Over the past four years, President Joe Biden conducted an experiment: What happens if you open the U.S. border to nearly all who seek entry?
He released millions of aliens at the border, paroled over a million more using programs Congress never authorized, and allowed at least 2 million more to evade the Border Patrol.
That resulted in the fastest illegal influx in U.S. history. The foreign-born population now exceeds the previous high from the 1890s – over 15%.
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The legacy media did its best to hide all this, habitually "gaslighting" their audience – telling many smaller lies in the hopes that eventually people will believe one big lie.
The big lie Biden and his media allies told America is that open borders bring unmitigated good. To prepare the public to swallow this, they told many little lies.
They aren’t. Congress authorized around 850,000 legal immigrants a year, based on family relationships and labor needs. The millions Biden has paroled, released or given "temporary" protection to under dubious programs are outside what Congress intended. And unless Congress changes it, the law should be upheld.
The methodology of studies claiming this is suspect, but we know some illegal aliens do commit additional crimes, every one of which is preventable if laws are enforced. One report estimates that "crime by illegal aliens … cost the country some $166.5 billion." But the cost in victims assaulted or murdered, and a declining sense of public safety, is incalculable.
Which ones? Those under 30 with doctorates in rocket science do. But those without a high-school degree, skills or English don’t. Almost 60% of families headed by an illegal immigrant are on a federal welfare program. Illegal aliens are less educated than U.S. citizens. Over their lifetimes, most of those let in under Biden’s border boom will be a fiscal burden to the country, not a benefit.
According to one congressional estimate, illegal immigrants cost over $150 billion a year. To take but one example, the Biden administration wrote a rule forcing Americans to pay for health insurance for people here illegally. "Congress never intended that illegal aliens should receive Obamacare benefits," said Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, after a federal court overturned Biden’s rule this week.
While the Biden administration undid every effective policy of previous eras, they asked you to believe that mass illegal migration wasn’t their fault. But it was not earthquakes, wars, or feckless governments that attracted the world’s economic migrants to our borders. This week, even the New York Times admitted: "the Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor."
Some of us have been saying that for years. But the legacy media only turned the lights back up when their favorite team lost an election.
The people elected Trump to fix Biden’s mistake. How? The recipe is clear, and with Tom Homan as border czar, the cook is in the kitchen.
Also known as Remain in Mexico, this policy discourages fraudulent asylum claims by keeping applicants outside the U.S. until their claims are decided. We also need to conclude Asylum Cooperative Agreements with every possible country, to deal with refugee claimants closest to their homes.
Mass movement of people from the Third World to the First is facilitated by the UN and globalist elites – elected and unelected. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to bring inadmissible aliens to and into the U.S. We can reverse the polarity of this flow by defunding NGOs that facilitate the process and by funding law enforcement.
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Authorize Border Patrol to remove or detain illegal entrants, not process and release them. Re-activate lights, sensors and other measures Biden’s DHS sidelined. Close gaps in the border wall. Barriers don’t stop everyone, but they channel illegal crossing to ports of entry. And, given that both sides of the wall are generally in the United States, we can prosecute anyone cutting or climbing it.
The Biden administration hamstrung Immigration and Customs Enforcement with prohibitions, arbitrary limits, and paperwork. Biden’s dereliction of duty has created a huge backlog in enforcement, including deportations, that needs a major effort to reduce.
States and cities need to hand over aliens in their custody to federal authorities when asked. They need to stop giving out jobs, drivers' licenses, in-state tuition, welfare, and other benefits to people here illegally.
Biden broke the border. America saw the results and voted accordingly. It’s time to restore the rule of law, the value of American citizenship, and legal immigration that puts Americans first.
Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
