With the return of a Democratic administration, the Democratic Party’s liberal immigration policy as it has stood since the election of 2000 will come with it. Joe Biden and his people have made clear that they will reverse President Trump’s restrictive program entirely, slacken control at the border, restore the old catch-and-release program and relax interior controls, implement DACA, increase the number of people granted refugee status annually, and legalize all illegals currently in the country. (The commonly quoted, virtually official, estimate given for the past 20 years is 10 million—somehow that number has remained stationary over the past two decades, though other and more recent estimates provided during that period have ranged between 20 and even 40 million illegal residents). The next administration will doubtless increase the number of green cards issued each year and expand the H-1B and guest-worker programs; all this at the height of the Covid pandemic! Biden has vaingloriously announced that he will “stamp out the virus, not the economy.” Apparently one of his stratagems for doing so is to impose something uncomfortably close to a policy of open-borders that would function as an attraction and encouragement to untold millions of foreigners from the Third World to cross our borders illegally and settle themselves in the United States. This is a plan born seemingly of dementia.
The pandemic is raging in Mexico and in Central America, among other sending countries and regions experiencing extreme poverty and over-crowding, and suffering from rudimentary and incompetent health-care systems, all of them socialistic. I have not read estimates of the rates of infection below the Rio Grande, assuming the statistics exist at all. Even if they do, they are certain to be largely faulty or made-up ones. President Trump, toward the end of his term, had great success in reducing illegal immigration across the southern border by agreements he contracted with President Obrador of Mexico to resist immigrants coming north from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and with the governments of those three nations to restrain the exodus from their own countries and repatriate their emigrated citizens returned by the United States. Obrador even pledged to prevent his own people from coming north. As President, Biden, harassed by progressive Democrats, will surely scrap those agreements “on day one”–or day five, or ten, or twenty.
All this would ensure the ultimate super-spreading event. Hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of sick, poor, and aggressive invaders would overrun the southern tier of states in the American Southwest and rapidly make their way northward and eastward from there, a mere months after the federal government initiates its anti-Covid vaccination drive to inoculate–eventually–every person in America—including the latest arriving inhabitants, the vast majority with little or no money and with health insurance, or the documents supposed to be required to obtain it through private insurance or the Affordable Care Act. Should that happen, America would experience an unimaginable intensification of her current public health crisis, and the Federal government a similarly unprecedented increase in its health-related expenditures—hardly what a government already carrying a national debt of 27 trillion dollars can afford.
Needless to say, the incoming administration will be dismissive of all of this. “¡Sì, se puede!”–roughly translatable as “Reality does not exist!”– has been its motto for the past dozen years, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It expresses the confidence of people mentally enfeebled equally by ideology and dementia.