The Morning Dispatch: Ending Pandemic Immigration Enforcement

Happy Friday! No April Fool’s Day joke from us this morning. We value your trust too much to toy with you like that, Dear Reader. (Okay, okay, we couldn’t think of one.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden announced Thursday that his administration will release up to 180 million barrels of oil from the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six months, the largest such drawdown in history. He also called on Congress to pass legislation imposing fees on oil and gas companies not making full use of their leases on federal lands. U.S West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices fell 7 percent on the news.

• Reuters reported Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an order drafting 134,500 new conscripts into the Russian army, a move the Kremlin claimed was routine and unrelated to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. “Most military personnel will undergo professional training in training centers for three to five months,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said. “Let me emphasize that recruits will not be sent to any hot spots.”

• After plunging nearly 70 percent in response to Western sanctions, the value of Russia’s ruble has nearly returned to pre-war levels thanks to rising oil and gas prices and stringent Bank of Russia restrictions on currency exchanges and withdrawals. The rebound is partially artificial because of those constraints, but many sanctions experts believe there remains “a lot of room for escalation.”

• The Treasury Department announced Thursday the United States is cracking down further on Russia’s technology sector and sanctions evasion networks, targeting 21 entities and 13 individuals that have helped facilitate the procurement of resources for the Russian government. The Treasury Department also expanded its sanctions authority to apply to the Russian aerospace, marine, and electronics sectors.

• The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index—the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric—increased 6.4 percent in February on an annual basis, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, up from 6 percent a month earlier. The index last registered a figure that high in January 1982.

• Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Thursday the Department of Homeland Security will make an additional 35,000 H-2B visas available for temporary nonagricultural workers between April 1 and September 30. Mayorkas said the move was made to “support American businesses” given the “current demand in the labor market.”

• U.S. corporate profits after tax increased 23.2 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to a Commerce Department report published Wednesday, but the growth began to stall out in the fourth quarter of the year as input costs boomed.

• The average number of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States appears to have leveled off around 28,000, the lowest level since July 2021. Daily COVID-19 deaths, meanwhile, have fallen below 600 for the first time since early August. According to CDC estimates, Omicron’s more transmissible BA.2 subvariant became the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the country last week.

• The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial jobless claims increased by 14,000 week-over-week to 202,000 last week.

Goodbye Title 42, Hello Migrant Surge?

In May, the Biden administration is expected to revoke Title 42, the Trump-era public health order that allowed U.S. officials to quickly expel migrants crossing the southern border. Although the White House hasn’t yet formally announced the plan, several outlets reported the move is imminent. Border officials are bracing for impact.

The Title 42 health order is based on the Centers for Disease Control’s authority to block immigrants who might be carrying serious disease—in this case, COVID-19. When it took effect in 2020, border enforcement began expelling unauthorized migrants without giving them a chance to apply for asylum or waiting to charge them with immigration offenses.

Biden’s CDC kept the rule in force. In fiscal year 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a record 1,734,686 encounters with migrants along the southwest border. And from February to December 2021, according to the American Immigration Council, 56 percent of the migrants encountered were expelled under Title 42. The swift turnarounds—and lack of legal consequences—led to a surge in repeat crossing attempts. About 27 percent of apprehensions since Title 42 went into effect were of migrants who had already tried entering the country at least once, up from 7 percent in fiscal year 2019.

“What Title 42 did is basically got rid of all those [legal] consequences and immediately shoved these people across the border,” Alex Nowrasteh, director of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, told The Dispatch. “They could then try again, sometimes in the same day.”

With COVID-19 infection rates slowing in the U.S. and pandemic restrictions vanishing, the Biden administration is losing its public health—and legal—justification for keeping Title 42 in place. Immigration activists and progressive Democrats—strongly opposed to blocking asylum claims—have been pushing the White House to scrap the policy for months. “As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxes its domestic COVID-19 protocols, it is perplexing that the agency continues to recommend the extended use of this draconian policy at the border,” Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Alex Padilla, and Bob Menendez wrote a few weeks ago. “As we have clearly reminded President Biden, we have a moral imperative to live by our values.”

The Biden administration has sought to avoid expelling unaccompanied minors under the statute—though it’s run into some legal challenges on that front—and in early March, a court ruled officials can’t immediately return families with children to countries where they would face persecution. As a result, single adults constitute a majority of those expelled under the rule.

That doesn’t mean unraveling the policy next month will be pain-free. Poor economic conditions and violence are still driving migrants to the U.S., and we’re due for a spring surge. About 7,100 migrants are now reaching the southern border daily, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday. And Axios reported that, once Title 42 ends, intelligence officials expect more than 170,000 migrants at the Mexico border. A federal law enforcement official estimated that 30,000 to 60,000 people are waiting in northern Mexico to cross after a Title 42 repeal.

