JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
There’s been a lot of nonsense about the southern border going around lately from the usual suspects, starting with the Biden administration’s smug Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. In two separate interviews last week, Mayorkas blamed the record number of illegal immigrants crossing into the country on climate change and later refused to call the situation a crisis, retreating to his favorite euphemism for the debacle at the border: “It’s a challenge,” he said.
It sure is, not least because in December more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were arrested at the border, the largest monthly total ever recorded. The numbers being what they are, it’s getting difficult to characterize what’s happened to our border under Biden. One way to put it is to note that at the current rate, we can expect 12 million arrests at the border in the first term of the Biden presidency, which is more than the preceding three terms combined. Most of those migrants have been released into the United States.
Or think of the problem from a different angle. Only 142,580 illegal immigrants were deported in all of 2023, which is less than half the number that illegally crossed the border in December alone. Those who were released into the country joined the more than 3 million-case backlog in our immigration courts, where it can take years for an asylum case to get an initial hearing.
So yes, it’s a “challenge,” as Mayorkas says, but probably not as much of a challenge as maintaining the cognitive dissonance required to keep going on national television to spout this gibberish. Yet Mayorkas keeps pulling it off somehow, so credit where credit is due. His approach seems a lot more difficult than just coming out and admitting openly what Democrats really want with all this border chaos: to turn millions of illegal immigrants into Democrat voters. To “fix” the border problem, said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a recent interview, we simply have to “document the undocumented people.” In case it isn’t bone-crushingly obvious, that’s leftist doublespeak for mass amnesty.
Both Mayorkas and AOC at least have the excuse of being partisan ideologues. One wonders, however, what possible excuse a person like Marc Thiessen could have for trotting out one of the most embarrassingly naïve arguments tacitly endorsing illegal immigration ever to appear in corporate media.
In his Washington Post column last week, Thiessen suggested that the record number of illegal immigrants now pouring over our southern border are coming for the same reason the Puritans came to America in the 17th century: They’re simply “seeking a better life than what they faced in the place of their birth.”
It might surprise Thiessen to learn that the Puritans came not for economic reasons but religious ones, not to upgrade their lifestyle and become First World consumers but to hack out an existence in the wilderness and build a society they thought would be pleasing to God.
But give Thiessen this at least, no doubt the masses of illegal immigrants crossing the border are seeking a better life. The latest caravan to set out for the U.S. border from southern Mexico, some 15,000 strong, has dubbed itself the “poverty exodus,” which has the virtue of being direct. These are, by their own admission, economic migrants, and as such do not qualify for asylum under U.S. law — in contrast to the Puritans, it should be noted, who were a persecuted religious minority and surely would have met the standard for asylum.
Not to belabor the point, but Thiessen’s column was predicated on an intentional misreading of something former President Donald Trump has said, that illegal immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country.” In context, Trump seems pretty obviously to be referring to the attendant problems that mass illegal immigration brings, like fentanyl overdoses and cartel-backed criminal activity. Thiessen, however, blithely asserts that Trump has something in mind like European blood-and-soil nationalism, as if illegal immigrants are corrupting the pure bloodlines of “true” Americans.
It’s a strawman of course, and Thiessen absolutely slashes it to the ground in blow after tedious blow. That he would bother with such a chore at all suggests the Washington establishment, of which he is a part and serves as a mouthpiece, is aware, on some level, that the ongoing collapse of the border is not going over very well with the American people. They must therefore be reminded that immigration is good, that it makes America (or some part of America) wealthy, and that only bigots like Trump oppose immigration.
As we move into the 2024 election cycle, expect the cognitive dissonance about the border crisis to become overwhelming and unbelievable. The reason is simple, if terrifying: The establishment, from Mayorkas to the Reaganite hacks at The Washington Post, cannot afford to admit that what’s happening at the border might actually be a crisis, a catastrophe even, that’s now begun to spiral out of control.
They were the authors of it and authored it for their own domestic political purposes and designs. But what they didn’t count on was the thing taking on a life of its own, propelled into something else entirely by the cartels and criminal smuggling networks that have figured out how to turn Democrat border policies into a major international black market. What we have on our hands now is not merely the “catch-and-release” policies of the Obama era.
That all seems quaint compared to the industrial-scale human smuggling and trafficking operations now underway from the Darien Gap to the Rio Grande, orchestrated and engineered by some of the most sophisticated criminal organizations in the world. What began as a cynical Democrat scheme to draft more voters into a crumbling political coalition has turned into something much more sinister: entire nations and peoples on the march, a walking criminal empire, far outside the control of mealy-mouthed bureaucrats like Mayorkas, much less an absentee president like Biden.
Maybe the gaslighting, at this point, isn’t something Democrats think they need to do to calm voters. Maybe it’s something they need to do to calm themselves.
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