Tag Archives: border crisis

The Border Crisis Continues

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  OCT 1, 2021

There are anywhere from 19,000-60,000 more immigrants headed for the southern border of the US. In addition, immigrants recently deported to Haiti are ready to make another try at getting in here.

The crisis at our southern border isn’t going away. It is getting worse, and the Government has seemed helpless in trying to do something about it.

In September an estimated 30,000 migrants crossed into the country. Many of them forded the Rio Grande River and set up a makeshift encampment under the bridge connecting Mexico and the United States at Del Rio TX, hoping for an open gateway into their promised land.

Now they’re gone. All 30,00 of them. Half of them disappeared in a matter of a few days, along with the telltale signs of their squalid encampment. You would think you were watching a television sci-fi series. They were there at the beginning of the week and gone by the end of it. Poof!

“They want those people out from under that bridge so they can’t be seen anymore. It’s an optics thing,” unnamed Department of Homeland Security (HS) officials told the Washington Examiner. “They are moving them around for process and release. They’re going to have everyone at the bridge gone in the next two days.” Continue reading →

Immigration: A Checkered Past, a Challenging Future

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  SEP 1, 2021

Part II of II — Read Part I

On the first day of the new year 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, became the first immigrant admitted to the US through Ellis Island. It was the day the new gateway to a new world opened to an old world of people with hope in their hearts of a bright future. After a 10-day ocean crossing from her native land, Annie was welcomed by immigration officials and given a ten-dollar gold piece.

She was among 700 immigrants, including two brothers, who passed through the Island that day and among 450,000 admitted in that first year of operation. She and her brothers were soon reunited with their parents, already in New York.

Before Ellis Island was closed in 1954, more than 12 million people from all over the globe—Russia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and others—made their way through Ellis in a never-ending stream of humanity. They came in search of something better than the poverty, famine, economic depression, dislocation, or religious persecution in their homeland. Continue reading →

Illegal Immigration Worsens in Cloud of Political Smoke

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  AUG 23, 2021

Part I of II

“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable…We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.”
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security, quoted from a leaked tape recording of a private meeting with border patrol agents in Texas, August 12, 2021

You have to appreciate the Secretary’s candor, even if in private. While he has intimated as much in his public statements after touring the border, this is the most honest assessment we’ve had from anyone in the Biden Administration.

While the White House grapples with the unmitigated disaster unfolding in Afghanistan it should also not diminish the priority of dealing with another unfolding disaster on our southern border.

It’s about time that someone senior in the Administration said what most Americans have known for a long time. The President and his underlings, including the Secretary and a good many progressive members of Congress, have been in public denial about the chronic crisis on our border. The propaganda, the almost comical prohibitions against the use of certain words in describing events there, the refusal to support enforcement of our immigration and criminal laws have gone on long enough. Continue reading →