That surge will include many migrants looking to make asylum claims, which often result in far-off court dates that allow the migrant to temporarily live in the United States. But a rule change–scheduled to take effect days after the reported Title 42 repeal in May–could expedite those claims by authorizing asylum officers to adjudicate migrants’ cases shortly after they cross the border. The rule may help the administration clear its backlog, but it won’t address the underlying causes of increasing migration. “They pretty clearly have in mind handling the flow rather than stopping the flow,” argued Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Still, Nowrasteh said a more efficient processing path may encourage migrants to make asylum claims at ports of entry rather than crossing illegally and making claims once detained. “It’ll probably result in border officials and CBP spending more time with asylum claims, at least initially,” Nowrasteh said. “But it will also be different, because instead of tracking people down in the desert and having them turn themselves in, you will have more of them go through a port of entry. So it will be more regular and more controllable.”

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday released a summary of its plans for dealing with a migrant surge, including moving extra officers to the border and expanding processing centers along with more long-term promises like prosecuting smugglers. “We have every expectation that when the CDC ultimately decides it’s appropriate to lift Title 42, there will be an influx of people to the border,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said Wednesday. “And so we are doing a lot of work to plan for that contingency.”

Republicans aren’t impressed. “Ending Title 42 without any real border security plan in place would spark a humanitarian and security crisis like we’ve never seen,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued yesterday. “I strongly urge the President to keep Title 42 in place and quickly produce an actual strategy to do his job and secure our border.” The House Freedom Caucus called on their colleagues across the aisle to help block a repeal of the law.

A handful of powerful Democrats agree. “With encounters along our southern border surging and the highly-transmissible Omicron BA.2 subvariant emerging as the dominant strain in the United States, now is not the time to throw caution to the wind,” Sen. Joe Manchin wrote to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. And after meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona said DHS hadn’t reached out to officials in their home state about preparing for a surge. 

“Until the administration does that type of consultation with local government leaders and nonprofits along the border,” the senators wrote, “it is premature to consider changes to Title 42 authorities.”

Then again, most lawmakers calling for another Title 42 extension believe the COVID-19 emergency ended long ago. “That Title 42 has proven to be a useful weapon against illegal immigration does not mean that it can be maintained outside of its legal context,” Charlie Cooke argued in National Review earlier this week. “The role of Congress in fixing these deficiencies is neither to beg the executive branch to abuse or stretch its statutory authority nor to declare forever emergencies, but to pass clear and constitutionally sound laws, and to demand that the president execute them faithfully.”

It’s a Petroleum Reserve Release, but Is It Strategic?

On December 3, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee posted a much-ridiculed tweet thanking President Joe Biden for a $0.02 drop in average gas prices—from $3.40/gallon to $3.38—between November 22 to November 29. 

In between those two dates, Biden had announced the United States would make available up to 50 million barrels of oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in an effort to address the “mismatch between demand exiting the pandemic and supply.” The move was accompanied by similar—albeit smaller—releases from China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.

Four months and one land war later, crude oil has surpassed $100/barrel for the first time since 2014, and a gallon of gas costs the average American $4.22. With Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening to cut off gas exports to Europe unless countries pay in rubles, prices could be poised to rise once again. Given a commanding plurality of respondents in a recent Quinnipiac poll viewing inflation as the most urgent issue facing the country—and just 34 percent approving of Biden’s handling of the economy—the president is going back to the well. Er, reserves.

“Today, I’m authorizing the release of 1 million barrels per day for the next six months—over 180 million barrels—from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” Biden announced on Thursday, adding he’s “waiting to see” whether allies will follow suit. “This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year. And it is by far the largest release from our national reserve in our history.”

Established after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-1974 in an effort to smooth over future supply disruptions, the SPR currently holds about 568 million barrels of crude oil in a handful of underground salt caverns across Texas and Louisiana. Though it’s the most extensive such reserve in the world, it’s far from a panacea. Based on 2021 consumption data, 568 million barrels on their own would power the United States for … about 28 days. And as evidenced by the fact that Biden is now tapping into the stockpile for the third time in about four months, the maneuver shouldn’t be viewed as a long-term solution to supply shortfalls.

“While this may increase supply temporarily, it is like selling off the insurance policy,” said GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. “It does little to increase domestic production. What [Biden] laid out isn’t a responsible plan; it’s the weakest possible effort to shift blame for rising gas prices.” The president used the phrase “Putin’s price hike” four times in his remarks yesterday.

Still, 180 million barrels is far and away the biggest SPR drawdown of all time, and WTI crude oil prices fell 7 percent on the news. That oil will need to be refined—into gasoline, but also other products—and will then be sold on a global market. But American drivers will likely enjoy at least some benefit. “The downdrafts will continue as oil drops after the SPR announcement,” Patrick De Haan—oil and refined products analyst at GasBuddy—said yesterday. “Nearly all states will see falling gas prices over the next week and potentially beyond.”

