As it continues to ignore the wholesale breach of our nation’s borders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) just announced the launch of “Uniting for Ukraine,” a historic effort to welcome 100,000 Ukrainians into the U.S. through various admission pathways—most prominently through humanitarian parole.
The full details have yet to be announced, but early indications are that this program will be yet another example of the Biden administration usurping congressional authority through an expansive and illegal use of humanitarian parole.
A new report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that the illegal alien population has increased to approximately 15.5 million as of the end of 2021, up from 14.5 million in 2020. The report also estimates that this population now costs American taxpayers a net of at least $143.1 billion annually – an increase of $9.4 billion from last year.
Since taking office, the Biden administration has made a point of not just rolling back everything that former President Donald Trump did to secure the southern border and deter illegal immigration, but also dismantle nearly all immigration enforcement measures on the books. This undermining of immigration enforcement ranges from protecting nearly all illegal aliens (including most serious criminals) from deportation to reinstating the Obama-era practice of catch-and-release.
The current political environment is terrible for Democrats — and that is putting it mildly. Poll after poll shows that Americans disapprove of President Biden’s performance. On two key issues, Mr. Biden is so far underwater that he needs scuba gear. His handling of the economy has an approval rating of just 29%, with 69% disapproving. Likewise on immigration, only 37% of Americans think he is doing a good job, compared with 60% who disapprove.
Not surprisingly, polls show that the GOP has a 3.5-point advantage in the 2022 generic congressional ballot. With the border crisis raging and prices rising, and little being done to address either, it is all but certain that Republicans will take control of one or both chambers in November.
The Biden administration has created an unprecedented border crisis affecting our entire nation. This has galvanized public opposition, creating a united front of state and local governments, former immigration officials, and public interest groups demanding that the administration stop its sabotage of border and interior immigration enforcement.
Amid a full-blown border crisis that threatens national security and public health — for which the Biden administration is wholly responsible — a bipartisan group of lawmakers has decided this might be a good time to fast-track citizenship for around 76,000 Afghan nationals who were lucky enough to force their way onto the last planes out of Kabul a year ago.
If we only listen to what the mainstream media and the open-borders lobby have to say, mass immigration is an unqualified good with no negatives worth mentioning, and anyone who disagrees with that sentiment is an anti-immigrant xenophobe.
In July, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens offered a notable mea culpa, acknowledging his failure to read or empathize with the mood of about half of the country. “I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called ‘the protected.’ My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges,” he wrote.
With the turn of the calendar and the unofficial start of the 2024 campaign cycle, President Biden took two steps designed to quell the growing furor over his handling of the raging, self-inflicted border crisis.
Even in a nation that includes the principle of separation of church and state in its founding document, for centuries our political leaders have often heeded the counsel of religious leaders on important moral issues of the day. But religious leaders, like politicians, have had a mixed record when it comes to being on the right side of history. The antebellum South had more than its share of pastors who found justification in Scripture for maintaining slavery. Father Charles Coughlin was perhaps the most prominent American Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s.
President Biden, who came to office two years ago with some of the lowest levels of illegal immigration in modern history, largely ignored the historic border crisis he created by devoting only a few lines to it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.