Border Security and Immigration Reform
Shaking his head with feigned concern, he pompously laments, “Let’s not act in some partisan political way. We can’t fix our massive immigration problem in this country until we pass bipartisan comprehensive immigration policy reform.” Ever heard that lament? Tired of hearing it? It is a myth created to excuse inaction.
What it means is “I will do nothing during my term of office to fix the problems. It is just too complex and controversial, so I will pretend that the problem is too large for any one person to tackle in such a brief span of time.”
Who is this wise individual? It could be any representative or senator from either party for the last thirty years. On February 29, 2024, it was President Biden himself, blaming MAGA republicans for the millions of illegal entries crossing the border during his 3 years in office and mouthing that worn out “comprehensive immigration reform” platitude. What it means is that nothing will be done. It is merely a stalling tactic designed to hide politicians’ lack of intestinal fortitude and action. I believe we have had enough of such political posturing! I will go to Congress to solve problems and not to dodge them.
For decades neither republicans nor democrats have tackled such a momentous task, even when they have held majorities in the House and Senate, because they know the issue is apparently so complex, that no consensus would ever be possible on issues as wide ranging as work visas, social security benefits, voting rights, medical benefits, sponsorship, Dreamer status, claims of amnesty, global migration, drug running, cartel involvement, and the list goes on and on. Just use your favorite search engine and enter “immigration issues”; then pour yourself a strong cup of coffee, because you will be in for an extraordinarily long night, as you wade through issue after issue, all of which would have to be addressed in what would become an unreadable 1,000-page bill alleging to address such “comprehensive immigration reform.”
As your representative from our 5th Congressional district, I will stop such vapid rhetoric and political posturing and work step by step with our Speaker and like-minded colleagues on critical individual immigration issues. Many of them can be individually solved when rightly understood and researched. But we need to address them one at a time, not try to lump them into one huge indecipherable omnibus bill. Because you have a right to know how I will represent you on key elements of such reform, let me just address a couple.
At the top of my list will be security issues associated with immigration policy. Such issues are often mentioned anytime our open border is discussed by pundits, but rarely does anyone explain specific steps that must be taken to rectify the existing problem. If the recent terrorist attacks in Israel highlighted anything, it demonstrated with savage clarity what can happen when those filled with hate and inspired by evil intent—too often criminals released from foreign prisons—are allowed to cross a border illegally and attack unprotected citizens. To be clear, not all illegal immigrants have such an evil intent, but the recent shootings of young children in our nation’s capital and Louisiana, and the vicious murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia nursing student in Athens Georgia, by illegal immigrants all with prior arrest records seems to attract even the attention of some democrats. These atrocities must end, and the solution starts with securing our borders and the immediate arrest and deportation of criminals. Because several countries such as Venezuela and Cuba will not allow their deported criminals back into their own country, once they commit crimes here, the only responsible action is to stop them from entering the USA initially.
What is usually opined is that a country without borders is not a country. That is a fundamental geopolitical truth that has as a basic premise, the fact that every country has the absolute right to identify and defend its borders and determine who can enter or not enter. When one enters a country illegally, she or he should not be afforded any rights normally granted to citizens. Citizens have basic Constitutional rights; mere residents should not be afforded such privileges.
What many politicians in this country seem to have forgotten is that anyone allowed to enter our country should do so legally and have legitimate asylum claims. Those allowed to enter should be of benefit to the USA or they should not be permitted to enter. That has always been our national policy in the past under more enlightened leadership.
The current Biden administration has persistently ignored such international protocols, failed in its obligations to protect our borders, facilitated the massive influx of illegal cartel transported fentanyl that killed 75,000 citizens in 2023 alone, and flooded our country with illegal immigrants, shuffling adults—often single males of military age—as well as thousands of unaccompanied children into state after state, often by bus or airplanes landing unannounced in private airports under the cover of dark. Even the mayors of so-called “sanctuary cities” such as New York City and Chicago are crying uncle and demanding national policy reforms. The Mayor of New York even announced on February 26th a desire to alter sanctuary city policies that forbid so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions from notifying ICE when an illegal immigrant has been charged with a crime.” Such a restriction is sheer lunacy and a slap in the face of every Angel Mom who has lost a child. We should immediately reinvigorate the 2019 Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as the Remain in Mexico Program (a program that actually worked), complete our border walls, and deport all those entering our country illegally.
Those I speak with often believe that such a “sanctuary” status is limited to a few major metropolitan areas. I wish such a belief were true. As of today, there are 176 sanctuary cities and whole counties as well as 12 sanctuary states in the USA where ICE can have no or extremely limited status. These cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — “either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.” These unreasonable barriers to protecting citizens must end and federal funds should be denied to any such jurisdiction.
