ANALYSIS: Rumors of Biden’s Centrism Are Greatly Exaggerated, Analysts Say

On the border and energy, rhetorical shift not matched by reality

President Joe Biden speaks with a member of the Border Patrol as they walk along the U.S.–Mexico border fence in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 8, 2023. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

The latest media narrative about President Joe Biden is falling into place just in time for his 2024 reelection bid.

Biden is tacking to the center, according to Politico, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other outlets.

Journalists have cited his approval in March of Alaska’s Willow oil project, albeit on a smaller scale than the oil company ConocoPhillips wanted.

Some also reference his administration’s recent gestures on immigration, including dispatching 1,500 troops to the border ahead of May 11, when COVID-era Title 42 restrictions came to an end.

But is Biden actually becoming more moderate?

“That claim is a lie and is hoping that the American public really is that stupid,” May Mailman, a senior legal fellow with the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, said in a May 8 interview with The Epoch Times.

Mailman listed recent Biden administration actions that reflect left-wing priorities: a new mortgage policy that would effectively penalize borrowers with high credit scores and a lawsuit against Tennessee’s ban on transgender medical procedures for children, among others.

A 'For Sale' sign is posted in front of a single-family home in Hollywood, Fla., on Oct. 27, 2022. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“Policy after policy after policy is extremely, extremely radical,” said Mailman, who worked in the Trump White House on a variety of issues.

“This idea that Biden is a centrist is one that he would never be able to make if not for the mainstream media.”

Biden’s Border

In addition to sending 1,500 more troops to the southern border, the Biden administration has recently touted measures that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims will “further reduce unlawful migration across the Western Hemisphere.”

Yet immigration experts who favor lower immigration told The Epoch Times that the bigger picture shows that Biden remains an open-border president.

Migrants from Central and South America take part in a caravan attempting to reach the Mexico–U.S. border, while carrying out the Way of the Cross to protest the death of 40 migrants in a fire at a detention center in Juarez, Tapachula, Mexico, on April 23, 2023. Stringer/AFP via Getty Images

“The changes the administration has made are merely cosmetic,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said in a May 8 interview with The Epoch Times.

The center describes itself as having a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision.”

“A lot of this is geared toward the president’s reelection bid,” Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a May 5 interview with The Epoch Times.

The federation favors lower immigration too.

Both Krikorian and Mehlman pointed out that the 1,500 troops won’t detain migrants. That’s despite the fact that numbers at the border are only expected to surge further after May 11.

“Really, the only thing they'll be is paper pushers,” Chris Chmielenski said in a May 8 interview with The Epoch Times.

Chmielenski is a vice president of NumbersUSA, a nonpartisan organization focused on reducing immigration numbers.

The military personnel will carry out “non-law enforcement duties,” according to the DHS.

Mehlman suggested that the media doesn’t make that clear enough.

“It sounds like, ‘Oh, he’s doing something,’” he said.

DHS has also trumpeted its use of expedited removal, a process for quickly expelling noncitizens. President Donald Trump moved to expand it in the face of accusations that he was seeking to undermine due process.

Yet Mailman argued that the agency’s rhetoric appears to conflict with its recent budget requests.

“The Biden administration has in every single budget requested less bed space for housing migrants, which means that they want to not use expedited removal and just let people come into the country and then give them a court date that they’re not going to show up for,” she said.

President Joe Biden speaks with members of the U.S. Border Patrol as they walk along the U.S.–Mexico border fence in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 8, 2023. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Indeed, the Trump-appointed judge who struck down Biden’s “catch and release” policy drew attention to DHS’s requests for less and less capacity every year.

“Like a child who kills his parents and then seeks pity for being an orphan, it is hard to take Defendants’ claim that they had to release more aliens into the country because of limited detention capacity seriously,” U.S. District Judge Judge T. Kent Wetherell wrote in his March 8 opinion in the case, which pitted the state of Florida against the federal government.

“They say their hands are tied, we don’t have enough detention space, and then they go and ask Congress for less money for detention space.

“Even if they start detaining people more, they'll detain a larger portion of people, maybe, but only for a few days–and then they let them go and drop them off at the bus station.”

Krikorian noted that would-be migrants can get out of expedited removal proceedings by saying they have a “credible fear” of harm should they return home.

It’s not hard to pass the initial interview with an asylum officer.

The latest data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show that most credible fear cases are resolved favorably for the people claiming credible fear.

“The bar is extremely low,” Krikorian said.

Loss of Rice a Signal on Immigration

The Biden administration’s shifting rhetoric on immigration coincides with Susan Rice’s departure as domestic policy czar from the White House.

