Why Exactly Did They Destroy the Border?

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Why would any president destroy the U.S. southern border?

The Left typically “pounces” on anyone daring to suggest that the Biden administration had green-lighted illegal immigration to gain new constituents for agendas that otherwise were without broad public support.

The Left smears critics of open borders as racist conspiracists spreading the “Great Replacement Theory.”

Yet for years, Democrats and leftists themselves had written triumphalist books with titles like “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” And often they crowed that “Demography is Destiny.”

A few left-wing globalists even boasted of a new borderless world, in which anyone could live anywhere he wished.

Not too long ago, Texas State Representative Gene Wu (D-Houston), chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, jumped the shark to say out loud what is usually left unsaid about the Democrat agenda:

The same unapologetic left-wing weaponization of illegal immigration is occurring in Europe. Sheer numbers there have already radically changed the demography—and political constituencies—of the continent.

Recently, the former Spanish “Minister of Equality,” an energized Irene Montero, offered an unambiguous rant: “I hope for ‘replacement theory.’ I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants. Whatever their skin color, whether ‘Chinese, Black, or Brown.’”

The culmination of the new hubris in the U.S. was the Biden administration’s destruction of the southern border and enforcement of federal immigration law.

On some days, the Biden influx exceeded anyone’s wildest imagination, at a rate of 10,000 illegal entrants per day. The Homeland “Security” Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in Baghdad Bob style, occasionally pontificated that the border was “secure”—as thousands in the background illegally swarmed the border, without health or even rudimentary background checks.

The Left’s political agenda for illegal immigration was to be realized either immediately through compromised ballot integrity or soon enough by warping the census-based reapportionment of congressional districts.

No wonder there is now near-hysterical Democratic opposition to even basic national requirements of a photo ID to vote. Yet, traditionally liberal polls like Gallup and Pew show that 83 to 84 percent of Americans support mandatory presentation of a voter photo ID.

Usually, the Left fawns over European protocols. But it now grows quiet when reminded that 46 of 47 European nations, even those governed by the Left, require IDs to vote.

Apparently, Democrats assumed that once 10 million more of the world’s poorest had illegally crossed the southern border, without audit or English proficiency, they would filter throughout American society and become impossible to repatriate.

Soon, open borders would flip more states blue, as well as increase their congressional seats. Illegals were to be redefined as mere “residents” and often recipients of mail-in ballots.

The reality that millions of new poor through their needs would grow the welfare state, expand government at all levels, require far more taxes, and fuel the DEI binary of oppressed/oppressors were added benefits.

The nexus between the nine-billion-dollar Somali welfare fraud and Minnesota Democratic officials offers a sharp reminder of how the immigration/welfare/DEI exemption industry was created and protected by authorities.

Biden’s new 10 million unlawful entrants may have increased the existing pool of illegal aliens (20 million?) to 30 million.

That total, in turn, radically grew the existing group of 20 million legal foreign-born citizens and legal residents of various categories.

So when Trump took office in January 2025, the U.S. had admitted a record high of foreign-born residents. They now made up some 16 percent of the population and perhaps 53 million in actual numbers.

The influxes came at a time when too often the melting-pot tradition of integration, assimilation, and acculturation was reviled and superseded by salad-bowl ethnic chauvinism and separatism.

Yet the triumphant Left never imagined a Trump reelection.

Nor could it grasp fully Trump’s counterrevolutionary effort to secure the border and undo the Biden nihilism.

Even more surreal to Democrats were his efforts to reinstate the integrity and supremacy of federal immigration law.

No one really believed Trump would seek to find and deport millions who had filtered through fifty states. Most were enjoying de facto immunity via hundreds of left-wing lower district court judges and blue-state officials of the Tim Walz/Gavin Newsom sort.

There is only one way that the left would ever oppose a return to legal, measured, and diverse immigration. Namely, if any of its immigrant constituencies in the future—such as the 55 percent of Hispanic males who voted for Trump in 2024—dared to vote on criteria other than federal entitlements, ethnic solidarity, and Democratic coercion.

Do that, and the Left would close the border quickly.