As we hurtle toward an election in an economy wrecked by Democrats full of … doctrinaire ideas, it’s a good idea to ruminate on the unjust financial burdens loaded on the bent, aching shoulders of Americans.
While rooting out the root causes of the border invasion, the know-nothing, do-nothing, deceitful, and kinetically distracting border czar Kamala Harris ignored the proximate cause of the invasion. The proximate cause was the de facto invitation extended by the Harris-Biden administration when they announced they would reverse all the effective policies of the Trump administration that had decreased border lawbreaking.
Since Harris and Biden took office and began working like beavers on meth at concealing Biden’s cognitive decrepitude, “Encounters at the northern border in April of FY24 increased 1,240% compared to April of FY21 and increased 18% compared to April 2023.”
In addition, “nearly 2 million known gotaways have evaded U.S. Border Patrol under this administration. Worse still, “In testimony before the [U.S. House Judiciary] Committee last year, then-chief of the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), Raul Ortiz, said the total number of gotaways could be undercounted by as much as 20%.”
The Judiciary Committee’s immigration report makes clearer the mindboggling scope of the invasion:
Three years into the Biden Administration, the crisis at the southwest border is worse than ever. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered a record-breaking 269,735 illegal aliens along the southwest border in September 2023, shattering the previous record of 252,315 encounters in December 2022. Although official figures are not yet known, the September 2023 record reportedly stood for just three months—December 2023 saw more than 302,000 illegal alien encounters along the southwest border. … Americans would be right to conclude that the border crisis is not a side effect, but instead a goal, of the Biden Administration’s radical open-borders immigration policies.
According to the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR),
As of June 2023, FAIR estimates that approximately 16.8 million illegal aliens reside in the United States. This is significantly higher than our January 2022 illegal alien population estimate of 15.5 million. This estimate is also a 2.3 million increase from our end-of-2020 estimate, meaning the illegal alien population increased 16 percent nationwide during just the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
This dramatic increase in number of illegals is, of course, accompanied by more costs to Americans:
FAIR’s most recent comprehensive fiscal cost study showed that illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children impose a net annual cost of $150.6 billion on American taxpayers as of the beginning of 2023. … [T]axpayers are being set up for annual spending to the tune of $163 billion and counting. This burden will only continue to grow as a result of the Biden administration’s open-borders policies.
Something Americans may not know is that twenty-five states—including Illinois—and the District of Columbia “provide statewide access to in-state tuition for the state’s undocumented students.” This means that an American citizen from Iowa who attends the University of Illinois in Champaign would have to pay $44K in tuition and fees, while an illegal immigrant who lives in Illinois would have to pay only $22K.
Additionally, sixteen states, including Illinois, Harris’ California, Walz’s Minnesota, as well as the D.C. swamp “offer or will offer state financial aid to students who meet certain criteria, regardless of their immigration status.” In sixteen states, financially strapped American citizens are forced to subsidize the college educations of illegals.
The laws or policies that permit this injustice are ironically called “tuition equity” laws—I kid you not.
Americans are well aware of the catastrophic costs of the invasion caused by Harris and Biden. The irony is not lost on Americans when Harris says as she did recently in an economic speech in Pittsburgh, “I believe we need to grow our middle class and make sure our economy works for everyone.” She is responsible for fiscally harming the middle class. She is responsible for the economy that has been failing Americans for almost four years. She is running against her own record of incompetence, ignorance, and harmful policies. And if elected, she will pursue the same policies with the same degree of ignorance and incompetence that created the mess in the first place.
Americans know how Trump governed. They know the economy was better, the world more peaceful, and the border more secure.
They know too how Harris has governed. The tragic signs are everywhere.
