OPINION:
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The juxtaposition could not be more stunning. Arab nations, recognizing the hazard, balk at accepting Palestinians who are fleeing the war that their leaders are waging against Israel.
At the same time, President Biden allows immigrants to flood the United States illegally without regard for the consequences.
Gaza is already a war zone, but the situation is about to become even more precarious for its residents. The Israeli military is expected to escalate its use of force to crush Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization that triggered the armed conflict with a savage attack on Oct. 7.
As refugees seek to escape Israeli shelling and the coming invasion, neither Egypt, which borders Gaza, nor Jordan, a haven for Palestinians that flanks the West Bank, is willing to shelter fellow Arabs.
Explaining, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi points to the obvious: Mass migration set in motion by war threatens regional peace. Jordan’s King Abdullah II concurs, saying, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”
In 2012, Mr. el-Sisi led a coup against then-President Mohamed Morsi, whose embrace of radical Muslims roiling Gaza threatened Egypt’s stability. An Egyptian court declared the deposed president guilty of treason for allowing foreign interests to take precedence over his own nation’s.
As for King Abdullah, he built barriers along Jordan’s border with Syria and Iraq a decade ago to shield his nation from infiltration by ISIS terrorists seeking a staging ground for overthrowing Iraq’s government.
As co-religionists and neighbors of the Palestinians in Gaza, the attitude of Egypt and Jordan may seem harsh. History, though, teaches harsh lessons to those who ignore the peril.
That is why Americans have every right to condemn Mr. Biden’s malfeasance in refusing to secure the nation’s southern border. For the past three years, U.S. immigration laws have gone unenforced, allowing people of nearly every nationality to join the steady procession of immigrants crossing illegally into the United States unimpeded.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged a record 3.2 million border encounters, including seaports and airports, for the fiscal year ending in September. In addition, more than 1.5 million “gotaways” have eluded border authorities during the Biden presidency, with more than 23,000 of them in October alone.
Ominously, annual arrests of those on the federal government’s terror watchlist have skyrocketed from three to 169 in that period. There is no way to know how many more malefactors have slipped in undetected, using the teeming crowds as cover.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found immigration was surpassed only by the economy among voters’ gravest concerns, and the president’s 40% approval is nearing an all-time low. Mr. Biden is obviously stumbling over the border. To avoid another political face-plant, he reluctantly agreed earlier this month to add about 20 miles to border barriers in South Texas. But more must de done.
Painful experience has taught Egypt and Jordan to protect their people against importing the dangerous spread of unrest from neighboring Gaza.
Sadly, the implications of such vulnerability appear lost on the current administration. The interests Mr. Biden is serving with his open-borders policies are clearly not America’s.
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