The euphoria so many of us felt as the vaccines took hold dissipated swiftly as the media relentlessly hyped the Delta variant. So far, the economic impact hasn’t been that bad (and the numbers this morning were encouraging), although many big companies are now telling employees not to come back to the office next month. In the fall, the travel and tourism and restaurant businesses could take a hit, without the federal assistance that kept them afloat last year. I’ve watched in a resort town how a fully booked summer suddenly evaporated — with real impact on some shellacked small businesses. At best, recovery will be tempered.
The trouble is mounting on some other fronts. On immigration, where Biden’s seriously underwater in the polls, Biden’s assurances that the huge uptick in migrants at the Southern border was just seasonal have also lost any credibility. Fifty thousand asylum seekers have been released into the US under Biden without a court date, in a sign of just how overwhelmed the system now is. Migrants from Cuba, Haiti and African countries are gathering south of the border in large numbers. June broke a 20-year record on the number of migrant arrests, with a staggering 178,000, when the summer heat almost invariably sees a sharp decline. This is not a sign of a crisis easing.
A million arrests have been made since last October. Axios notes that migrants coming from nations other than Mexico, Guatemala, Hondura and El Salvador rose yet again last month, to 46,000 (from 11,600 in February). As more and more of these Bangladeshis, Romanians and Ecuadorians are admitted to the US, pending court dates far into the future, more and more will come.
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