America’s day of reckoning has arrived. After decades of lofty sanctuary rhetoric and scandalously reckless immigration policies, we now face some big questions with no easy answers. Where are we to put the millions of new arrivals? How will we pay for them? What is the cost to our society?
While Joe Biden and his team of anti-borders radicals have been busy turning our country into a make-a-wish charity for the rest of the world’s population, it seems little, if any, thought was given to where all these newcomers would reside. Most of our larger cities, which illegal aliens tend to live in or near, appear beyond capacity due to the White House-engineered border stampede.
As even the most doctrinaire sanctuary mayors are now waving surrender flags, an alternative plan has become necessary. The solution? Third World-style shanty towns in places like rural Liberty County near Houston. Already home to more than 75,000 migrants, a community called “Colony Ridge” is undergoing a massive expansion with huge tracts of land being clear-cut to create more living space. Apparently it’s not considered ecosystem-killing deforestation if it’s done to deposit more illegal aliens into America.
Those who crossed the desert in Mexico to reach the prosperous land of opportunity in the north may be disappointed when they reach communities like Colony Ridge. As there is no regulation of what is built there, early residents are living in RVs and sheds, some with blankets instead of windows.
As with so many sanctuary communities, these new areas almost exclusively inhabited by illegal aliens become recruiting hotbeds for MS-13, the 18th Street gang, and other ultra-violent syndicates. These areas seem destined to become the Western Hemisphere’s version of the infamous no-go zones of Paris: impoverished, overcrowded, and crime-ridden. At some point the Colony Ridge settlers may ask if the squalor of their new home is really that much better than the squalor of Tegucigalpa or Caracas.
In addition to the expansion of places like Colony Ridge, the erasure of our southern border has also provided our wobbly economy with a perverse housing boom: the construction of massive new shelter facilities needed to accommodate the overflow of illegal aliens.
Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is allocating $363.8 million of federal money—that is, your money—to non-federal entities to provide housing and other amenities to recently-arrived aliens. Few and far between in the word salad from our federal bureaucracy is any mention of deterring the sea of humanity from entering our country illegally. It is treated like a hurricane, a force of nature that can only be dealt with, never stopped.
After filling many of its luxury hotels and homeless shelters with migrants, New York City recently announced it will construct two new “Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief” shelters in the Upper West Side to house more than 800 migrants. At least that plan keeps the new arrivals in the city. Mayor Eric Adams’ other solution has been to sue 30 counties in New York state for refusing to accept the aliens who Adams and the Big Apple invited with their sanctuary preening.
The New York shelters are dwarfed by the new migrant processing center in the El Paso sector near the border. The 360,000 square-foot facility occupies 28 acres and can hold 2,500 migrants. If the U.S. economy truly hits rock bottom, the Biden White House already has a modern-day version of FDR’s Works Progress Administration underway: hiring the unemployed to build the numerous shelters needed to house the migrants that helped bankrupt the nation in the first place.
As one might expect with such lavish spending, the opportunities for corruption are almost limitless. Fiery debate roiled town halls in Chicago recently over the expenditure of $51 million to help illegal aliens in the city. The Chicago Tribune reported that $47 million of that sum paid for “contractual staff,” with the paltry remainder actually going toward its declared purpose.
City Alderman Raymond Lopez, a Democrat, said the majority of the money is going to “the pockets of grifters [and] usual poverty pimps.” One shudders at the scale of corruption likely on the federal side of the anti-borders racket, where the spending is measured in billions, not millions.
Despite the tired “immigrants make us stronger” platitudes, none of the aforementioned activities serve to make America stronger, more prosperous, or more cohesive. The once-triumphant victor of the Cold War and lone superpower is now busy managing its own self-created decline.
On America’s current trajectory, our future is not well-kept suburban neighborhoods, but a nation of dilapidated Bidenville slums built to deal with our elites’ disastrous policy failures. The window to avoid this future is closing rapidly.