If Biden Is Serious About Covid, He’ll Protect the Border

The government releases migrants, untested, to live in tight spaces alongside scores of strangers.

By Jason Riley. Excerpts: 

"In late April the New York Times reported that the government “has insufficient time and space to test migrants,” and therefore “testing is being postponed until their release to local community groups, cities and counties, usually after the new arrivals have spent days confined in tight spaces with scores of strangers, often sleeping shoulder to shoulder on mats on the floor.”

The report went on to note the obvious, which is that such a policy is at cross-purposes with fighting the pandemic. “As the United States vaccinates larger numbers of people and several states begin to reopen after seeing lower infection rates, the failure of U.S. authorities to test adult migrants for the coronavirus in jam-packed border processing centers is creating a potential for new transmissions, public health officials and shelter operators warn.”

No one can say for certain how big a role these high levels of illegal immigration have played in the spread of the virus, but the Biden administration can’t have it both ways. If the president wants the public to defer to public-health officials when it comes to masking and social distancing, he can’t expect people to ignore these same officials when they tell us that large numbers of recent migrants may be contributing to the crisis."

"El Salvador’s homicide rate fell by more than half between 2015 and 2018, and Guatemala’s economy was averaging 3.4% growth in the years leading up to the pandemic. Both countries continue to be much poorer and more violent than ours, but it’s worth noting that emigration to the U.S. from Central America kept rising even as these “root cause” trends moved in the right direction."