Last week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection revealed that nearly 7.3 million individuals have entered the United States illegally since Joe Biden became president in January 2021. That figure exceeds the population of 36 states and every American city except New York. Even then, it excludes the so-called "gotaways," an estimated 1.8 million additional illegal immigrants who are believed to have entered the country during the Biden presidency and evaded law enforcement.
The overwhelming majority of these illegal arrivals entered the country across the southern border with Mexico, which was far more secure under the administration of former president and current Republican frontrunner Donald J. Trump. Now it is porous to the point of being open in all but name.
Recent polling has identified border control and illegal immigration as a highly important voting issue for Americans in the 2024 presidential election. For some groups, it even exceeds the economy, which has been their perennial priority for decades. It is also the issue on which American voters prefer Trump over Joe Biden by the widest margin.
Biden has offered lame excuse after lame excuse for not enforcing extant border security and immigration law, often advancing the false claim that he—the president of the United States and commander in chief of its armed forces—has no authority to do so. Meanwhile, federal authorities have followed policies that not only fail to stop illegal immigration but effectively decriminalize it through feckless "catch-and-release" schemes, risible mass paroles, and the hapless granting of work permits to illegal immigrants. At the same time, the federal government has subverted state-level attempts to rein in border chaos nearly to the point of constitutional crisis.
Earlier this month, House Republicans impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on articles alleging that he has failed to enforce federal law and violated the public trust. Although Mayorkas will almost certainly be acquitted by the Democratic-majority Senate, this humiliation is the first time in history that a sitting cabinet secretary has been impeached.
A proffered immigration deal would have given Biden the authority to close down the border whenever the number of arrivals claiming asylum exceeded 5,000 individuals per day. Whether he would have used that authority is an open question, but the measure would still have allowed well over a million people to enter the country through the border every year before that threshold was reached.
Radical partisans assessing this apparently hopeless situation claim that mass amnesty is the best, most humane, most moral, and ironically, even the most American solution. But amnesty is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.
First, it's worth noting how self-serving the policy would be for the Biden administration, which is widely believed to be using nearly unchecked illegal immigration to shift the demographic balance of the country to benefit Democrats in the longer term, since the party has historically drawn overwhelming support from poor people of color. Cynically subverting immigration policy has already added nearly 10 million people to that demographic within the United States. Should they become voting citizens or—as some progressive Democrats have already attempted to accomplish through legislation—voting non-citizens, they will potentially be numerous enough to transform historically red states like Texas, which receives the largest numbers of arrivals, to new blue states.
Second, making the illegal immigrants' presence permanent would have disastrous effects on the most vulnerable sectors of what remains an unsteady economy. Legalizing 10 million new and almost entirely unskilled workers will keep wages low for a long time to come, not only for them, but for the millions of native-born and legally arriving new Americans who must compete with criminals who have broken our country's laws to come.
Our fragile urban governments will also suffer. Even Democratic local governments have loudly criticized the strain on their resources and constituents, who routinely express anger at progressive leaders who appear to place illegal immigrants' needs over their own. In September 2023, Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams, whose municipality was hosting about 150,000 newly arrived illegal migrants at the time, claimed that the cost of their care—an estimated $12 billion over three years—would "destroy" his already severely distressed and heavily indebted city. Under a recent city initiative, newly arrived illegal immigrants are offered free flights anywhere in the world just to remove them from the public dole.
When the overwhelmingly Democratic population of Martha's Vineyard, a wealthy Massachusetts island community that had declared itself a "sanctuary," saw just 49 migrants arrive a year earlier, it called upon state authorities to send in the National Guard to remove them, arguing that island residents—among the richest people in America—had no means to care for their new neighbors.
Third, there can be no escaping the fact that illegal immigrants are, in fact, criminals and that turning a blind eye to their unlawful presence will further erode the rule of law. A broad section of the Democratic Party—including many of its prosecutors, judges, and elected representatives—has already effectively decriminalized once-serious offenses and routinely argue that their peculiar notions of social and racial "justice" far outweigh public safety, private property rights, equal treatment under the law, and other bedrocks of stability essential for our society's success. In these unfortunate circumstances, declaring amnesty for illegal immigrants would strongly signal that disobeying our country's laws is not only acceptable but rewarded if sufficient numbers of people violate them.
Finally, amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who consciously chose to enter our country unlawfully would represent a revolting mockery of the millions of immigrants who have arrived legally, obeyed our laws, followed our lengthy and sometimes difficult path to citizenship, and not become Americans through criminal means. For their sake alone, amnesty should be denied.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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