Barring the U.S. Supreme Court stepping in, the Title 42 policy using a COVID-19 health restriction at the border will finally end Wednesday, a good outcome for the rule of law that will see an increased volume of arrivals seeking asylum.
This time there’s some advance warning, which means there’s an invaluable opportunity to prepare a response that’s not only more logistically apt but more humane, and that means a sharing of responsibility.
This is largely Washington’s mess to clean up, not because — as some commentators have cynically and falsely asserted — it threw open the border, but because it decided to maintain the Title 42 policy for almost three years, creating a bottleneck that was always destined to burst when the illegal program was finally struck down.
It cannot wash its hands of the aftermath of its decision to kick the can down the road on figuring out better ways to process asylum-seekers. At minimum, it has to take a much more active role in working with states, municipalities and nonprofits to place migrants where they can best be accommodated, and work with Congress to excise the silly requirement that they wait six months before they can legally work at all.
Leaving them to political wolves like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott — who are salivating at the prospect of using the vulnerable migrants in stunts like the misleading flights to Martha’s Vineyard — is not appropriate. If President Joe Biden is concerned about the perception that his administration is being too welcoming, let us warn that the perception of letting chaos reign isn’t much better, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen if dozens of buses sent without coordination start arriving again in New York and elsewhere.
That doesn’t mean the city should shirk its responsibilities, as certain others might like, but it shouldn’t fall squarely on our shoulders. Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state should be standing ready to help, with an eye toward parts of the state that would happily absorb some arrivals.
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