Today’s progressives are eager to see what happens when a large welfare state opens its borders.
What are the Biden administration’s immigration priorities? Are they to erase the southern border for all intents and purposes, while legalizing everyone currently in the country without authorization?
An objective observer might easily draw such conclusions. So far, the White House has ostentatiously reversed any number of border-security provisions enacted by the previous administration and thrown its weight behind amnesty legislation that would apply to more than a third of the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. And then there are the not-so-mixed messages to potential migrants. Out one side of its mouth, the administration shouts, “Don’t come, the border is closed!” Out the other side, it whispers, “But if you do make it to the U.S., even illegally, you’ll almost certainly be allowed to stay.”
This is no way to run a sovereign nation. Even Democratic administrations used to understand that without a border there is no country. And without security, there is no border. “We must say ‘no’ to illegal immigration so we can continue to say ‘yes’ to legal immigration,” said President Clinton, who responded to a spike in illegal immigration in the early 1990s by asking Congress for additional funding, among other things to “protect our borders, remove criminal aliens, reduce work incentives for illegal immigration [and] stop asylum abuse.”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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