Rice’s reputation for moderation on the border prompted some advocates of increased immigration to celebrate her replacement by Neera Tanden, herself a child of Indian immigrants.

(L–R) Counselor to the President John Podesta, White House national security adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, and then-Vice President Joe Biden attend a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama in the East Room after meetings about the situation in Ukraine and other topics at the White House on Feb. 9, 2015. Alex Wong/Getty Images

“Susan Rice’s departure makes it even harder to change policy,” Krikorian said.

Chmielenski said, “She was less open borders than others in the administration.”

Mailman said, “If the rumors are true, and she was getting fed up with the open border policies, then surely replacing her is a continued move to the left. On the other hand, Susan Rice is sort of a special case. She doesn’t need the Biden administration to be a household name, to be important, to be invited to dinner parties.

“I do think that as far as the border [is concerned], Biden is trying to have communications be centrist but policies be leftist.”

She also noted that “their policies continue to be radical.”

Debate Over Energy

Biden’s partial approval of the Willow project in March sparked outrage from some left-wing Democrats.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned the decision in a joint statement with several of her colleagues.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), right, speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation to promote clean energy programs outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 7, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The Willow project also helped spur climate protests outside last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Dan Kish, a senior vice president for policy at the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance, said he doesn’t think the approval marks a turning point.

“I think that’s a very convenient choreography from some of his friends,” he told The Epoch Times in a May 6 interview.

“He'd have lost in court probably if he hadn’t granted the OK.”

The applicants took all the necessary legal steps, Kish said.

According to him, all the outrage was “a contrived thing” from the president’s allies.

Kish said he thinks that Biden is “the most extreme anti-energy president we’ve ever had.”

In late 2022, Kish’s organization released a list of 125 actions by the Biden administration that “have made it harder to produce oil and gas.”

He said he doesn’t believe that the trend has changed in the subsequent months.

Kish said the administration’s recent vehicle emissions proposals, released a few weeks after the Willow project approval, stand out as particularly radical.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) anticipates that its standards will lead to the mass adoption of electric vehicles over the next decade, projecting that fully two-thirds of new light-body vehicles sold in model year 2032 will fall into that category.

“EPA’s proposed emissions plan is aggressive by any measure. By that, I mean it sets automotive electrification goals in the next few years that are ... very high,” John Bozzella, president and CEO of the automaker trade organization Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote in an April 12 blog post, upon the release of the standards.

Tesla superchargers in San Rafael, Calif., on Feb. 15, 2023. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Kish said he believes that the standards “are going to destroy the American automobile industry.”

Appearance May Trump Reality

Analysts who spoke with The Epoch Times stressed that the appearance of moderation from Biden is just that–appearance, not reality.

Mehlman said the administration’s rhetoric on the border is part of “a strategy to mask the scope of what’s going on there.”

“They’re trying to remove the bad optics without necessarily changing the policy,” he said.

Kish made a similar claim about the Willow project.

“[Biden] got one up on the board that made it look as though he was being reasonable on energy,” he said.

If Biden’s policies are as far left as Republicans argue, how might he credibly position himself as a centrist?

Mailman said she thinks his “Sleepy Joe” moniker coined by Trump is more powerful than Republicans believe.

U.S. President Joe Biden sits on a train as he goes over his speech marking the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine after a surprise visit to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Feb. 20, 2023. EVAN VUCCI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

She said Biden’s policies appear less radical than they are to some voters precisely because he can “seem moderate, seem boring, seem stable.”

Mailman said she believes that Democrats can keep notching wins by portraying their opponents as the opposite.

“As long as they are labeling Republicans as ’MAGA extremists,‘ which you can see them doing, that ’We are the Democracy Party' angle [is] the angle that they really need to continue to capture,” she said.

Chmielenski pointed out that another possible advantage for Biden is that he faces a Republican Party that doesn’t always offer a coherent message on immigration. Republicans who are comfortable condemning illegal border crossings are often less willing to question the overall rate of immigration, whether legal or illegal.

“Nobody’s really up in arms about the number of people they’re letting into the country,” he said.

Chmielenski suggested that Biden’s new parole programs could offer “quasi-legal” paths for would-be Americans.

The results could look less chaotic than the current border while opening up the possibility of additional legal immigration into a country that has already been demographically transformed by the influx of foreigners since the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965.

“People have a better perception of legal immigration,” Chmielenski said.

“The President’s new auto mileage and emissions standards will cut our use of OPEC oil, saving consumers billions at the pump, reduce pollution, and help US automakers compete better against Chinese car companies. This is auto mechanics, not rocket science, so what’s not to like?” Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a May 9 email to The Epoch Times.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Immigration Council, and Fossil Free, among other analysts and organizations, didn’t respond by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.