Try to imagine every single person in Alaska.

Now add everyone in Delaware. And in Hawaii. And in Maine. And in Montana. Now add New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Add together every single person in each of those states. Now you have a sense of how many illegal immigrants our demented Democrat president, Joseph Robinette Biden, has allowed to invade our country by refusing to secure our southern border.

We cease to be a country when we cease to control our border. And anyone who doubts that this “browning” of America is a key component of Barack Obama’s third term in office and the Democrats’ long-held plan for permanent political power hasn’t been paying attention.

This isn’t the sexiest story of the year. Let’s face it: We’re all sick of hearing about the border. Not a week goes by here in our humble shop when we aren’t struggling for a way to put a novel spin on a broken record of a disaster. But Joe Biden’s refusal — as opposed to “failure,” which implies effort — to abide by his constitutional duty to secure our southern border is without a doubt the most consequential story of the year.

It’s also an impeachable offense, and it speaks to Republican myopia that they fixate on the Biden Crime Family’s influence peddling rather than having charged the president with this inarguably high crime long ago. We can’t absorb a Pennsylvania of low-skilled and unskilled, non-English-speaking immigrants and not have it permanently change our national fabric. As we wrote earlier this year, the costs are incalculable.

Customs and Border Protection says we recently saw a record 14,509 illegals in a single day, Tuesday. In addition, as Fox News’s Bill Melugin reports, we’ve already had more than 200,000 border encounters in December alone. That’s the equivalent of a Birmingham, Alabama, crossing our border in just 20 days.

They’re coming from everywhere — from Guinea, Senegal, Liberia, Oman, Lebanon, Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere. They’re flying from Africa into Central America, then heading north. As our Emmy Griffin challenged earlier this week, “Tell us again how it’s not an invasion.”

But don’t worry. A Colombian woman was given her confirmed appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for — we kid you not — Thursday, January 23, 2031. This is called back-door amnesty, and this is what Democrat governance gets you.

“It’s deliberate,” says Newt Gingrich, stating the obvious before adding something less obvious: that the Democrats’ next phase is to grant illegals the right to vote.

Estimates vary when it comes to the scale of this calamity. And why wouldn’t they? How can we keep track of a nearly 2,000-mile border when our president isn’t interested in doing so? As the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reports, “A new estimate this week put the growing population of ‘gotaways’ at a sky-high 13 million, more than the population of every state except four: California, Texas, New York, and Florida.”

That shockingly large number comes from an expert: Steven Camarota, the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies. “He provided the new estimate at a conference held this week,” Bedard continues, “during which he released a new census-based report showing that there are almost 50 million foreign-born citizens in the country, far more than previously expected by the government and likely driven by the spike in Biden administration-approved immigrants flooding into the country.”

Camerota’s paper also studied the ruinous economic impact of such a massive migration, noting that 54% of immigrant households — including naturalized citizens, legal residents, and illegal immigrants — used at least one major welfare program. The rate is even higher, 59%, for noncitizen households, which include green-card holders and illegal immigrants. As for U.S.-born households, “only” 39% are on the government dole.

Any suggestion that the Democrats have been powerless to stop this invasion — and this depletion of our treasury — is a lie, and that was made clear this week when news began to trickle out that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a band of establishment Republicans have been working in secret to tamp down the flow of illegals in exchange for $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. North Carolina moderate Thom Tillis and his fellow Republicans proposed a trigger of 3,000 illegal crossings per day for closing the border, which was down from the Democrats’ opening offer of 5,000 per day.

Huh? How about zero? Does zero work for these people? And why are we bartering on behalf of Ukraine to secure our border? As the New York Post editorial board puts it:

If Washington can tell border agents to stop waving in illegals when the total hits some arbitrary threshold, then it can tell them to do it from the get-go. In other words, by dickering over just how many illegal migrants can come through in a day before the door slams shut, the Biden administration has at long last said the quiet part out loud: The law doesn’t actually require treating the word “asylum” as a magic “Open sesame.”

Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, who wasn’t invited to the private powwow, spoke for many of us: “Conducting rushed and secret backroom negotiations is not the way to address the unprecedented border crisis. That’s the kind of business-as-usual process that Washington leadership has relied upon to mortgage our children’s future and weaken our country.”

Thanks to Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. That’s because this administration has long been packing up and sending illegals all over the country, to every congressional district in the 50 states.

Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has been returning the favor. Abbott, who followed the lead of Ron DeSantis but recently endorsed Donald Trump for president, is flying illegals to sanctuary cities like Chicago while noting that every sanctuary city is fair game. “Until Biden steps up to secure the border,” he said, “we will continue to provide overwhelmed Texas border towns with much-needed relief.”

Chicago’s sanctuary mayor, Brandon Johnson, is squealing like a stuck pig: “We have a governor … that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago. … The governor of Texas needs to take a look in the mirror of the chaos that he is causing for this country. This is not just a Chicago dynamic. He is attacking our country.”

Got that? The guy who’s trying to secure our country’s borders and enforce its laws is actually “attacking our country.”

Republicans haven’t been as strong on securing our border as they should be, largely because they’ve been cowed by a phony political calculus: They mistakenly believe that Hispanics will hold it against them at the polls. But Hispanics, as it turns out, are sick of this situation too. Judy Gutierrez, a lifelong resident of the border town of El Paso and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, calls the situation “unsustainable” and says that the normally solidly Democrat city will reflect its displeasure at the polls. “They’re really frustrated. … They just feel nothing is being done and their voices aren’t being heard.”

If you like what’s been happening at our southern border under Joe Biden, then the Democrats are your party. If you deplore it, if you want your voice to be heard, then it’s your duty to vote for the party that believes national borders are not optional, not a bargaining chip, not a “nice to have.”

As for that national fabric we mentioned earlier, what are the effects — over weeks and months and years and generations — of an influx of people unlike any in American history that is forcibly distributed across the land by the Biden administration? Does our patriotism and our sense of Americanness grow stronger or weaker? Do we become more inclined to fight for our country or less so? More inclined to obey our nation’s laws or less so? More inclined to pay taxes or less so? More inclined to work or less so? More inclined to vote or less so?

If recent polling is any indication, the American people are finally waking up. According to a recent Fox News poll, the percentage of voters who see illegal immigration as the most important issue facing the country has nearly doubled since August.

As for what ought to be done by the first post-Biden administration, 89% of Republicans favor deporting illegal immigrants, while Democrats are divided, with 48% in favor and 44% in opposition.

The 2024 presidential election will have consequences, and none will be more profound or long-lasting than our nation’s border security.