Time for a Legal Immigration Moratorium?

Merely stopping illegal migration is not sufficient...

Source: ICE

Do we need to secure the border? Of course. In fact, that task must be the number one priority imperative for the incoming House GOP, regardless of the speaker.

But do we need to go further? Should America take a timeout, a pause, on even legal migration?

Recent alarming data and trends argue in favor of such a moratorium, and the America First movement should start marking that case now, to persuade voters in time for key 2024 elections.

New numbers from the Biden Administration reveal the frightening spike in criminals with serious records joining the trespassing hordes into America to take advantage of Biden’s open-borders incentives. As reported by Heritage Foundation, among illegal migrants who were actually vetted at the border, the number who had been previously convicted of assault or domestic violence increased by more than five-fold vs. the last year of the Trump Administration.

As shown on this chart, Biden’s border chaos creates a sharp reversal of the Trump years, when border toughness resulted in far fewer dangerous, previously-convicted criminals even attempting to trespass into America:

Source: Heritage Foundation

Similar trends explode for other dangerous crimes, as well. For instance, the number of convicted sex offenders has risen by more than six times vs. 2019 levels. These convicts bull rush into America because they make the rational decision, given Biden’s porous border, that their prior convictions will not matter as they stream largely unchecked into America, vaporizing our border.

In addition, the cartels and these migrants know very well that once they reach the interior of the United States, typically on bus and plane rides paid for by American taxpayers, that getting deported becomes nearly a non-existent threat to them. Last year, Biden’s neutered Immigration and Customs Enforcement only expelled a paltry 30,000 illegal migrants from the interior US. The total ICE and CBP deportation level of 72,177 for 2022 is far less than half of the 2020 total under President Trump and only about 25% of the typical levels of 2008-2019.

To put that 72,000 number in perspective, consider that a rigorous study from a Yale/MIT research team placed the total US illegal migrant population at well north of 20 million illegals, even before this new Biden wave. If the Yale upper-end number of 29 million migrants is accurate, then the US deported only 0.002% of illegal aliens in 2022.

Given these numbers, the Border Battle with Biden must be the first task of the new GOP House, as I previously detailed.  Sadly, the incoming House GOP lost major pressure points of leverage with the Omnibus legislative monstrosity that largely leaves the political corpse of Nancy Pelosi intact as the de facto speaker well into 2023.

Nonetheless, a narrow window of leverage remains, via the debt ceiling. Biden and McConnell and Tom Cotton will need swift and frequent increases in the borrowing power of the US taxpayer to finance their boondoggle profligacy, including mountains of borrowed money to escalate Ukraine.

The Republicans can, and must, refuse to authorize additional borrowing unless strict conditions are met regarding border security, especially an end to Biden’s illegal and capricious abuse of America’s asylum generosity to welcome unfettered masses of economic migrants.

But our movement must go even further. It is not enough to insist only on orderly borders.

Immigration exists for one reason only: to enhance the lives of current American citizens. Immigration is not some intrinsic good, some hallowed goal to be pursued for its own inherent merit.

In centuries past, America harnessed the power of immigration like no other nation on earth to help forge this society and tame our continent. But America has also regularly intelligently pivoted between periods of permissive border openness to times of tight migration controls.

In fact, the present share of America that is foreign born now nearly matches the all-time high water mark of a century ago. In those days of the Industrial Revolution, the need for manual labor was almost insatiable, and the federal government provided zero social safety net benefits. Today’s America could not be more different on both of those counts, and yet our country presently has almost 50 million foreign-born residents here.   

See the chart with projections going forward based on present trends: