The Patriot Post® · Untouchable Untenables
Sustainability, one of society’s most in-vogue words, is relentlessly applied to discourse involving climate change but never uttered in conversations about two of today’s most important topics: immigration and the national debt. Paralyzed by hyper-partisan attitudes and, in some ways, the will of the people, no action has been taken in the 21st century to address the fiscal imbalance caused by government spending or our broken immigration system.
The annual deficit will approach $2 trillion this year. This is despite Joe Biden’s claims he decreased the deficit and despite the debt ceiling agreement he and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated, which was supposed to restrain government spending. Unfortunately, Congress’s collective apathy toward entitlement spending guarantees exploding deficits for the years to come.
Spending on entitlements accounts for 66% of the budget. Factor in interest on the debt, and only 26% of our budget is available to go to other programs. Any leftist who wants more money for some useless and counterproductive government program must first solve the fiscal imbalance created by the last bout of government intervention.
Furthermore, the unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare totals $78 trillion. The structure of these programs combined with an aging population ensures their bankruptcy (and eventually our nation’s) in the next decade or so. But leave it to our leaders in Washington to ignore a problem that would affect millions. Once the Medicare hospital trust fund runs out, deficits will become even more burdensome than they already are. And once the Social Security trust is emptied, retirees will face immediate benefit cuts to cover the shortfall.
But when reelection is the number one priority of Congress, it’s foolish to expect any changes soon.
Illegal immigration also illustrates the incompetence of the executive and the legislature. Since the amnesty in the ‘80s, immigration laws have not been enforced to the extent that they should be. When Ronald Reagan signed into law an amnesty in 1986, part of the legislation included employer sanctions that dictated it was unlawful to knowingly hire an illegal immigrant. These employer sanctions and other laws regulating immigration enforcement have been taken as suggestions rather than dicta, to the misfortune of hard-working Americans.
According to CBS, border crossings approached and sometimes surpassed 10,000 per day in December, part of a record-breaking year of border crossings. The sustained flow of migrants is putting incredible stress on American communities. Don’t just take my word for it — New York City Mayor Eric Adams has commented that the surge of migrants will “destroy New York City.”
The laws surrounding legal immigration also pose a threat to the prosperity of the American people. In 1995, civil rights hero Barbara Jordan chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and proposed reforms that Donald Trump echoed during his 2016 presidential campaign. Not only did the report stress the importance of curbing illegal migration through the enforcement of employer sanctions and deportation, but it also called for reductions to legal immigration into the United States.
Rather than heeding the Commission’s advice, politicians ignored it. Instead, they pressed for amnesty and an increase in legal immigration in a series of failed attempts to reform the system.
American Patriots do not want to be lectured about sustainability exclusively in the environmental context. They want an end to this unsustainable spending and relentless immigration that began with the 1965 Immigration Act. Leaving these issues untouched is becoming increasingly untenable and, yes, unsustainable.