Perhaps even more frightening than the millions of illegal border crossers at our southern border, are the over 1,000 so-called “got aways” per day in 2023—1.7 million in the last 2 years alone. We have no idea who they are or where they are from. What we do know is that ever since Texas has done what the President is obligated by law to do, in tightening border restrictions, the number of those flocking into America from Mexico has been drastically reduced and those now flowing across the border illegally in Southern California and western Texas are predominantly military aged men from dozens of countries, most alarmingly from China, Yemen (home of the Houthis), Somalia, Libya, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India, and other possible terrorist spawning countries. China is a particular problem not only because China is the source of most of the deadly Fentanyl flowing illegally into our country but also because no one emigrates from China—indeed, no one leaves China—without the permission of the ruling political party. Why are so many well-dressed English-speaking young men arriving from China? They are clearly being sent. We also do not know where they currently are or why they came. They have just been released into our country by the Biden administration. How many of these undocumented border crossers are CCP operatives, or members of Hamas, ISIS, or other terrorist organizations just biding their time until the right moment to attack. When they do, 9- 11 will look like a well-scripted dystopian movie. We need to assign ICE their primary duty to be finding and deporting them.
My first effort will be to support finishing strategic portions of the border wall begun under the previous administration and to team with my colleagues in the House to encourage the use of our dedicated military to help US Customs and Border Protection control entry to our sovereign country. Their current number of 60,000 employees are routinely ill-assigned to act as drivers, cooks, social workers, and housekeepers for people who should never have been let into our country in the first place. Morale in that organization is terrible. Such misuse of personnel must end, and I will work with like-minded colleagues to redirect any funding currently being used for such services to prevent new border crossers. I believe that any new funding by Congress must be used to stop further illegal entry, not to provide services to those who have already broken our laws. In that regard, I am in favor of increasing the pay and benefits for both our border control agents and the 17,000 ICE agents across the country. Increasing ICE by 5,000 agents will assist in rounding up and deporting those here illegally.
Throughout our history we have allowed non-citizen workers to enter our country to provide necessary labor for our farms and businesses. Arizona, Texas, and California are particularly dependent on such labor. Indeed, with our current US birthrate of just 1.64 children per woman, and a rate of 2.1 births per woman required just to maintain our current population, we need legal immigrants anxious to become law abiding citizens. But, as important as this issue is, we cannot focus on the numbers of people migrating legally until we first secure our border. That is this nation’s leadership’s primary responsibility. Until we secure our borders, we are not a nation. Mere residency—just being here—must not be allowed to be equated to citizenship, not for voting, not for retirement benefits, and not for cash handouts. That is what the democrats want: more people, residing in more states, so they can gerrymander voting districts to increase the number of electors in the Electoral College. That democrat folly must end. As part of that reform, the current system of work visas needs to be reformed and brought into the 21 st century. I will work to ensure that such reforms are implemented. Only after our borders are secure, we can address other issues regarding asylum and legal immigration—not until.
Finally, after three years of dereliction of duty in failing to secure our national borders, the political outcry to do something about the collapse of our national borders—even from democrats—had become so intense that President Biden finally visited the Texas southern border on February 29th . Predictably, he and his entourage of democrat politicians and CNN reporters visited Brownsville, Texas, a notorious border crossing area which Texas Governor Abbott had already secured, even in the face of being sued by the Biden administration and wrongly accused of cruelty for the measures he had taken. During his visit, Biden, and his impeached Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas predicably took credit for the reduced flow of illegals. Meanwhile, a couple hundred miles away, former President Trump, accompanied by Texas Governor Abbott, and General in charge of the Texas National Guard, was at Eagle Pass, Texas—the current epicenter of the border crisis—where the Guard was in the process of closing the border at the Governor’s direction. Both were clearly political visits. Biden realized the issue would dog him to his possible failed reelection in November and predictably blamed MAGA republicans for not acting on comprehensive immigration reform, but when asked about the murder of Laken Riley, the President turned his back to the questioner and simply shrugged his shoulder. Trump, on the other hand had already met with Laken’s devastated parents and promised upon reelection, to finish the wall and deport criminal border violators. While Biden strolled ICE headquarters with his entourage looking at advertising posters, Trump walked the border crossing with National Guard Commanding General Suelzer and Abbott’s team of Border problem solvers. You will choose which approach you prefer.
The third major aspect of immigration policy I am dedicated to reforming is curtailing the misuse of your tax money to provide cash payments, social security benefits, and Medicare benefits to those illegally entering our country and who never contributed a dime to such trust funds. These are not charities granted at the largess of government, but rights earned by American citizens who have paid into such programs during their entire working lives. Should the issue arise in Congress, I am also opposed to granting citizenship status to anyone entering this country illegally until at least 10 years of work history free of domestic abuse and other criminal charges and with a record of having paid federal taxes for the entire period. Implicit in that requirement is that until any illegal immigrant passes a Naturalization test that they may not vote in any federal election. As a corollary to those requirements, I am opposed to “birthright citizenship” and the abuse of “anchor baby” criteria to grant citizenship rights to parents and will work to end those currently ill-conceived policies.
Comprehensive Immigration reform is an idealistic aspiration, but being a financial and legal realist, I know that such an approach to immigration is an ignis fatuus. Each individual aspect of reform, however, can be fixed and are capable of being dealt with in a bi-partisan way; indeed, many of the necessary laws are already on the books, but have failed to be enforced by the Biden administration that in the first day of his election as President, revoked via executive order, 94 of the actions his predecessor had implemented to stop the illegal flow into our country. I will work to change such a disregard of our laws.
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