In 2019, people working outside their homelands sent $554 billion of their earnings back to their native countries. Nearly all of this cash flowed from developed nations to less developed ones. The $554 billion in remittances eclipsed the total of all foreign investment in these receiving nations, and three times the amount these nations received in foreign aid.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. The global health crisis touched off a global economic crisis, resulting in millions of lost jobs and restrictions on travel that make it difficult for foreign workers to get to a job in another country, even if one is available.
Candidate Joe Biden was harshly critical of Donald Trump’s handling of immigration policy and border enforcement. He was even critical and apologetic about the Obama administration’s record on immigration, in which he served as vice president, even though President Obama’s supposed toughness on immigration was vastly hyped.
In March, as the impact of President Joe Biden’s open borders policies turned a border problem into a full-blown border crisis, the president handed his second-in-command the task of trying to convince the American public that the administration sincerely wanted to fix the mess he created.
The Afghanistan debacle is only the latest, and most damaging, policy failure on the part of an administration that is seemingly caught off-guard by the sun rising in the east. The Biden administration does not seem to grasp the connection between ideologically-driven actions and statements, and consequences.
The new regime in Kabul has reneged on its assurances of respect for human rights, women’s rights and free passage for those seeking to escape the Sharia hellhole the Taliban is imposing. As they rolled across Afghanistan, the Taliban freed some 5,000 prisoners who had been held at the Bagram Air Base, which the U.S. abandoned. In addition to the Taliban’s fighters, the hardened terrorists turned loose from Bagram reportedly include some associated with ISIS and al Qaeda.