by Brian Lonergan
If there’s one thing our corporate media loves as much as hyping an upcoming election, it is conducting a days-long postmortem on that election: identifying the winners and losers, who dropped the ball and who is “The Next Big Thing.” Yet, beneath the surface of personality-driven analysis, one can find data that reveals much about what Americans see as the nation’s biggest problems.
An NBC News exit poll found that the biggest issues to voters, in order of importance, were: inflation, abortion, crime, gun policy, and immigration. After the last two years of Biden-fueled destruction of our border, the idea that immigration barely registers as the fifth-most important issue to voters should be disturbing.
One of the reasons immigration does not rank higher in importance to voters is the widespread misunderstanding about how immigration works. For all the hand-wringing by cable news talking heads on the need for a “national discussion” of various issues, America desperately needs to talk about immigration. If and when that conversation occurs, it must include these issues:
Border security is compassionate. One of the most effective tactics of the pro-illegal immigration lobby has been to manipulate the instinct of most Americans for compassion. To refuse entry into the United States to anyone seeking it, they argue, is to be mean-spirited to the less fortunate.
Actually the opposite is true. Surrendering operational control of our southern border, as Joe Biden did on his first day in the Oval Office as chief executive, might be the cruelest thing one could possibly do to those seeking entry. By now there are numerous accounts of how women and children are routinely sexually abused by cartels, who then move them about like cargo and murder family members who cannot pay transport fees.
Those who do make it across the border are often forced to serve as indentured servants to pay off their cartel debt. Enforcing our borders would threaten the cartels’ human trafficking racket and spare untold numbers of people from its horror.
Americans need relief from their suffering. Reckless anti-borders policies have caused nightmarish pain to American citizens as well. In addition to its human trafficking operation, cartels at the border have a booming business in transporting addictive drugs into the United States. Chief among them is fentanyl, currently the leading cause of death for Americans 18-45 years old.
The cost of these pro-alien, anti-American policies is far-reaching. Illegal aliens released into the United States under the Biden Administration will cost American taxpayers an additional $20.4 billion annually. This at a time when our homeless population, which includes many veterans, is soaring. When senators tell us building a wall on our border is too expensive, we must ask, “How much would a wall save by reducing the number of illegal aliens who consume more services than they pay for?” And can those savings be directed toward helping American citizens in need here in our own communities?
Lawlessness and societal breakdown. When our government flagrantly refuses to enforce its own laws, more lawlessness inevitably results. Among the most destructive practices in our country today are “sanctuary” policies, whereby local politicians actively recruit illegal aliens to their cities with the promise they will not be prosecuted or deported.
Where these laws exist, crime and squalor have flourished. It is no coincidence that a list of the most prominent sanctuary communities could double as a list of the areas with the highest incidence of rape, murder, theft, and illegal drugs. The philosophy that endorses sanctuary policies also promotes defunding police, eliminating cash bail and lighter sentences for violent criminals.
The epicenter of such thinking, California, also famously declared it would not prosecute “victimless” crimes and thefts of under $950 worth of goods. The result has been an epidemic of “smash and grab” robberies at high-end stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, many stores closing rather than subject their employees to nonstop plunder. Lawlessness—whether in the form of tolerating immigration violations or street crime—undermines public safety.
Politicians and media figures continue to push anti-borders policies, knowing their own families will be protected from them. No such protection exists for ordinary Americans, who could become Angel Families at any time. That is collateral damage our “leaders” will happily accept while feathering their own political caps.
While many of our fellow citizens bemoan the decline of the country, there is a frustrating lack of curiosity about why the same problems continue to plague us. Until we start seeing illegal immigration and its related poisonous symptoms differently, the only direction we will continue to go as a nation will be down.
– – –
Brian Lonergan is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
Photo “U.S. Customs and Border Protection” by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
