Trump turned tide against immigration run amok

Article author: 
Tom Tancredo
Article publisher: 
Colorado Politics
Article date: 
24 October 2020
Article category: 
National News
Medium
Article Body: 
Take it from someone who has been fighting the open-borders lobby for more than 30 years: If you think President Trump “hasn’t delivered” on his immigration and border security promises, then you need to take a closer look at the record.  
 
This administration has made incredible progress toward ending the toleration for lawlessness and mass unchecked migration that defined American immigration politics for decades.
 
Remember the situation that prevailed before Trump, when the Obama-Biden administration effectively gave amnesty to millions of illegal aliens in direct contravention of the law with a couple strokes of a pen called “DACA” and “DAPA.” Those blatant abuses of executive authority were basically ignored, even by establishment Republicans.
 
Despite its popularity among the Republican base and Americans as a whole, the attitude in Washington was one of unconditional surrender. Recall that in 2013, only some last-minute heroics in the Senate prevented a full-scale, irreversible amnesty. Even the knowledge that this weakness convinced tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children to walk to our border alone, convinced they would be given “permisos” to enter the United States, did nothing to shake Washington out of the open-borders consensus.
 
Then came Donald Trump, and almost overnight, the issue was at the very forefront of the American political consciousness. As soon as it got a fair hearing, the immigration issue catapulted a Republican to the White House.
 
Unfortunately, some of the people who were motivated to vote based on immigration and the border in 2016 have allowed themselves to become disheartened by the open borders lobby’s demoralization campaigns, which are designed to create the impression that President Trump hasn’t kept his promises.
 
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
 
Over the past three years, the “refugee” racket has been utterly crushed, to the open dismay of the globalist NGOs and “resettlement experts” who got rich flooding the American hinterland with hundreds of thousands of unvetted people from some of the world’s most dangerous places. In 2020, refugees are capped 18,000, the lowest since the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 opened the floodgates to the Third World.
 
Before President Trump, the people responsible for this travesty were leveraging their connections in the Obama administration to tell states and towns all over America that they had no choice but to accept tens of thousands of military-aged Syrian men. Today, these refugee grifters are on the ropes. They and their friends in the left-wing media are furious that they are no longer able to override the wishes of American communities. And they’re desperately hoping for a Biden-Harris administration that would put them back in business.
 
Before President Trump, the ACLU and an army of immigration lawyers were turning our asylum laws into a secondary immigration system that could be used to circumvent limits put in place by Congress. Effectively limitless numbers of people could present themselves at the border, make a declaration of “credible fear” of persecution for an ever-growing list of social ills in their home country, and count on being “caught and released” into the United States.
 
Under President Trump, this farce has been dealt a mortal blow. This administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, along with agreements with Central American countries, have put a stop to it. Genuine Central American “asylum seekers” now can stay in Mexico, safe from the political persecution they claim to face in their home countries. If American immigration courts find their claims valid, we are happy to allow them in — just as the law is supposed to work.
 
We were also promised a wall, and a wall is what we’re getting. It’s happening right now. You can see it for yourself, verified by third parties: more than 340 miles built and standing, with more than 500 additional miles planned and paid for. And it’s working. The so-called “caravans” of 2018 and 2019 are over and our border is more secure than ever.
 
For decades, Americans said they wanted immigration levels to go down or stay the same, and we were consistently ignored by the Washington establishment. That’s over. Net migration to the United States is just over half what it was in the last year of the Obama-Biden administration. The proportion of foreign-born people in the United States is falling for the first time since the disastrous 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
 
If you care about enforcing our immigration laws, rest assured President Trump has followed through as no president has before him. He has the open-borders lobby on the run.
 
Tom Tancredo is a former U.S. presidential and Colorado gubernatorial candidate who represented the state’s 6thCongressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.