As 2019 began, newly empaneled Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi vowed, “There’s not going to be any wall money,” referring to legislation needed to fund the government.
Pelosi’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was even clearer about Democratic leadership’s view of the border wall. “Democrats are against the wall,” Schumer stated with uncharacteristic brevity. Thankfully, the president still managed to secure nearly 100 miles of wall construction and border fencing over the last three years by using Department of Defense money dedicated to related purposes.
As 2019 began, newly empaneled Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi vowed, “There’s not going to be any wall money,” referring to legislation needed to fund the government.
Pelosi’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was even clearer about Democratic leadership’s view of the border wall. “Democrats are against the wall,” Schumer stated with uncharacteristic brevity. Thankfully, the president still managed to secure nearly 100 miles of wall construction and border fencing over the last three years by using Department of Defense money dedicated to related purposes.
For the seventh month in a row, apprehensions of illegal aliens along America’s southwest border dropped, a trend that six months ago would have been unthinkable. Illegal alien apprehensions for December dipped to roughly 40,000, a far cry from the 144,000 illegal aliens who were detained trying to enter their way into the U.S. in May. Apprehensions have been falling ever since.
Catch and release, a phenomenon that has haunted administrations since George W. Bush was in office and contributed to the surge of migrants arriving at the southern border, is nearly a thing of the past. So what gives?
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.
Check out what Preston wrote for the Daily Caller.
House Democrats recently voted to strip the president of one of the most important tools at his disposal to protect America from foreign threats: the ability to suspend travel to the United States. The Democrats voted 233-183 to pass the NO BAN Act. Had this bill been law in early 2020, President Trump would have been unable to ban travel from China and Europe, which saved American lives according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Under current law, the president can react in real time to national security threats by restricting the entry of aliens under the authority laid out in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
President Joe Biden and his administration continue to peddle the public relations snake oil that spending money in the Northern Triangle countries will help regain control of the southern border and reduce illegal immigration. The administration plans to spend $4 billion as part of its strategy to look like they’re trying to control the border, provide more than $300 million in emergency aid and has contemplated granting direct cash payments to migrants.
Of course many in the Biden administration were perplexed by Vice President Kamala Harris’ performance during her recent trip to Guatemala and Mexico. They must have been watching the same NBC News interview the rest of the nation watched, in which a clearly frustrated Lester Holt pressed the vice president on why she was visiting Guatemala without having been to this nation’s southern border, which is ground zero of the border crisis.
In March, the Biden-Harris administration restarted the Central American Minors (CAM) program, an Obama-Biden migration scheme that was terminated by the Trump administration. On June 15, in a joint statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the new administration – which is currently facing a border/illegal migration crisis of its own creation – announced that it is expanding CAM.
The Biden administration clearly has no enthusiasm for deterring abuse of our asylum system by requiring migrants with specious claims to wait on the other side of the border until an initial hearing can be held, rather than releasing them into the United States, where they join the burgeoning illegal alien population. The other partner at the altar – the government of Mexico – is equally unenthusiastic about the prospect of having large numbers of migrants waiting on their side of the border for a date before a U.S. magistrate.
When presidential candidate Joe Biden was on the campaign trail in 2020, he touted that his immigration agenda would “direct enforcement efforts toward threats to public safety and national security, while ensuring that individuals are treated with the due process to which they are entitled and their human rights are protected.”