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This is the last in my series on “Three Reasons the Left Wants Open Borders.” I’ve covered ideology and electoral politics; now, let’s turn to extortion.
By turning on the taps of illegal immigration, open-borders proponents hope to create bargaining chips to negotiate amnesties and increased immigration flows. Since he took office, Joe Biden has paroled a million and a half inadmissible aliens under bogus premises, caught and quickly released into the U.S. the better part of 7 million more, and allowed at least 1.8 million more to evade Border Patrol—the “gotaways.”
As Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year, “The White House knows that an overwhelming majority of the people coming aren’t fleeing persecution but are economic migrants gaming our asylum laws. They know that there will be no serious effort to deport people whose claims are denied.”
Nonetheless, the roughly 10 million inadmissible foreign nationals who the White House calls “newcomers” will be new leverage to push immigration “reform,” which means massive amnesties and new “pathways” into the U.S. outside and on top of the legal immigration system authorized and numerically limited by Congress. Biden’s threat is to leave the taps wide open.
Under this pressure, wavering conservatives might concede to ineffective or even counterproductive legislation like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., bill that claimed to be a solution but did nothing to reduce the illegal flow. Fortunately, it failed on Thursday.
It was a trap—House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., correctly stated that the bill “would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open-border policies that created this crisis in the first place,” making it difficult for a future conservative president to reverse.
“Once bitten, twice shy” sums up why conservatives aren’t going to fall easily for this round of extortion. The relevant lesson is the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The deal was that about 3 million illegal aliens would be amnestied, but that the government would work to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and keep another amnesty from happening again. To achieve this, employers would have to confirm the legal status of people before hiring them or face penalties.
The first part of the bargain (the amnesty) happened, but the second part did not in any comprehensive manner. Almost 40 years later, the number of illegal aliens present in the country is perhaps five times as great as in 1986.
Until recently, Democrats believed in enforcing immigration laws, even if they might want them eased. Listen to President Bill Clinton talking here in 1995. He endorsed the conclusions of the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform chaired at the time by Texas Democratic Rep. Barbara Jordan, which in its final 1997 report urged “immediate reforms to ensure that aliens with final orders of deportation, exclusion, or removal are indeed removed from the United States.”
Today, there are over 1.2 million such aliens with final orders, including 400,000 convicted criminals, and the Biden administration plans to remove barely 30,000.
Clinton also proudly stated that his administration had “moved aggressively,” hiring more Border Patrol, deporting “twice as many criminal aliens as ever before,” “cracking down on illegal hiring,” and “barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Today, no elected Democrat would even dare call an alien present in the U.S. illegally an “illegal alien.” In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is required to use the nonsensical term “undocumented noncitizens,” and Biden apologized recently for calling Laken Riley’s accused alien murderer “illegal.”
In 2024, after three years of mass release, mass parole, and lax enforcement, “Democrats appear to be panicking about this fall’s election, to the point that they are feigning doing something about the invasion at our southern border,” as Teresa Mull put it in the Spectator. Their strategy is to try and convince the American people that the real obstacle to securing the border is unreasonable Republicans. To sell this message would be to pull a giant rabbit out of a very small hat, as the open border is the clear work of the president and his hand-picked secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Schumer brought up the supposedly “bipartisan” Senate border bill for another vote Thursday, but it failed again, with even less support than in February. Biden may claim that he had “proposed and negotiated and agreed to the strongest border security bill this country has ever, ever, ever seen,” but senators who read it no doubt quickly reached the same conclusion as Johnson did in a few hours. The bill would have turned Biden’s welcome mat policies from overreaching executive whim into hardlaw. The Schumer bill was electioneering in the guise of legislating.
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-N.J., claimed the bill “gives the president new tools to better manage the border.” In fact, Biden has had the tools, including under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, since January 2021.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre unwittingly admitted this week that Biden could “unilaterally” limit how many illegal aliens are allowed to enter the country. Biden has also considered ordering expedited processing for newly caught illegals rather than just releasing them. Inaction on the border is the president’s choice.
In a May 19 letter to fellow senators, Schumer wrote “the American people … want bipartisan action to secure our border.” Indeed, a May 21 nationwide poll by the University of South Florida found that 77% wanted more Border Patrol agents at the southern border, and 60% actually supported “increasing physical barriers.” In a March poll, The Wall Street Journal reported that “at least 72% of respondents in each of the [seven swing] states saying the country’s immigration policy and border security were headed in the wrong direction.” Schumer somehow discovered this six months before the national elections.
Jean-Pierre has echoed her boss many times over the past three years in claiming that the border was “not open”—even as it leaked 10,000 or more illegal aliens a day. On May 20, she told senators to set “partisan politics aside and vote to secure the border.” But even Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., opposes using the bill he drafted for purely political messaging, and Johnson has called it “dead on arrival” if it were to pass the Senate.
“Bipartisan” should mean just that, like the Jordan Commission report, not a one-party position enforced through the extortionary means of doubling the illegal alien population via mass release, parole, and negligence.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
The post Reason No. 3 the Left Wants Open Borders—Extortion for Amnesty: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Why does the Biden administration want open borders so badly? For three very big reasons. One is ideology, which I covered in last week’s BorderLine column. Another is extortion, which I will cover in next week’s column. But this week, I look at how the Left uses illegal immigration to give itself an unfair electoral advantage.
