What if we threw a humanitarian nightmare of biblical proportions, and hardly anyone showed up?

That seems to be what’s happened — at least initially. The expiration of Title 42 — the Trump-era defense against the waves of phony “asylum seekers” who’ve kept migrating to and pouring across our southern border, to the tune of more than six million since Joe Biden took office — gave us every reason to expect an onslaught. But we didn’t get it.

Some 700,000 would-be illegals reportedly had been amassing along the border in apparent anticipation of Title 42’s expiration on Thursday, and, as our Emmy Griffin wrote on Friday: “There are only 20,000 Border Patrol agents. They are already overwhelmed. There have been 10,000 illegals apprehended per day since Monday. President Joe Biden has sent the Border Patrol another 1,500 personnel from the Army to handle the incoming flow.”

As if 1,500 Army bystanders could do anything to restrict such a flow. That was never their intention, of course — their presence was simply meant to lend legitimacy to a failed policy, to give the American people the sense that the Biden administration wasn’t just standing there but was doing something.

Biden had even conceded to a largely incurious media that the southern border would be “chaotic for a while,” as if it hadn’t been so throughout his tenure.

And yet there he was this weekend, all but celebrating his success during a bike ride back at his vacation home in Rehoboth, Delaware. “Much better than you all expected,” Biden crowed when asked about The Surge That Wasn’t.

At least one border-town mayor confirms this: “The amount of migrants we were expecting initially, the big flow, is not here yet,” said the mayor of Laredo, Texas, Victor Trevino.

“The numbers we have experienced in the past two days are markedly down over what they were prior to the end of Title 42,” said Joe Biden’s as-yet unimpeached homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, to the friendlies on CNN this weekend, crediting the administration’s ostensibly brilliant plan and noting that there were just 6,300 border encounters on Friday and 4,200 on Saturday.

As Fox News reports: “The Biden administration’s post-Title 42 plan requires migrants to schedule an immigration appointment through an app or seek protection from countries they passed through on their way to the U.S. border. If they do not follow the process and are caught entering the U.S. illegally, they are not allowed to try again, even through legal means, for five years. There are prison terms for other violations.”

Ooooh. If these illegals aren’t going to respect our nation’s borders, what makes the Biden administration think they’re going to respect their new rules, especially when they’re coming from a guy who, during a 2019 Democrat presidential debate, invited “all those people who are seeking asylum” to “immediately surge to the border”?

The Bidenvasion, even if less catastrophic than originally anticipated, is still grim, especially for the 85,000 children who have entered the U.S. recently but whose location or status is unknown to Team Biden.

As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson writes: “In the end, the only thing that will end the ongoing border crisis is to fix our asylum and immigration laws so they can’t be exploited by illegal immigrants making bogus asylum claims. Programs like Title 42, or even the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy, are stop-gaps at best. To secure the border, we’re going to need laws that mandate a secure border, which means closing the asylum loopholes, immediately deporting those who cross illegally, and building a really high wall.”

None of this will happen as long as Joe Biden is president — especially not the “really high wall” part. But we know of a certain presidential candidate who might just make such things a priority if he’s elected in 2024.