Consumers of the mainstream media might think that all news stopped on Jan. 6, 2021, but readers of The Daily Signal know that illegal crossings at the U.S. border are at “astronomical and record-breaking levels,” as a just issued reportAccording to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Republican minority.
The 47-page report, “Biden’s Border Crisis: Examining Policies That Encourage Illegal Immigration,” describes the ongoing disgrace on our southern border and the utter failure of the Obama and Biden administrations to address it, concluding with some recommendations for immediate action to secure our country from uncontrolled illegal immigration.
First, the numbers. In April, 234,088 foreigners attempted to illegally enter the United States tried to cross the border. That’s the highest-ever monthly total.
Even as the report was being prepared, this record was already broken. In May, “there were 239,416 encounters along the southwest land border,” according to government figures.
That doesn’t count the unknown (and unknowable) number that evaded detection entirely. One estimate puts that number—the “got-aways”—at about a third (32%) of those caught, which would mean more than 600,000 last year.
According to the report, most illegal crossers still come from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), but the number from elsewhere increased nearly nine times between President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 and March of this year to more than 88,000.
Not only Ecuadorians, Haitians and Cubans have heard the message from Biden, but also Cameroonians and Bangladeshis and Chinese that the border is open for illegal crossing without any credible repercussions.
As 2022 progresses, we are close to exceeding the 1.7 Million illegals captured at the southern border in 2020, which was an unprecedented figure.
The crisis has been brewing since decades, the report shows. The “push factors” in Latin America (not to mention much of Africa and Asia) get worse: feckless governments, corruption, poverty, and economies hampered by socialism or incompetence, or incapable of harnessing the labor of their burgeoning populations.
Transnational criminal organisations such as the Tijuana cartel, and gangs like MS-13 are essential brokers on the U.S. route and are making billions.
The report says that “55% of those traveling illegally [use] a smuggler” at rates up to $10,000 a head. Illegal border crossers from the Northern Triangle paid an estimated $1.7 Billion in 2021 to enter the U.S.
What has the U.S. done?
To summarize the report’s conclusion, we have spent billions of dollars in foreign assistance in failed efforts to tackle the “root causes” of immigration. No doubt some of it reached the target countries, but much will have gone in administration and overhead fees to the “Beltway bandits” run by nongovernmental organizations with government connections.
The Obama administration’s Strategy for Engagement in Central America was built on the fantasy that any amount of U.S. money (in that case, $3.6 billion) could fix what ails the countries to our south.
It is absurd to believe that we can afford enough to spend on noble, but vague, goals like security cooperation and promoting economic prosperity in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in order to deter their youth leaving.
In the words of the State Department’s senior Latin American official in 2019, “This approach failed.” There is no realistic correlation between U.S. aid dollars spent in Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and any reduction in illegal crossings of our border by the targeted nations, much less from places such as Eritrea and India, which the “root causes” aid spigot does not even touch.
Meanwhile, as the report makes clear, President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents programs were essentially amnesty by the slow boat, adding to the factors pulling illegal migrants into the U.S.
Just as “Justice delayed is justice denied,” so too action on immigration deferred, whether by Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole, or deliberate lack of prosecution, is amnesty in practice.
With an official policy of “prosecutorial discretion” not to deport them, work authorization, schooling for their children, health care in emergency rooms, and even driver’s licenses and “free” in-state college tuition in many states, illegal residents of the U.S are highly incentivized to stay.
Biden’s administration came to power with an open border mentality and determined to undo all that President Donald Trump had done in order to control the border. Biden ended the Migrant Protection Protocols. These protocols, which sent would be illegal immigrants back into Mexico while they were deciding their cases, deterred fraudulent asylum claims by economic migrants.
Biden also ended the promising Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Northern Triangle countries, and through regulatory overreach and prosecutorial discretion—which in practice means telling prosecutors not to do their jobs—undid efforts to streamline the asylum-processing system.
U.S. immigration courts currently have 1.7 millions pending cases and this unavoidable backlog is rapidly growing.
The Biden regime is determined to also succeed. end Title 42Trump’s health-related provision, which allows CBP and the FBI to expel illegal aliens before they can be admitted or claim asylum.
The disdain with which this administration treats career border officials and agents who attempt to enforce the law is disgraceful, from Biden’s silence when Texas National Guardsman Bishop Evans died saving illegal immigrants from drowning to the White House’s refusal to apologize to mounted Border Patrol agents after falsely accusing them of using their reins to whip Haitians crossing into the U.S. illegally.
The consequences of Biden’s abject refusal to enforce our immigration laws are obvious, if slow to unfurl. At the current rate, the Biden border allows in enough illegals to fill a large city like Houston or Chicago in one year. CBP will likely arrest over 10,000 of them. criminal aliensIn 2022.
How many made it through, while agents were pulled off the border to rubber-stamp “credible fear” claims that end in asylum applicants being released indefinitely? The Department of Homeland Security reported in 2017 that of the 89% of illegal migrants from the Northern Triangle who claimed asylum and then passed an initial “credible fear” screening, “more than half never applied for asylum after being released or failed to show for their initial hearing.”
Although drug seizures at border borders are at an all time high, they are still at record levels. However, it is enough to cause the deaths of more than 107,000 Americans from overdoses last year.
Despite the failure of Obama’s effort to stem the tide of illegal migrants by throwing money at “root causes,” according to the report, the Biden administration doubled down with its own Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.
It’s the same idea: billions in deficit-funded U.S. tax money in an attempt to create functional democracies in the Northern Triangle. This being the Biden administration, it sprinkled the plan with terms such as “community-based solutions” and “safe spaces,” and added climate change and “sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence” to the list of problems to solve, but it’s essentially the same program as Obama’s and will achieve as little.
What we can’t do is clear. “The United States is not responsible for solving the transnational crime, migration management, and border security issues in Mexico and northern Central America,” the report concludes.
What the administration can do, the senators recommend, is “use all available tools to secure the border” right now, including Title 42 and the Migrant Protection Protocols.
In the longer term, they recommend targeting U.S. assistance to “strengthen the capacity, funding, and staffing of migration management and law enforcement agencies” in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries to process refugees there, and signing Asylum Cooperative Agreements or similar undertakings with them to stem the flow into the U.S.
The senators also recommended that we work with our southern neighbours to prosecute organized criminals making money from the misery of both migrants as well as the tens and thousands of Americans who each year overdose on drugs smuggled through Mexico.
There’s even more to be done, as outlined in a May 2022 joint letter to CongressIndependent public policy groups such as The Heritage Foundation, former Trump administration officials, and others.
Those measures would reestablish the successful “Remain in Mexico” agreement, correct regulatory overreach, limit prosecutorial discretion, and generally get control of the border through proper enforcement of existing laws.
Only when the border is not an unmitigated chaos, can the country start to think about reforming immigration laws in a greater national interest.
Until then, warming over the cold hash of foreign aid and social justice programs that have been tried and failed before is only going to make Americans poorer, less safe, and less confident in their government’s ability to protect them.
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