First, illegal immigration affects congressional representation because the apportionment of members of Congress by state is based on U.S. census data.
As Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries writes, the census currently counts all noncitizens—from green card holders to illegal aliens—in addition to U.S. citizens for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts among the states.
The more citizens in a state, the more congressional districts—i.e., seats in Congress—a state gets. In turn, the number of congressional districts in a state determines how many Electoral College votes that state receives. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
While president, Donald Trump tried to restore the U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 census and exclude all noncitizens from apportionment calculations. Yet court challenges prevented him from doing so prior to the deadline for getting a new census form printed and distributed. Joe Biden then immediately terminated the effort when he took office. That should tell you which states and party benefit most from the population overcount.
The second way mass illegal immigration undermines U.S. elections is through negligence and fraud. Only American citizens can legally vote; it is a crime for a noncitizen to vote. Yet, in many states, noncitizens can easily register and vote with little chance of detection.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as “Motor Voter,” was intended to make it easier for U.S. citizens to register to vote when they applied for or renewed a driver’s license. However, Motor Voter also made it easier for noncitizens to accidentally or purposefully get on voter rolls.
In December 2022, the Reno Gazette Journal reported that if applicants applying for a Nevada driver’s license check the online box saying they are eligible to vote, their information is sent to Nevada’s secretary of state for registration. The Washoe County Registrar’s Office told the Gazette Journal that it is possible for a noncitizen to register by falsely claiming citizenship (though this is a felony).
Moreover, Nevada accepts alien work authorization cards as proof of identity. Millions of aliens the Biden administration has released into the country are eligible for such cards and could register to vote in Nevada and other states with similar registration processes with little risk of detection.
It would seem to be common sense for all states to want to close loopholes and maintain confidence in their electoral systems. Yet, one of the biggest canards in American politics today is to equate election integrity efforts—like ensuring proper identification or limiting mail-in and early voting—with voter suppression.
There was real and shameful voter suppression in our nation’s past. Efforts in the post-Civil War South to deter blacks from registering included discriminatory literacy tests and poll taxes; police intimidation at polling places; and at the extreme, cross-burnings, bombings, and even killings. But the civil rights movement, strong new laws, and voter-registration drives ended the “Jim Crow” era by the 1960s. Poll taxes and literacy tests were banned.
In 2022, 98.9% of voters in Georgia “felt safe in their polling location” and “98.9% reported no issues casting a ballot,” according to a University of Georgia postelection poll. Nonetheless, legitimate efforts to ensure that voters are legally entitled to vote, that they do so in accordance with the law, and that their votes are properly counted are falsely labeled as voter suppression.
“Americans need and deserve a system in which it is easy to vote and hard to cheat,” says The Heritage Foundation, which publishes a state-by-state Election Integrity Scorecard to encourage best practices from electoral officials and vigilance by voters.
As Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Ensuring that only American citizens vote in American elections is a straightforward requirement for maintaining election security and public trust.”
And yet, progressive groups seem intent on fighting efforts to ensure that voter rolls contain only eligible voters. The logical inference is that they believe ineligible noncitizens would be more likely to vote for their candidates. As Raffensperger writes, these activists want states “to rely on a person’s word” when registering to vote and oppose all efforts to verify citizenship. Unfortunately, in the real world, people sometimes lie—especially when there are no consequences.
A Heritage database currently records 1,500 cases of proven election fraud nationwide—and that is merely a sampling. When it comes to abusing absentee ballots, most of the perpetrators in the database are Americans. But on just the first page (of five) for one state (North Carolina) are cases of noncitizens from the Congo, Guatemala, Mexico, and Nigeria convicted of falsely claiming American citizenship to register to vote. They committed a fundamental offense against our democracy, and yet most of them got a one-year pretrial “diversion program,” after completion of which, charges were dropped.
Some states are better than others regarding voter integrity. Virginia cross-references Motor Voter data with the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, and “since 2014, has removed 11,000 ‘declared non-citizen[s]’” from the voter rolls, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Meanwhile, the foundation is suing Wisconsin and Minnesota for lack of transparency with their voter rolls.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, recently introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to require states to obtain proof of citizenship—in person—when registering an individual to vote. Further, the bill requires states to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.
Meanwhile, this week, the House passed the Equal Representation Act, a bill that would restore the U.S. citizenship question to the census and exclude noncitizens from congressional apportionment. The bill passed 206-202 by a completely party-line vote. Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., forced a vote on a similar bill in the Senate in March, but it failed 51-45. All of the Democrats and one Republican voted against it.
Election integrity shouldn’t be a liberal versus conservative issue, and maintaining accurate voter rolls is a national, not a political, goal. Impartial legislation to ensure both integrity and accuracy ahead of our next election and census should receive bipartisan support.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness
What I Saw on My Latest Visit to the Border
The post The Ways the Left Exploits Illegal Immigration for Electoral Gain: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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