The original draft of this email was sent to NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez after he misleadingly claimed that congressional Republicans weren’t “taking seriously” the Biden administration’s efforts to manage the recently renewed rush of illegal aliens crossing the U.S. border with Mexico. In fact, the GOP takes such “efforts,” if they can be called that, as seriously as a heart attack.
Good morning, Mr. Ordoñez,
Like your NPR colleague Kelsey Snell who last week barely deigned to acknowledge, much less detail, what she let slip were “substantive” GOP criticisms of the Democrats’ drunken-sailor spending bill, you this morning, during your live 5:10 a.m. immigration update with Morning Edition co-anchor Noel King, seemed to go out of your way to mischaracterize GOP criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of growing illegal border crossings.
Contrary to your reporting, Republicans aren’t claiming that the Biden policy team “isn’t taking [the border crisis] seriously.” (Note: I say “policy team” because we all know that our twilighting, campaigned-as-a-moderate president’s policy-making days are long behind him.) In fact, Republicans believe this increasingly radical administration is taking the crisis very seriously, as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to open our borders and actively invite tens of millions of low-skill migrants to become both reliable, dependent-on-government Democratic voters and — as an irresistible bonus for well-off elites in two-earner households — low-wage workers willing to trim the hedges, paint the house and tend to the children on the cheap so woke Mommy and Daddy, with no sense of irony or self-awareness, can have more free time to condemn our nation as irredeemably racist, etc.
Furthermore, Republican demands for the administration to stem the again-rushing tide of illegal migrants are not, as you claim, some phony means of “distracting Democrats” from what you’d apparently like listeners to believe is the more noble work of crafting comprehensive immigration legislation, including amnesty for tens of millions of wage-depressing aliens. As if that’s ever going to happen.
GOP demands simply acknowledge reality in a still partially shut-down country with millions of actual American citizens still out of work while our government willy-nilly prints trillions of inflation-stoking dollars for vote-buying distribution to people, cities and states that may or may not be in need. And the Democrats’ position is that we should wave in still more millions of unemployed people at this time?! That’s not a policy. That’s insanity, and middle-America understands it as such whether you and your nanny- and landscaper-hiring colleagues at NPR report it or not.
Finally, borrowing from the progressive left’s talking points, you referenced as “cruel” the previous administration’s border policies, which were certainly more effective than what’s happening now by way of discouraging illegal immigration in the first place. So rather than cruel, most sensible Americans might characterize those effective policies as sadly necessary. And you can be sure they’ll see it that way when they vote in 2022.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.