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The Immorality of Illegal Immigration

Donald Trump will not be president for almost another two months.

Yet Democrat politicians, both federal and local, vie to be the most strident in denouncing his plans to begin deporting millions of foreign nationals who, over the last four years, have entered the U.S. illegally. Trump pledges to focus initially only on the 400,000 to 500,000 current felons and some 1.4 million additional aliens who have ignored legal summons for their deportation.

Weekly we read of thousands of illegal immigrants arriving from areas controlled by violent Mexican cartel gangs or failed, strife-torn South American countries that have emptied their jails to send their felons northwards. Hundreds of thousands of them have been committing violent crimes while demanding still more free housing and support from strapped American taxpayers.

Big-city left-wing mayors and city councils boast that they will do all their best to nullify federal immigration laws, even as their cities face near insolvency housing, feeding, and monitoring the influx. More specifically, they brag they will continue to order local and state authorities to resist all efforts of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They scream about possible “massive deportations” to come under Trump, callously ignoring that their own advocacy has fueled rising crime waves of unaudited illegal aliens. And they appear absolutely indifferent to the social costs imposed by illegal immigration upon their own poor and middle-class constituents.

Virtue-signaling Democratic governors and mayors have so far not dared to utter a word of criticism about what has been the Biden administration’s truly historic “massive importation” of illegal aliens into the U.S. over the last four years.

Why?

Largely because these political grandees and media demagogues have the money, connections, zip codes, and influence to be immune from the fallout of their own performance-art advocacy of illegal immigration. They take for granted that the baleful consequences of open borders always falls upon the distant and vulnerable Other.

Again, consider the left-wing logic: it is deemed moral to dismantle the border, disrupt the social fabric of the country, and destroy federal immigration laws. But it is immoral to restore U.S. sovereignty, secure the border, stop the flux of lethal cartel-supplied fentanyl and child sex trafficking, and follow the law?

In this regard, the party that prides itself as progressive is regressively adopting the states’ rights arguments of 19th-century southern states that boasted they would resist all federal enforcement of tariffs. By the late 1850s, these future Confederates were asserting that the national government had no jurisdiction in their state domains. Such brazen nullification would lead to the Civil War.

Note the left assumes that conservatives will not emulate their tactics and thus declare swaths of federal firearms or environmental laws null and void within their red state and county jurisdictions. They know that doing so would start a cycle of lawlessness that would eventually result in either civil war, total anarchy, or both.

The open-borders left’s more immediate spiritual predecessors are states’ rights resisters like former segregationist Governor George Wallace. He boasted that federal civil rights legislation had no sway over his own state’s laws. Wallace, remember, in a historic moment, was removed from blocking the entry of black students to the University of Alabama by federal troops.

Given that nullification now has been turned upside down, will California Governor Gavin Newsom or New York Governor Kathy Hochul block the entrance to their state jails to prevent federal agents from sending home murderers and rapists who arrived in the U.S. illegally?

The left has learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the recent election and decisive Trump victory. The defeat of left-wing candidates was a result most prominently of the Biden administration’s deliberate destruction of the southern border and the illegal welcoming of some 12 million foreigners without legal sanction or health and criminal background audits.

This lawlessness ensured that Kamala Harris, who had sanctioned it, was going to lose the election. The daily sight of thousands swarming the border with impunity, coupled with Orwellian assertions of President Biden, “Border Czar” Vice President Harris, and Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas that the border was absolutely “secure,” doomed the Biden and then Harris campaigns.

Violating U.S. sovereignty and laws while sending millions into already frayed health, food, housing, medical, legal, and education social services designed to help American citizens was never a winning campaign strategy.

Yet almost nothing could deter the Biden-Harris administration from their fixation with undermining the border and federal immigration law while seeking to change the very demography of the American southwest. The resulting influx of illegal aliens within just three years proved comparable in size to the creation of some 12 American cities, all the size of San Francisco.

The mass crossings resulted from an effort by Joe Biden to utterly disregard his oath to faithfully execute the laws of his country. He was also helped in his lawlessness by some 600 state and local “sanctuary city” jurisdictions that subverted federal law by using their own offices to thwart immigration enforcement. Indeed, left-wing state and local officials pledged their own greater fealty to the welfare of the illegal millions who ignored the law and swamped the border than to their own overtaxed and underserved American citizen constituents.

Finally, on November 5, the people said no more. In historic fashion, traditional Democratic constituencies of the working class and minorities turned on their own left-wing politicians who had first turned on them.

Yet the cynicism of the left had known no bounds. As the presidential campaign had heated up, and the polls, first for Biden and then for his surrogate Harris, began to erode, both began to lie that their vanished border was in fact “secure.”

In other words, they knew they had permanently alienated the American public, knew that it would cost them the election, and so then frantically first tried to deny the truth they had welcomed in millions of illegal aliens. Then they pivoted and sought belatedly to stop the public relations disaster at the border for a few weeks before the election, vainly hiding the sheer cynicism of such an insincere effort.

Earlier, they had tried blaming border hawk Republicans for not signing onto a false border “bipartisan,” red-herring bill. The left introduced it in Congress solely to allow blanket amnesties for millions of illegal aliens while still allowing 4,000 illegal aliens daily to enter the U.S.

The great majority of sane senators who did not sign the Trojan Horse bill were then immediately demonized for the mess by Biden and Harris themselves, who deliberately created the catastrophe.

Now that the election is over, an enfeebled Joe Biden has two months left on his presidency and no longer worries about reelection. So, in its final gasp, the left is again trying to invite in more illegal aliens. Apparently one final huge caravan is forming south of the border and plans to make its way northward just days before Trump takes office and begins to fulfill his promises to the majority of voters to close the border.

