OPINION:
Under the policies of President Biden, the United States, with a population of roughly 330 million, now has the most open border of any major nation in the world. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world — with a population of nearly 8 billion — would love to come to America. What could go wrong here? Plenty!
During the Biden regime, more than 2 million illegal aliens have flooded across America’s southern border. Most are poorly educated males pushing down the wages of Black, brown, and blue-collar Americans. Far too many are children toiling in factories. The number of unaccompanied minors crossing into Mr. Biden’s America last year hit a record 130,000.
With drug cartel couriers, gang members, terrorists and child traffickers notable exceptions, these illegal immigrants are not demons. They are rational humans simply seeking a better life. Absent a secure borders policy, however, unrestrained immigration will make the vast majority of Americans worse off.
To understand the toxic politics of Mr. Biden’s open border policies, one need only understand the late professor James Q. Wilson’s principle of “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs.” To wit: Where policy benefits accrue to powerful special interests and costs are spread across America’s population, the special interests typically win.
Millions of Main Street Americans now bear the diffuse costs of illegal immigration through higher crime, rising drug use and fentanyl carnage. Our schools are increasingly crowded, emergency rooms double as pediatric wards, and middle-class taxpayers shoulder the lion’s share of the burdens associated with subsidizing a significant fraction of the illegal immigrant population.
In addition, these poorly educated, low-skilled illegals do indeed depress wages in the lower ends of the labor market — the Federal Reserve has even perversely noted the phenomenon as an aid to fighting inflation. American workers most at risk from poverty are also most likely to lose their jobs to this “illegal immigrant army of the newly employed.”
Most controversial, there are second and third order effects on American culture, politics, religion and society that may become toxic. Here, while a Judeo-Christian America used to be a melting pot, it is becoming increasingly Balkanized.
As foreign-origin religious, nationalist and ethnic groups take over large swaths of U.S. cities and suburbs, they stick far more to themselves than integrate into the American way of life while using our ballot boxes to “vote for their own.” How this “America Last” turn of the immigration screw ends is very much an open question, yet it is a question that should be asked — and answered — in any rational border discussion.
Even as these costs are diffused across America, the benefits from this border invasion are highly concentrated. Here, labor is certainly cheaper; and American corporations — General Motors, General Mills, Frito-Lay, Ford, J.Crew, Walmart, even the “woke” Ben & Jerry’s — are jumping at the opportunity to employ docile children who will make few demands in the workplace.
It’s not just corporate executives and their Wall Street financiers who love open borders. The Democratic Party is making a big bet that these new arrivals will vote Democrat if they gain citizenship — now you also understand the Democrats’ demands for amnesty.
To this political end, the Bidenites are systematically shipping many new arrivals to red states. They hope these political time bombs will blow up Republican control of America’s MAGA heartland.
Serving the Trump administration, I played a small role in helping secure our border. While it took some time to overcome a labyrinth of Democratic judge-rendered legal opinions favoring open borders and child trafficking, then-President Donald Trump finally did so.
Under the threat of massive tariffs (that’s where I came in), Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador all signed “safe third nation” agreements. With such agreements — Mr. Biden immediately ended each — these countries agreed to hold illegals on their side of the border until any claims for entering the U.S. were processed.
Such processing takes months if not years, so these safe third nation agreements not only prevented illegals from entering the U.S. They discouraged migrants from crashing our borders at all.
As the end of Title 42 brings all this to a boil this week, it should be clear America’s current border invasion is a politician-made disaster. It is manufactured largely by the K Street lobbyists of the D.C. swamp, corporate donors who buy up our congressmen, and a Democratic Party that has embraced an open border strategy to reign politically supreme.
Elections do indeed have consequences. Now, we must throw the open border rascals out.
• Peter Navarro served as one of President Donald Trump’s closest policy advisers. This article originally appeared in his Substack at http://peternavarro.substack.com.
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