Did Biden’s “I Shouldn’t Have Used the Word Illegal” Apology Go Far Enough?

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MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart has an interview with President Biden, following up on Biden’s State of the Union speech.

Capehart:  “You used the word illegal…”

Biden: “Undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used the word illegal, it’s undocumented person.”…

Capehart: “So, you regret using that word?”

Biden: “yes.”

Maybe Biden is being smart, using the world “illegal” in the State of the Union before a large audience of swing voters, then backing away from it an interview with MSNBC’s largely left-leaning audience. It seemed to satisfy progressive Democrats. Congressman Chuy Garcia, Democrat of Illinois, tweeted, “I’m comforted that President Biden recognizes his serious error. We cannot parrot the xenophobic, dangerous rhetoric of the right, and we cannot perpetuate their failed enforcement-only immigration policies either.”

Yet for center-right commentators, the whole episode seemed telling. The writer Adam Rubenstein tweeted, “this type of hyperbolic remonstration, aimed at prompting an apology for repeating a minor cultural taboo (in this case successfully), leaves no one better off. It’s just morality policing.”

Said Robert Kelner, “I may be wrong, but this could be a significant moment in the campaign. An error (his retraction of the statement, that is) that will reverberate throughout the rest of the campaign and impact the outcome. He had it right the first time.” Said Kelner, “If Trump wins, this explains why. What was wrong with calling the illegal immigrant ‘an illegal’? It was a true statement. Biden looks weak and completely beholden to political correctness, wokeness, or virtue signaling. Whatever you want to call it. It’s Trump’s secret weapon.”

I’m a proponent of more legal immigration, but it strikes me that this flap is less about immigration than about the enforcement mechanisms that a certain set of leftists who dominate the press and academia use to signal their own enlightenment. It’s a kind of one-upmanship (one-uppersonship?) in which the ability to keep up with the most-up-to-date terminology is a brag that you have the leisure time available to prioritize that rather than, say, anything more prosaic, such as earning a living, or taking care of a family.

The high, or low, point of this for me came on a recent tour for prospective students and parents at a highly rejective college where the college-student tour guide pointed out a campus building that housed a center to support “students who identify as undocumented.”