BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  JAN 31, 2024

There is no more glaring example of non-functioning government and the suffocating effect of ugly partisan politics than the illegal immigration crisis. It is a national humiliation. Immigration has been a cornerstone of our experiment in individual freedom over two centuries.

“The vast array and diversity of the people our way of life has beckoned here has helped mold the American character. It has also challenged what we stand for, what we strive to be. It is hard to calculate the benefits that flow from the American melting pot. But it is also hard to ignore the intractable problems that have spilled over the edges from unlawful entry. Now it has once again gotten away from us, out of our control.”

Those words are in quotation marks because I wrote them three years ago this April. Matters have only gotten horribly worse since then. The serious solutions proposed over the past two decades, if laid end-to-end would be, well, very long. But the courage to resolve the issues comes up very short.

In 2019 the President of the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd wrote that “the national emergency is very real…If the US was dealing with a crisis in 2014, you must agree that we’re dealing with a complete border catastrophe.” If it was a national emergency and border catastrophe then, what is it now? The well of descriptive adjectives has run dry.

The worst tragedy at the border and now far into the interior, beyond the drug runners, traffickers, and terrorists, is the humanitarian crisis that has been largely curtained off from view by the government and the legacy media, until now, years too late. I suspect it is because it’s an election year and immigration is today a higher voter priority than all other issues except the economy, and because it keeps getting harder to ignore the human calamity.

The statistics are staggering. The House Homeland Security Committee, in a report at the end of the fiscal year (9/30/23), called it “the worst year at America’s border crossings.”

• There were a total of 3.1 million Border Patrol ‘encounters’ with illegal immigrants nationwide.
• In December of 2023 alone there were 302,034 encounters along the Southern border.
• Since President Biden took office it is estimated that anywhere from 6 to 9 million migrants have entered the US. There is no accurate accounting of ‘gotaways’ who crossed undetected or were observed but not detained.
• Deaths along the border are on the increase, too. In fiscal year 2022, border officials found the remains of 858 migrants, up from 657 the year before. Deaths over the past two decades have been estimated at 8,000.
• The cartels that smuggle migrants and sometimes sentence them to death make an estimated $1.7 billion a year.

Those statistics have faces and names. They are people from dozens of countries all over the globe from Asia to Africa to South America now seeking what they hope will be a better, safer life here, or for some, to undermine life here. The migrants include women and children who have been exploited, abused, and injured. Hundreds have drowned in the Rio Grande, died in the deserts, suffocated in overcrowded vans and trucks, and succumbed to hypothermia in cold waters. Children have been forced into labor instead of placed in schools. Countless numbers are homeless living on sidewalks, huddling in tents or blankets. The more fortunate make it to overcrowded migrant centers. Currently 3 million are still waiting to be heard in badly overcrowded immigration courts.

Tens of thousands of others are simply let free or put on planes, trains, and buses for big cities that once boasted the compassion of their sanctuary city welcome-wagon status. Those same cities now face immigration crises of their own. Chicago Mayor Randall Johnson has spent more than $100 million absorbing 34,000 migrants. Shelters are full and the mayor has decided to set a 60-day limit on staying in them, according to the Washington Examiner.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (just can’t make it up) is facing all kinds of local crises. “Nearly 40,000 migrants have arrived in Denver over the past year,” NBC reported last week. Just like Chicago, Denver “will limit the number of days migrants can stay in shelters and send those who exceed their stay out onto the streets.” The mayor figures that the city will need $100 million more to meet new housing, education, and health care demands. “Nearly 3,000 immigrant children, mainly from Venezuela, have joined the Denver Public School system since July,” with no budget for them. “At Bryant Webster Dual Language School, Principal Brian Clark says he is receiving five to 10 new immigrant children per week, the number of new students he used to receive over a year,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Migrants are living in Boston’s Logan Airport. The New York city budget is being drained dry by the cost of shelters, health care services, schooling, and law enforcement. Children were recently booted out of their school so the building could be turned into a migrant shelter.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have produced the makings of a bipartisan package of reforms. House Speaker Mike Johnson said it is dead on arrival in the House. House Republicans passed a package last year. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said it was dead on arrival in the Senate. No good deed goes unpunished.

For his dogged determination to find a legislative solution Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, was censured by his state’s GOP, which called on him to “cease and desist jeopardizing the security and liberty of the people of Oklahoma and of these United States.”

The prospects for at least temporary relief have been on again, off again, on again, and now maybe off again.

One reason?

In the past week, the tablets came down from Mount Mara Lago and etched in the stone was a decree from Donald: There shall be no solutions to the illegal immigration issue.

As former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once reminded his political fraternity, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Trump found wisdom in that.

“We need a Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border and, unless we get that, we are better off not making a Deal, even if that pushes our Country to temporarily ‘close up’ for a while, because it will end up closing anyway with the unsustainable Invasion that is currently taking place,” Trump wrote on his website.

Roughly translated, the ex-President was telling Republicans to hold the issue for use against President Biden. His decree did not fall on deaf ears. Republican loyalists in Congress seem to have fallen into line, some fearing their own fate may well be tied to Trump and the potency of the issue.

Some Republicans balked. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, for example, had this to say to NBC: “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis added, “It is immoral for me to think you looked the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.”

“Then there’s Ukraine, the U.S. friend in Europe now running out of ammunition to fight Vladimir Putin,” a Wall Street Journal editorial reminded us Jan. 26.

Desperately needed funds for Ukraine are currently being held hostage by the Republican’s insistence that a tough US border security package must be included in the Ukraine-Israel aid bill, something Trump apparently opposes in its entirety.

As for Democrats they are stuck behind the wheel of a semi careening down a mountain pass with no brakes. The consensus among them seemed to be that tearing down the wall and opening the borders was a win-win strategy. They could appear altruistic in their behavior and flood the country with millions of new residents who presumably would vote Democratic. Instead, what they gave the country was thousands of miles of out-of-control catastrophic conditions that may now be a hot political poker in the eye of the President and his Party.

Back to the beginning: A paralyzed government and a polarized political system have gotten the best of us, thwarting the national will and the national interests, weakening us abroad in the face of international tensions, and perpetuating man’s inhumanity to man. Immigration failures are not in isolation, however. The governmental and political debacles run wide and deep in our current politics.

The way out may require a transformative change in the way Americans view their role in self-government and their responsibilities as citizens. That would require restoration of civility and compromise in our politics, civility, and mutual trust in our behavior toward one another and a return to social order in our lives. That would entail a reaffirmation of and a new commitment to the values that make up the American character. All of that would entail the revival of many of our political and social institutions that keep us upright and pointed in the right direction. It is more than politicians can produce, but not more than a reunited and integrated country can achieve.