Finally, why did illegal immigration explode to levels never seen before?

One, the left saw millions of desperately poor foreign nationals as a natural long-term constituency for their big-government, anti-poverty programs. They felt that some 20-30 million illegal aliens over the last 50 years, along with their children, had flipped California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado—and soon Arizona—from blue to red as planned. Of course, should the sudden Hispanic backlash against the immigration insanity of bicoastal elites persist, then the left might turn on their Hispanic voters as illiberal or brainwashed by the right—and ironically move to close the border to preclude more MAGA boosters.

Two, Mexico and Latin America received some 120 billion dollars per year in remittances, mostly sent by their own citizens residing illegally in the U.S. and reliant on American government services that free them up to send billions into the coffers of our own increasingly hostile neighbors. Mexico further sees its 20 million expatriate illegal aliens as a strong lobby group to promote Mexico City’s agendas. The more Mexico exports its impoverished citizens, the more it saves on social services for them, while cynically noting that the more distant and longer their citizens reside away from Mexico, the more they romanticize it, safely from afar.

Three, corporate employers like cheap labor from Latin America, especially when the U.S. government subsidizes such workers with massive housing, food, transportation, and health social services.

On the other side of the ledger, the left cares little that an open border is destroying support for legal immigration and de facto punishes immigrants who wish to follow our laws. A cynic might argue that the left also may fear legal immigrants applying under meritocratic standards, as too independent, self-supporting, educated, skilled, and law-abiding to become its predictably loyal constituents at the polls.

So, what might change to close the border and stop the massive influx?

Donald Trump won the electoral college and the popular vote with a mandate to restore border security and immigration sanity. He received a near-record number of minority voters for a Republican candidate, given they believed that most often must deal with the realities of what elites have unleashed.

In other words, the proverbial people are on to the no-borders elites. They suffer firsthand from their utopian bromides and are tired of being smeared as racists and xenophobes for simply wishing the United States to follow the law, restore secure borders, and end illegal immigration.

And now they have the power and mandate to do all of that.

 

 

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Photo: Migrants wait to receive food donated by people from the Community Center for Migrant Assistance in the community of Caborca in Sonora state, Mexico, on January 13, 2017. Hundreds of Central American and Mexican migrants attempt to cross the US border daily. (Photo by ALFREDO ESTRELLA / AFP)

Notable Replies

  1. VDH has been of late on a roll! He summed up the fine kettle of fish we are in perfectly.

    As someone who - aside from my blood brothers - has as family, best friends men and women who are immigrants - I am anything but averse to immigration but - of the legal variety.

    What the LEFT has brought in are nothing more than those whose greatest claim to fame is that "they saw their opportunity and took it", teat sucking scum in comparison to true immigrants - like my guys and gals.

    Who are cut from the old world type cloth of yesteryear; those who came here seeking the opportunity to be all they can be by standing on their own - not holding their hands out and saying “No speaka da English” (and don’t care to learn and never will).

    They will never assimilate - why would they when they don’t have to to be able to work and survive?

    What we need, and I believe we will get is a continuation - until the job is finally done under up-and-coming President Vance in 2028 - is a true return to only Americans residing in America - not criminals akin to thieves breaking into a family’s home at night.

  2. This situation has all the makings of another civil war with states/cities proclaiming they will not follow federal law enforcement. VDH has outlined it very well in his usual astute manner. There will be resistance - how that turns out will determine the future.

  3. Biden’s illegals will begin to self-deport once Trump cuts off the money they’re receiving from the regime. So far, four hundred and fifty billion has been spent on their behalf. But Trump will first have to gouge out the resistance in the Deep State bureaucracy to make it impossible for what’s left to defy his order to stop giving these people taxpayer money. It will be tempting for his administration to only remove the low-hanging fruit of criminals and non-citizen welfare grifters. There are so many of them. But the Trump administration can aid itself by revealing just how much money has gone to Biden’s illegals. The figure is staggering, far higher than four hundred and fifty billion. If blue state governors resist ICE, punish them financially and take them to court. We’re in a war with these criminals. To avoid the possibility of a second civil war (which they would quickly lose), do them a favor and make the pushback so hard that they’ll never do this to the country again.

  4. I think that we should avoid thinking that illegal immigration is just about politics, and “replacement.” It’s more like a religious cult. Sanctuary Cities: a sanctuary is a sacred place. So it’s all about religion. Just like Marx believing in the triumph of the proletariat. Or climate change unless we act now. Or the genocide protests over Gaza. Or the climate girls baring their breasts today at the Louvre.

  5. Avatar for Phredd Phredd says:

    I personally like immigrants, those who come here and do the work to earn citizenship, that is. I believe that most of the posters on this forum would agree with that position. (In fact, I am aware that some posters on this site are, in fact, such immigrants!) I’m an old white guy with a Chinese wife. We did the legal work to get her here as a Lawful Permanent Resident (Green Card). Within a few months, she decided she was going to become a citizen, so she signed up for all the free classes that Goodwill Industries (yes, Goodwill!) provides in English, American History, and American Government. This while also holding down a job. Three years later (instead of five because she was married to me, a citizen) she applied, took, and passed the test, and was sworn in as a new citizen. Also, our next door neighbors are from El Salvador and came here on an asylum claim. They also did the work and are now naturalized citizens, and I couldn’t possibly ask for better neighbors!

    The thing I have noticed, is that those who did do the work are even less tolerant of the “line jumpers” than those of us born here! So if the illegals think that their “brothers and sisters”, Latino or otherwise, are going to be inclined to stick up for them when the deportations come for them, they are in for a nasty shock.

Continue the discussion at community.amgreatness.com

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