In autopsies of Joe Biden’s presidency, one word will be explanatory: disorder. From urban crime to campus tumults to inflation’s comprehensive disruption — the currency becoming emaciated — Americans fear societal fraying. The most infuriating provocation is immigration. An essential attribute of national sovereignty — control of borders — has been sacrificed on the altar of “equity,” with collateral damage far from the southwestern border. Far-flung communities — their hospitals, their schools — experience the truth that “every state is a border state.”

A young man from Honduras is released into the national interior, where he replicates a pattern as old as immigration, going where other Hondurans have settled, in cities far from the Rio Grande. He has responded to incentives concocted on the banks of the Potomac.

Biden’s syntactical labyrinths are amusing, until they aren’t. In a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, he said: “I would in fact make sure that there is, that we immediately surge to the border — all those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard.” They heard him.

When caravans of migrants headed north during Biden’s presidency, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said they considered Biden “the immigrant president.” Many headed for cities that performative progressives had declared “sanctuaries” that would not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Chicago, a sanctuary since 1985, is now buckling under the cost of its moralizing. In New York, a sanctuary since 1989, illegal immigration “will destroy” the city, Mayor Eric Adams (D) says. Virtue signaling has costs.

On his first presidential day, Biden committed his administration to “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” His Department of Homeland Security said it would apply Biden’s words “in the immigration and enforcement context.”

Writing in City Journal about “a border crisis by design,” Jeffrey H. Anderson, president of the American Main Street Initiative, calls today’s crisis the result of Biden’s “unprecedented refusal to enforce federal immigration law,” which requires that asylum seekers be detained rather than released while their claims are adjudicated.

So, many aliens arriving at Biden’s deliberately porous border sought rather than evaded Border Patrol officers. Anderson says that in December 2020, Donald Trump’s last full presidential month, 17 aliens were released into the nation. Two Decembers later, 191,142 were. Biden’s administration justified this erasure of law as “prosecutorial discretion.” Also writing in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga says, “By late 2022, the immigration court backlog had swelled to 1.6 million people,” who could largely ignore this coagulated process.

In August 2020, officials reported detaining five attempted entries in the El Paso sector, then operating under a presidential order allowing officials to summarily expel illegal border crossers. In August 2022, that order having been rescinded, officials detained 3,453. In Kinney County, Tex., sheriff’s deputies made 67 arrests for smuggling in 2021, but 3,045 in 2022, when security cameras showed about 21,500 people crossing the border with impunity.

Polls have concentrated Biden’s mind. On Tuesday, he announced that he will faithfully execute his executive order intended to contain the wreckage wrought by his refusal to perform his core constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” New restrictions will take effect when illegal crossings exceed 2,500 a day. The arithmetic is: 912,500 (approximately the population of Biden’s Delaware) in a year could melt into the nation, as under today’s system. Regarding border security, as when combating inflation or aiding Ukraine, Biden is a too-little-too-late president.

Presidents from both parties have become geysers of executive orders, imposing tariffs, essentially banning internal combustion vehicles, forgiving student debts, altering the legal status of millions of immigrants, etc. What fun.

Until it isn’t. Until the public, taught by presidential highhandedness that presidents can do whatever they please, blames them for whatever problems persist. This is both unfair and richly deserved. Today’s Congress, which has been well-described as cable television’s largest green room, escapes blame for the immigration disaster because the public, fixated on the presidency, knows that, for Congress, governance is a spectator sport.

This nation, with an aging population, increasing life expectancy, declining birthrate and entitlements transferring trillions of dollars from employees to retirees, needs lots of legal immigrants to replenish its workforce. That the government cannot provide for this is a failure second only to the nation’s fiscal shambles. In five months, Biden, who is too busy “saving democracy” to attend to mundane matters of public order, might find that the immigration inundation is the most politically lethal of his multiplying failures.