“Last Monday, Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) warned that the long-awaited bipartisan border deal was delayed for at least one more week, and that it may arrive this week at last. Details of the deal aren’t yet official, but reports state that restricting asylum is on the table, and Republicans have called for reinstating some of Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“But chaos at the border will persist until Washington takes seriously the only true solution to the crisis: expanding legal immigration. . . .
“The situation at the border is urgent. It’s dangerous, unsustainable, and it hurts Americans and migrants alike. While some of the measures that Democrats and Republicans are currently proposing (e.g., building more of the border wall, hiring more border patrol agents) might help in the short term, the truth is we already place plenty of obstacles at the border. Yet we still saw a record number of encounters in the last few months. . . .
“It doesn’t matter how many enforcement efforts Congress rolls out; migrants won’t stop coming. If lawmakers really want to end the chaos at the border, then instead of wasting taxpayer money on temporary, tired, and failing strategies, they should focus on providing legal, safe, and orderly ways for migrants to come to the U.S. . . . .” — There’s Only One Way To Solve the Border Crisis: Expand Legal Immigration, Agustina Vergara Cid, Newsweek, 1/18/24 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: This article, written a year and a half ago, made a prediction. It was the claim that “It doesn’t matter how many enforcement efforts Congress rolls out; migrants won’t stop coming.” In other words, the surge of illegal migration happening a year and a half ago was like a surging tsunami, an unstoppable force of nature beyond human control. The “solution” proposed by the article: end illegal immigration by making it legal.
Many other immigration advocates have made similar predictions, and proposed similar remedies. Now we know after five months of the second Trump Administration that these predictions were false. With executive orders, Trump has turned the migrant tsunami into manageable stream. The flow across the border is hitting record lows, and is on track to drop even lower.
A lesson we can learn from this failed forecast is to take with a grain of salt (or perhaps a whole shaker) some of the other predictions that mass immigrationists claim are inevitable. The following are some examples: We can never deport most of the illegal aliens now living in our country. Our prosperity depends on unending mass immigration. All our crops will rot if we don’t have illegal aliens to harvest them. And so on, and so on.
The truth, as Trump’s securing of the border shows, is that we don’t know what the possibilities are until we try them. Also, we can learn that where there is a will, there is often a way.