Fixing the Biden Border

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

Joe Biden, to the degree he was cognizant, has always reflected the Obama-era utopia dream of a borderless world, and thus millions of poor have illegally entered the United States. On numerous occasions, he offered clear warnings of what he would do if he ever had power over immigration policy.

Do we remember this 2020 Biden boast to let in millions and offer blanket amnesties?

“But I will send to the desk immediately a bill that requires the access to citizenship for 11 million undocumented folks, number one. Number two, in the first 100 days of my administration, no one, no one will be deported at all. From that point on, the only deportations that will take place are commissions of felonies in the United States of America.” In Biden’s world, if no illegal alien is ever to be deported unless a criminal, then there is at last no border.

Earlier Biden had also bragged, “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”

After 2020, we found out what Biden really meant was that a few thousand privileged and rich people in Martha’s Vineyard, Malibu, and Rehoboth, Delaware, certainly could not absorb even a few hundred in “desperate need”—but the millions of poor in inner-city Chicago, in the Rio Grande Valley, and the Central Valley of California most certainly could absorb “another two million” illegal aliens.

Most infamously, in 2019, Biden gave explicit outlines of the very open border that he has now institutionalized: “I would, in fact, make sure that there is, that we immediately surge the border all those people are seeking asylum. They deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says if you want to flee, and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come. (emphasis added).”

Again, Biden assumed that “you should come” applied to downtown New York, South Central LA, or El Paso, but under no circumstances to Kalorama, Kailua, or the empty summer dorm rooms of Stanford or Harvard.

All this braggadocio was unfortunately more than the usual empty Biden blather. As president, one of the first things he did really was to “surge the border” by overturning through fiat some 90 Trump executive orders. Despite countless lawsuits, left-wing congressional stonewalling, and internal agency obstruction, these earlier directives had effectively stopped illegal immigration by the fall of 2020.

Upon taking office, Biden, perhaps for the first and only time, made good on his word as he ranted, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration.”

Biden not only did his best to ensure an unfenced border, but after the election, he sold off piles of idle wall materials for pennies on the dollar. Thereby, in childish fashion, he reminded the American people (who will needlessly pay additional millions for a new wall, given Biden’s auction and his hyperinflation since 2020) that he hated Donald Trump more than he liked the American people.

Why did Biden destroy the border, allowing in 500,000 violent felons and gang members, over 1 million already served with deportation orders, ten million more unvetted—initially at a time of a government COVID quarantine? Why did he appoint the now-impeached prevaricator Alejandro Mayorkas, who repeatedly and disingenuously claimed that “the border is secure,” even as Americans watched thousands of illegal aliens, drug smugglers, and cartel coyotes crossing the border with impunity?

Was Biden pledged to bend to La Raza pressures?

Did he owe allegiance to a Hispanic activist elite that demanded that millions of new constituents ignore the border, oblivious to the concern of Hispanic border communities? The latter, unlike their elite DEI megaphones, had to deal firsthand with the resulting massive border crossings that overwhelmed social services, drove down wages, bankrupted their schools, and spiked crime in their communities.

Or was Biden simply a nihilist who enjoyed the chaos and the furor it evoked among his supposed “semi-fascist” and “ultra-MAGA” foes?

Was he a hard-left waxen effigy who had no idea that his policies empowered the cartels and their fentanyl pipeline that killed up to 100,000 Americans a year, more than the dead of the Vietnam, Korean, Afghan, and Iraq wars combined?

Certainly, President Obrador of Mexico loved Biden for greenlighting more than $120 billion in remittances that poured into Mexico and Central America, the vast majority of the money subsidized by the American taxpayers whose generous subsidies to illegal aliens freed up their cash to be sent home.

Was the culprit Biden’s legendary innate incompetence fueled by his growing senility? In that regard, it might be best to remember what Obama himself in 2020 said about his former Vice President Biden’s un-Midas touch: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up,” and his admonition about the non-compos-Biden’s desire to run in 2020, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.”

Whatever his reasons, how does the Trump administration now correct the Biden legacy of an erased border, a new cohort of 12 million illegal aliens atop an existing body of 20 million, half a million dangerous illegal alien felons, 600 neo-Confederate sanctuary city jurisdictions, and the destroyed corpus of federal immigration law?

One, the administration must change the entire current illegal alien dialectic.

Massive illegal immigration is not a humanitarian project. It is a deeply immoral one. It undermines the rule of law. It insults legal immigration applicants by punishing their lawfulness and making them follow hundreds of protocols while exempting and thus rewarding the lawbreaking.

