In light of the recent revelation that at least 858 individuals and maybe twice that many who had been slated for deportation were accidentally granted citizenship, one would expect that the Department of Homeland Security would be working overtime to shore up its vetting process and do its due diligence to reassure Americans that it will work carefully to prevent such a blunder from happening again. The DHS is indeed working overtime — not to get all its paper finger print records digitalized, but to process as many immigrant citizenship applications as possible before the election.

An email from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office chief stated, “The Field Office due to the election year needs to process as many of the N-400 cases as possible between now and FY 2016.” The email continued by “encouraging” employees to take advantage of overtime opportunities in order to meet the processing goal. The level of disconnect is simply stunning. In a letter sent to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) stated, “Your department seems intent on approving as many naturalization cases as quickly as possible at a time when it should instead be putting on the brakes and reviewing past adjudications.”

The real problem is a mindset. On Monday, one of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers sent around a tweet quoting Donald Trump: “No one has the right to immigrate to this country.” The staffer responded by writing, “We disagree,” and said that Trump would have kicked his family out for immigrating from Libya. Whether this ends up being Clinton’s official policy is almost irrelevant. This staffer revealed an attitude espoused by many on the Left: The U.S. has no right to reject or limit people from immigrating to America, whereas immigrants have an unfettered right to come here. This globalist, open-borders mindset is the main reason it has been so difficult to get Democrats on board with stopping illegal immigration. This fact is made even more obvious by their refusal to refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal,” preferring the moniker “undocumented” immigrant. The truth is, Trump is exactly right that any sovereign nation is obligated to its citizens to regulate immigration, whether this be through limits or prevention. No non-citizen has the right to demand the privilege of citizenship, and to claim that such rights exist is to do violence to the rights of actual citizens.