Sensible and defensible. That's how best to describe Gov. Gavin Newsom's decision to reassign all but 100 of the 360 California National Guard troops stationed on the southern border, which undercuts President Donald Trump's hyperbolic claim that there is a "national emergency" at the border.
Here in San Diego-easily the largest U.S. city along the border-our proximity to Mexico is a gigantic economic plus, not the nightmare the president depicts.
Beyond that crucial point, Newsom's characterization of Trump's deployment of border troops as "political theater" is borne out by news accounts from last April. That's when the president surprised his aides with a series of tweets and statements declaring a need to militarize the border to protect against an influx of unauthorized immigrant criminals and drugs. If there was a border emergency, that was news to his national security team.
Trump went on to make the purported border "invasion" a major theme in his fall campaigning for Republicans, capped with his October decision to deploy more than 5,200 active-duty military troops to the border after reports that a caravan of migrants was headed toward the U.S. While the GOP held on to the Senate, it lost 43 House seats, suggesting the president's alarmism didn't play well.
Nonetheless, Trump has stayed the course with his invasion theme, forcing a 35-day partial government shutdown when Congress refused to approve his request for $5.7 billion for more border walls. Another shutdown is possible on Friday when funding for many government agencies runs out.
In December, Homeland Security officials said the number of asylum seekers was about 93,000 in fiscal 2018-a huge increase over the 55,584 reported in fiscal 2017. A Syracuse University project that tracks data on asylum seekers reports that fiscal 2018 was the sixth straight year that the percentage of asylum seekers rejected by immigration judges had increased.
Given that this pattern began under the Obama administration, it is difficult to see it as a function of Trump's heated rhetoric. What it suggests is that more and more people want to use asylum to try to bypass a lengthy legal immigration process without sufficient cause.
So while it is absurd to pretend the U.S. is facing a crisis at its southern border, it is not absurd to say immigration has begun to change in profound ways. That is why immediate funding for more border barriers, increased Border Patrol staffing and additional immigration judges makes sense.