Democrats) want.
“If the political violence continues in Los Angeles,” he says, “it will be used to galvanize and inspire far-left extremists and Antifa cells across the country to incite anti-government insurrections in different cities. What we are witnessing now is almost exactly what happened five years ago. The same networks and militants are involved. It is their same playbook.”
That's an accurate description of events, and I&I also correctly note that the violence is spreading.
But here's the relevant observation:
We reached this point because over the four years of Joe Biden, the border was, as a matter of policy, not secured. It was more sieve than barrier. In April 2021, Politico reported that “the early months of Biden’s administration have been shadowed by a major increase in immigration.” Border agents had encountered “more than 100,000 people attempting to cross unauthorized in February and more than 170,000 in March, a 15-year high.”
While campaigning for the 2020 election, Biden “pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations after taking office,” reported CNN, “promised to protect sanctuary cities from federal law enforcement agencies,” and declared the country “could afford to take in a heartbeat another 2 million.”
A June 2022 Senate Foreign Relations minority report noted that “illegal migration” had “reached astronomical levels since the Biden administration entered office.”
So here's the turning point, in 2020. This was the critical decision that led to all this: Make it a key campaign point to run on open borders and a moratorium on deportations. Campaign to throw the gates open to all and sundry. And, once in office, follow up. That's what happened, and illegal border crossings spiked. Events like the murders of Lakin Riley, Rachel Morin, and Jocelyn Nungaray hit the news. This chaos was not only allowed by the Biden administration, but facilitated by it; thousands of illegal border crossers were stopped, given a date with an immigration judge months or years in the future, patted on the head and released into the United States, to disappear there.
This is Joe Biden's baby - or the baby of whoever was running the autopen. And we should be aware of that. More to the point, history had better be aware of it. The chaos on the streets of our cities today, the rioting, the rebellion, the, yes, insurrection, was fomented by the Biden administration. This is malfeasance at the highest levels of government.
See Also: Inevitable: Body Found on Sidewalk in Downtown Los Angeles
And now? The Biden administration's lax enforcement-no, scratch that, the Biden administration's utter failure to make any attempt at enforcement-has resulted in thousands, nay, millions, of illegal immigrants now in the country, ensconced, comfortable, many of them up to no good, and feeling like they're entitled to stay. They are willing to resort to violence to be permitted to stay. And why not? Under the Biden administration, they were allowed to stay; their presence was not just allowed by the Democrats, but celebrated.
This is all the Biden administration's fault. Sadly, old Joe will never be held accountable. In all honesty, the man is non compos mentis. Senility may not be a legal defense, but it's a practical one; the former president has very little idea of what's going on, and it would be difficult to prosecute a man who is so out of it that he likely doesn't know what day it is. But as this mess gets cleaned up, we need to fix firmly in our minds who was responsible for this mess. And we need to vote accordingly.
