PolitiFact Strikes Again! “Don’t Believe Your Lyin’ Eyes, Everything is Just Fine at the Border,” Say the “Fact-Checkers”
Last week President Joe Biden declared about half of all Americans to be a threat to democracy. Not to be outdone, PolitiFact, the self-anointed guardians of truth, has ruled that about half of all Americans are stupid or, at least, dupes. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of overlap among these two cohorts.
If you believe that our southern border is wide open and that what is taking place can correctly be termed an invasion; that the unprecedented influx of illegal migration and the influx of fentanyl are related; or that taxpayers are paying for the needs of the migrants, then PolitiFact is here to tell you that you are absolutely wrong and that you need to start listening to their experts.
“The southern border is not open,” PolitiFact declares in large font, boldface type. “Open border insinuates that there is nobody guarding the border and nobody attempting to stop people from crossing the border, and that is not true,” states PolitiFact’s go-to expert, Theresa Cardinal Brown of the open borders advocacy group the Bipartisan Policy Center.
So as long as there are a bunch of folks in green uniforms in close proximity to the border, it is technically inaccurate to say that the border is “open.” Never mind that Border Patrol agents are being ordered not to do their jobs (or even punished for doing them), or that 90 percent of them are busy processing migrants for release into the country (more than 2 million since President Biden took office), their mere presence, declares PolitiFact, belies the claim that the border is open.
“There is no invasion at the southern border,” PolitiFact assures, once again in large font and boldface. Why? Because “many immigrants crossing the border illegally turn themselves into Border Patrol agents on purpose, to ask for asylum.” Once again, citing Brown as the definitive expert on the matter, “That is not behavior that you would really attribute to an invader.” Yeah, it is, if you are reasonably confident that you will be released quickly and provided with transportation to your preferred destination within the United States. True, they are not arriving in tanks, but whether millions of people entering the country without permission constitutes an invasion is a matter of semantics. In practical terms, it is an invasion.
“Most fentanyl entering the U.S is not being smuggled by immigrants illegally crossing the border,” declares PolitiFact. No, but most of the fentanyl being smuggled into the United States is occurring because so many migrants are crossing the border illegally. In fact, the migrants are being smuggled by the same criminal cartels that traffic narcotics into the U.S., and are often used as decoys to distract the Border Patrol while lethal drugs make it through. And since we’re splitting semantic hairs, the criminals who are moving drugs across the border are foreign nationals who, along with fentanyl, are “illegally crossing the border.”
And, if you thought you are paying for all the migrants after they are released, PolitiFact reminds you that “Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are ineligible for most federal benefits.” If you were wondering who is paying to transport the migrants to their final destinations, housing them, feeding them, and providing for other basic needs, it would seem the Tooth Fairy is.
Actually, many emergency federal programs (and even some nonemergency ones) are accessible to illegal aliens, especially to minors who enter unaccompanied. And whatever costs aren’t picked up by the federal government are absorbed by state and local taxpayers. While New York City Mayor Eric Adams continues to squabble with Texas Governor Greg Abbott about the migrants he is busing to the Big Apple, local taxpayers are on the hook to the tune of $300 million a year to house the migrants in luxury hotels with some rooms running as high as $700 a night.
Good thing we have the truth police at PolitiFact to set the record straight. Without them we might have thought that there is a problem at the border. Silly us.