But the relief is likely to be short-lived, and it won’t come without risk. For starters, the sale of 180 million barrels of oil—they are generally auctioned off to the highest bidder—will leave the SPR more depleted than it’s been in four decades. What if there’s an even more acute shortage? Biden promised to use the revenue generated by the sales to restock the reserves when prices are lower in the future, but no one knows when that will be.

“It took five years early this century after Bush authorized the SPR max fill to go from 550 [million barrels] to 700 [million barrels],” De Haan added. “How long is it going to take us to fill from potentially 400 [million barrels] back to 700 [million barrels]? Global demand is much higher, this could take four to seven to 10 years to refill.”

A potentially bigger risk is how other oil and gas producers will respond to the move. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, for example, currently projects domestic companies will increase their production by 400,000 barrels per day this year, and by another 1 million barrels per day in 2023. Exxon and Chevron said recently they’re going to increase production in the Permian Basin by a combined 160,000 barrels per day in 2022. Will having to compete with SPR releases change those plans?

And then there’s OPEC. Enjoying sky high prices and wary of a sudden drop in demand, the bloc of oil-producing countries has been rebuffing Biden’s pleas to accelerate production for months. And with Russia a member of the larger OPEC+ group, the cartel has shown little appetite for making things easier on the West. The Biden administration has reportedly given up asking Saudi Arabia to pump more, asking only that the country not react rashly to an SPR release by cutting its own output.

Worth Your Time

• The Oscars Slap and its fallout reignited fears that comedian Jeff Maurer has harbored for a while now: America might be becoming humorless. “Empathy protects the weak, but a person with too much empathy (yes, I think a person can have too much empathy) can enable perpetual weakness. And a culture that over-values empathy (yes, I think a culture can over-value empathy) can cause people to encourage weakness in others so that they can assume the hero protector role,” he writes in his latest newsletter. “The ability to take a joke is a positive trait. A society that places no limits on what’s ‘fair game’ would be cruel, but a society that declares most things off limits would be treating people like children. When people can’t take a joke…well, that’s a shame. I hope those people get to a place where they can let go of their fear, because I’d like them to join in on the fun.”

• With just four states yet to finalize their new, post-2020 census congressional maps, FiveThirtyEight elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich is out with a helpful primer breaking down what’s changed—and what it means for the 2022 midterms. “No matter which way you slice it, Democrats have gained blue seats from the mapmaking process, making the House playing field between the two parties more balanced than it has been in decades,” he writes. “As the maps stand on March 30 at 5 p.m. Eastern, 175 congressional districts have a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of D+5 or bluer, 181 have a partisan lean of R+5 or redder and 33 are in the “highly competitive” category between D+5 and R+5. That’s a net increase of 11 Democratic-leaning seats from the old maps. Meanwhile, the number of Republican-leaning seats has decreased by six, as has the number of highly competitive seats.”

• The Biden administration’s recently released proposal to tax wealthy Americans’ unrealized capital gains will never become law for a variety of reasons, and this National Review piece from Jack Salmon touches on most of them. “Taxing unrealized gains aside, policymakers have long acknowledged that even taxing realized gains is inefficient and economically harmful,” he writes. “In the 1960s, President Kennedy noted how capital-gains taxes negatively affected investment and growth. Similarly, a Joint Economic Committee report in 1997 concluded that the capital-gains tax ‘is systematically biased against savings, investment, and work effort.’ The Clinton administration agreed with that assessment. … All that said, unrealized gains represent changes in wealth, not income. In this sense, a tax on unrealized gains is a wealth tax. If the history of wealth taxes teaches us anything, it’s that they never work as intended and tend to be abandoned to alleviate the economic destruction they wreak.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On the site today, Charlotte has a fascinating piece examining the current state of Russian espionage and how it has changed since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

• In this week’s edition of The Current (🔒), Klon Kitchen warns readers about the perils of not valuing personal data privacy. “The challenge of cybersecurity can feel like a battle that’s already lost. Like we’re all so far down the rabbit hole that the only thing we can really do is sit back and enjoy the ride,” he notes. “[But] we must individually understand we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. The United States is hemorrhaging data to the Chinese. The nation cannot be secure if these losses continue at their current pace.”

• Chris devotes lots of ink in Thursday’s Stirewaltisms (🔒) to trash-talking the Windy City, much to a certain TMD editor’s chagrin. “Democrats are reportedly considering Chicago as the site for their 2024 convention,” he writes. “This is an idea so crushingly, mind-numbingly bad that it immediately has the ring of truth to it.”

• And speaking of Stirewalt, he joined Jonah on yesterday’s Remnant for punditry so rank it’ll make your head spin: What do Biden’s sagging approval numbers mean for the Democratic Party heading into the midterms? What is Madison Cawthorn doing? What was Ginni Thomas doing? Where have all the great TV shows gone?

Let Us Know

Have you changed your behavior in response to the long-term increase in gas prices? Driving less? Switching from premium to regular? Driving more fuel-efficient vehicles?