In 2021, President Joe Biden widened the inherited secure southern border, finally halting mass illegal immigration.
When he reversed former President Donald Trump’s efforts, more than 8 million illegal immigrants were planned to enter the United States.
Almost all entered the country without background checks, medical exams, or vaccination certificates, but there was a huge need for free housing, education, health care, food rights and subsidies.
For four years, Mr. Trump fought the courts, opposition Democrats, and his own party’s open-borders establishment to ensure only legal immigration. Somehow he rebuilt part of the old porous border fence. He had begun construction on a long-promised new wall to the Gulf of Mexico. He ended the Obama-era catch-and-release system.
Potential refugees had to apply for asylum in their home countries. President Trump has used Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador to secure his country’s borders and cynically block millions of illegal aliens from entering the United States.
All of President Trump’s actions were opposed by the entire Democratic Party, both in Congress and in the courts.
During the last three years of Biden’s mass influx, the left has praised open borders. Until late last year, overwhelmed governors in southern border states began funneling illegal immigrants en masse by bus and plane into their jurisdictions in northern sanctuary cities.
For years, these reserves have maintained a permissive stance on open borders. They slandered those who advocate legal-only immigration as “racists” and “xenophobes.”
But now they are exposed to the real effects of their own destructive ideology.
Major cities in blue states such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., were outraged by the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants without legality, real identification, or background checks.
Some turned out to be violent. It also foreclosed some companies from scarce resources vital to millions of inner-city poor.
The liberal architects of illegal immigration are usually wealthy and powerful enough to escape the consequences of their utopian policies.
But this is not the case for poor and minority voters. They are directly addressing spikes in crime, occupation of parks and civic centers, and limited access to currently overwhelmed social services.
That leaves Democrats and Biden in a predicament, even though the border was once open. They are now concerned about mass defections of core Latino and black voters in an election year.
But how can we square the loop between open border advocacy and the need to appear determined to close borders to our own voters?
This week we saw that ridiculous answer. Shameless Democrats tried to help naive and stupid Republicans bail them out with a “comprehensive immigration bill.”
In fact, we’re spending billions of dollars to facilitate faster and more orderly movement while keeping our borders open, and providing better support for the millions of undocumented people who are here and are coming. Designed to promote welfare support.
Now the Democrats are going crazy and claiming that anyone who didn’t sign up to codify and regulate illegal immigration is responsible for their own intentional open border policies in the first place!
To add insult to injury, they then tried to piggyback harmful immigration legislation on massive aid to Israel and Ukraine. This was an apparent effort to accuse Republicans of harming Israel and supporting Putin if they did not sign on to more effective border openings.
The bill’s supporters’ real agenda is never to return to President Trump’s legal-only immigration and secure borders.
This simple solution requires little new legislation or new spending. But that would mean that the hated Trump admitted that he had resolved the problem administratively, an admission that is clearly taboo.
In the end, the bill was blocked by public outrage from the left and conservative anger at its stupid and naive Republican promoters.
Still, it remains somewhat unclear why Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas destroyed what Trump accomplished. Why do they ensure such misery for both American hosts and millions of illegal immigrants?
Did they want new long-term voters, given that their neo-socialist policies fail to convince the majority of Americans today?
Importing millions of the poorest and most needy people on earth will ensure a great society with even greater entitlements and, with it, higher taxes on the “filthy rich.” Is there a way to secure it?
Do they think that because America is voting more outside of Election Day, there will be far fewer certifications and rejections of mail-in ballots, making it relatively easier for non-citizens to vote?
Even though the current labor force participation rate is only 62 percent of America’s potential labor force, many on the left and right make no secret of their desire for cheap imported labor.
Finally, some might expect this maneuver by the left to be tied to open borders.
But the fact that some establishment Republicans aided and abetted these disingenuous efforts is yet another reminder of why the principled Republican Party had to be reinvented by Trump. .
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Basic Books’ The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.You can contact him via email authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
