We know exactly the cause of our disastrous immigration crisis. It was us. We voters have only ourselves to blame.
Biden didn’t even try to deceive us on this one. In the 2020 presidential debates, he vowed “on day one” to reverse Trump’s immigration policies. He promised to provide free healthcare to illegal aliens.
Unlike many other campaign promises, he faithfully kept these. He also terminated the Remain in Mexico policy and ended the ban on travel from centers of terrorism. He loosened the rules for seeking asylum so that millions of healthy appearing military-aged males were able to claim “I am afraid“ and be admitted to the land of the free.
Most Americans didn’t think through the consequences of an open immigration policy, Now the associated problems are beyond obvious. Yet many, particularly religious NGOs, see welcoming all immigrants as an act of decency and compassion which all people of good will should applaud.
Is importing tens of millions of persons without qualifications into America, with only the hope they will somehow engage and become productive and independent, really the way to build a better world? There are 8 billion humans on this planet. They obviously can’t all be brought here.
Immigration does not increase the world’s net wealth, it merely redistributes it. The winners are those who are willing and able to make the arduous trek here and defy our laws. The losers are those still in their country of origin and the rest of us.
But the real force driving the illegal immigration surge came from Democrats and the political left. There is no other way to interpret the events over the last three years other than as a brazen attempt to attract millions of future Democrat voters and permanently alter the character of the American polity. Long after the political winds began to blow against the administration’s policies, the Biden gang was willing to take one for the team and keep on going.
The question now is: will the grand scheme work? Signs are appearing that racial minorities might not be Democrat wards forever, like the perhaps apocryphal one who told Democrats “we’ve been voting for you for 60 years and we’re still poor.” Democrat-led big cities, which is virtually all of them, are getting fed up with the squalor and budget pressures that’s come with thousands of demanding “newcomers“ appearing in the night, not to mention luxury hotels filling up. The immigration disaster is looming as a major, possibly the decisive, factor in the upcoming election.
Immigration advocates claim that immigrants are actually valuable additions to our society. They are correct that modern America was created by immigrants, without whose efforts we wouldn’t exist.
Yet there’s a world of difference between the Ellis Island immigrants who loved America and were eager to fulfill the requirements of citizenship, and the millions streaming in today. To paraphrase JFK, they seem to care little about what they can do for their new country, but only what it will do for them.
Even if unlimited immigration were a great policy that benefited both immigrants and their hosts, the timing is terrible for two reasons. First is the rapid advance of AI and other laborsaving technologies that will replace many of the low scale jobs that, in the brightest scenario, the uneducated masses would fill. The question for labor economists has changed from who will pick the lettuce and staff the fast food chains to how we find employment for the laborers, now including the “newcomers“, whose jobs are disappearing.
The other, more serious, problem is that we live in an increasingly dangerous world. With the rise of Islamist jihadists and the growing belligerence of international communism and other mortal enemies, it is lunacy for America to maintain an essentially unmanned border.
The solutions at this point have narrowed. First, we need an administration that will turn off the spigot. But now we have 20 million non-Americans who as they age will increasingly demand their share of benefits, which are already imperiled due to lack of future funding.
Repatriation, the ultimate solution, is logistically and politically fraught. We will be a long time regretting this massive foolishness.
Tom Patterson is a former member of the Arizona State Senate and was chairman of the Goldwater Institute for more than a decade.