It is a cynical ploy by the governments of Mexico and Central America to provide a Turnerian “safety valve” for their dispossessed to head north rather than to protest at home for reform.

It is a money-making scheme costing the U.S. $120 billion in remittances alone. The arrival of millions of impoverished migrants to the United States involves virtual indentured servants who are sent northward by their home countries in the expectation they will send hundreds of dollars a month back southward to help their families, who in turn are long neglected by supposedly caring Latin American governments.

It is a war on the American poor, whose wages are eroded by millions of the undocumented, and whose social services, from health to housing to education, are swamped by non-citizens in dire need of government support.

It is a long-term effort to import and nurture a new constituency of those in need of more entitlements and bigger government. The aim is to flip more red states to blue, as if Georgia, Arizona, and Texas will follow the demographic metamorphoses of California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Two, Trump, within a year, can finish the wall. A permanent steel/concrete fence of some 2,000 miles will help staunch the influx. So will an immediate executive order ending catch-and-release and requiring application for refugee status before entering the U.S. legally.

Three, Trump can stop the flow of $120 billion in subsidized U.S.-based remittances to Mexico and Latin America. He can threaten all such cynical recipient nations with tariffs. He can further levy a blanket 20-30 percent tax on all remittances sent to Mexico and Latin America from the United States, regardless of the legal status of the sender. Combined with a wall and new border enforcement, such tariffs and taxes would stop the influx quickly.

Four, either passage of new legislation to overturn or winning court reinterpretation of the supposed “anchor baby” clause of the 14th Amendment could end the entire imbroglio of women and couples entering the US solely to obtain infant citizen status (as well as free health care), in order to anchor legality for an entire family.

Trump can merely say, “We need to follow the humane policies of the sophisticated postmodern European nations, none of whom allow unrestricted and automatic anchor-baby provisions.”

Five, to encourage self-deportation, Trump can seek legislation that would forbid for 20 years any foreign national from receiving a legal visa or green card to enter the United States if, at any time in the past, he had been detained entering the United States illegally.

Six, Trump can begin carefully calibrating deportation iterations, starting first with those whose deportations win widespread public support.

The first to go home should be the half million suspected felons and criminals, both those who were arrested here and those who came with criminal records.

They would be followed by 1.5 million aliens already facing deportation orders but who failed to show up for hearings or ignored their prior deportation orders.

The third cohort would include all those who have had no work record, are able-bodied and are currently on local, state, or federal assistance of any nature.

Trump then could issue immediate deportation orders for additional aliens arriving from countries that support terror or are deemed hostile to the United States. That would entail those with known ties to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, or arriving from Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, North Korea, Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, and a host of others,

To separate the Biden influx from earlier illegal entrants, Trump could offer not an amnesty or citizenship but a green card to those who have: 1) resided in the US for five years, 2) have not committed a crime, 3) are not on public assistance, and 4) would pay a fine for their prior illegal entry.

After those rounds of deportations, the administration might have sent home 10-12 million with full public support. Only then would the public back the one-time issuances of green cards to some of the remaining 20 million pre-Biden illegal aliens, who are working, crime-free, not on public assistance, and have resided over five years in the United States.

All these measures might halve the number of illegal aliens and stop all future illegal immigration. They would allow Americanized prior illegal aliens to formalize their status with a green card that would not entail amnesty but simply allow those now here legally to work, and in some cases, if they wish, to begin the lengthy legal process of obtaining citizenship.

The time to act is now.

In an odd way, Biden’s influx has finally resulted in the American Hispanic community’s abandonment of their former support for open borders. Why?

The sheer size of the current immigrant wave posed unprecedented costs, social and demographic disruptions, and dangers to the viability of existing social services for citizens.

Worse in some ways are the asymmetrical burdens that elite open-borders activists have placed on the Hispanic middle and poorer classes, whose communities bear the brunt of massive illegal immigration.

But most cynically and importantly, half the new arrivals are not from the Latin American world and thus have smaller, if any, expatriate apologists or activists in the United States. It seems to be one thing for the open borders advocate to demand illegal entry for an uncle in Mexico and quite another to extend that same exemption and costly support to someone from Russia, Syria, or mainland China.

A final note: those who destroyed the border and immigration law with it will be the first to decry the cost and trouble of undoing their damage—on their theory that because it costs much to arrest, detain, and try a criminal suspect, it is, therefore, cheaper and wiser simply to let him continue to commit crimes with impunity.