The Patriot Post® · Illegal Immigration Myopia

What do President Joe Biden and his Democrat supporters really think about our three years of wide-open southern border? Perhaps they’re still happy with it — or maybe as the election season heats up, they think it might have been a political misstep.

Either way, they’re not even close. Enabling the tsunami of illegal immigration into the U.S. has been a colossal failure in public policy that will haunt our nation for decades — and we’ve yet to internalize its implications.

We got a whiff of that myopia from last week’s State of the Union Address (SOTU) and the subsequent reactions to it.

Given the ugly poll numbers on that topic, Biden’s speech writers understandably held back mention of the border issue until late in the SOTU and limited his remarks to criticism of Republicans for refusing to act on the Senate’s recently proposed border legislation.

He’d evidently not planned to acknowledge the latest incident of illegal immigrant violence, the murder last month of nursing student Laken Riley. But when goaded by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene to “say her name!”, he did so — or tried. Interrupted from his teleprompter reading, Biden ad-libbed, first mispronouncing her name, then stating that “she was killed by an illegal,” and adding the confusing rhetorical question, “But how many thousands of people are being killed by legals?”

That latter part of Biden’s unscripted comments has not received much attention, but it reveals a remarkably casual attitude about the safety and security of Americans — as if to say, what’s the big deal about a few extra murders and rapes?

But it’s Biden’s description of Riley’s killer as an “illegal” that set the Leftmedia’s hair on fire. A day later, he apologized, advising that he’d made a mistake in using that derogatory word — he should have called the murderer “undocumented.” Later yet, the White House Press Office “clarified” his correction, asserting that it was not an apology; Biden was simply using the proper terminology.

And so, here we are. After three years of the open border that Democrats had long advocated, reversal by President Biden of all Trump-era border control policy, repeated assertions over that time that our border was “secure,” known entry into our country of roughly ten million unvetted aliens from countries all around the world (many hostile to the U.S.) now scattered throughout the nation — that entire topic merits only a few words in our president’s report to Americans about the state of our union. And the aspect consuming the full attention of American media and administration officials is whether we should call them “illegal” or “undocumented.”

But that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. The vastly greater problem facing America is that among those ten million are surely some with the capability and intent to do great harm: violent criminals, gang bangers, cartel members, drug pushers, and even terrorists. Yes, the vast majority of illegal entrants are no doubt individuals simply seeking a better life, but even a tiny fraction of bad actors equates to thousands who pose dire threats to individual Americans — like Laken Riley — and perhaps to the nation as a whole.

Who are they? Where are they? We don’t know — and sadly, most will only be revealed by the crimes that they commit.

This is a problem that already exists and would be with us even if our leaders found a way to close our border tomorrow. That won’t happen, of course, and the situation will only worsen with every passing day.

Moreover, it will be faced by whoever is elected president in November. We can debate ad nauseam what President Biden should have done about the border and what former President Trump claims he would have done about the border; but as we voters wrestle with the choice between Biden and Trump (or whomever our political parties nominate this summer), we’d best focus on how each proposes to deal with the problem of our ten million unvetted aliens.

So far, Joe Biden is unwilling even to acknowledge the enormous problem he has created. Presumably, if elected, he plans to do nothing — no doubt, he’d like to see them voting before long (an entirely new cadre of natural Democrats), and he would confront whatever horrors the bad ones instigate as they occur. That is a recipe for catastrophe (think 9/11 or last October 7th in Israel…).

Trump, on the other hand, boasts that he will un-bake the cake, rounding up all ten million and sending them back to wherever they came from — a wholly unrealistic, enormously difficult undertaking. Good rally talk, but hardly a serious plan.

And a wrong-headed one. Having effectively invited these millions of migrants, promising them asylum consideration, and then turning them loose in the countryside (thanks, Mr. Biden), we now have an implicit responsibility to treat them humanely and fairly. That has already proven to be a huge burden, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Yes, we must close the border, we must revamp our asylum process, and we must reopen the entire matter of legal immigration. And through it all, we must deal with the millions of illegals, good and bad, already here. Don’t let our presidential candidates off the hook. Demand to know what they plan to do.