Biden’s Border Backtrack

Already under fire for his failure alleviate a situation in which, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week, “the vast majority” of individuals seeking to enter the United States from Mexico “have been turned away,” and further, for his decision to re-open a privately run juvenile detention center for unaccompanied teen migrants, President Biden seems to have stepped in it yet again when it comes to immigration reform, formally adding Mexico to the list of “shithole” countries from which former President Donald Trump said the United States did not want immigrants.

A bit of background: last week, the San Diego Board of Supervisor’s decision to declare the flow of sewage from the Tijuana River Valley into the United States and its waters a public health crisis. (The flow has been polluting America for years, but has grown worse in recent years thanks to a series of major spills from ruptured Mexican pipes, leading to increasingly frequent beach closures in places like Coronado, where people pay good money not to have to deal with such things.) The declaration was a difficult one for the Board, which only two weeks ago declared that systemic racism was a public health crisis. “And if there’s one thing we can learn from Adolf Hitler,” says Super Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, “it’s that you run into trouble when you try to fight wars on two fronts. Our county’s progressives are committed to creating social equity. But we are also committed to environmental protection. And the sad fact is that there is only so much progress to go around in San Diego. So we called in the feds.”

“Unfortunately,” said Biden in a statement following his emergency visit to the scene, “the United States cannot let this shit pass. We are going to have to call Mexico out on their shit, and until they get their shit together, declare that they ain’t shit to us. Or rather, that they’re a shithole.”