How We Can Reverse Biden’s Lawless Immigration Surge, Despite the Moral Hysteria of the Media and Our Pastors

I’m responding to the column in defense of the DREAMers by my good friend Jason Jones, with whom I’ve had friendly disagreements over the decades on the best way to approach the immigration question. I think we agree on the outcomes we want:

• Order at our country’s borders, and the humane enforcement of our democratically enacted immigration laws.

• An end to the influx of vulnerable, easily exploited workers for the benefit of big-business Republicans and big-city Democrats.

• An end to the constant downward pressure on wages for the American working class of every race and ethnic background.

• Wins for conservative causes, from protecting unborn life to defending the natural family, from gun rights to parents’ rights.

• An end to the vast subsidies from the federal government, via non-profit contracts, to the most corrupt and left-wing ex-Catholic nonprofits — such as Catholic Charities, which in my estimation is neither.

• To avoid dividing Americans along racial and ethnic lines, while accomplishing all the above.

But how do we get there? First, it’s key to remember that our enemy here isn’t the immigrants; it’s the power-hungry, greedy, callous Americans eager to profit off their backs at the expense of hard-working citizens. In other words, the Democrats, the RINOs, and sad to say, the U.S. Catholic bishops (among other money-grubbing church groups).

So when I argue for Donald Trump to adopt the same kind of tough-minded, hard-nosed negotiation tactics he’d use against a Mafia-connected building contractor, it’s because I know who we’re dealing with: a Democratic party (and its tame Republican poodles) willing to flout all our immigration laws by simply refusing to enforce them while persecuting little old ladies who took selfies outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Victimists who weaponize White Guilt and corrupt Christian compassion while shrugging at the chaos they inflict on American cities, not to mention the suffering of migrants themselves.

Immigrants Aren’t the Enemy. Leftists Are

Trump must be fair and humane toward the impoverished, misled migrants — and play bad cop to the pasty-faced profiteers and ideologues. If he wants to remove even a large fraction of those whom the Biden administration lawlessly invited into America for blatant political gain, Trump must avoid ugly mass roundups, heart-rending scenes on TV, and other opportunities for our shameless media to play on Americans’ heart strings.

One of the chief weapons wielded by the partisans of chaos who profit from our immigration tragedy has been sentimental manipulation of Americans’ generous feelings, our basically Christian regard for the human dignity of every one of God’s image-bearers.

The Democrats, church-based profiteering “nonprofits,” and the media did this shamelessly when the Trump administration tried to protect migrant children in 2017, expanding on the Obama administration policy of separating such kids from those who claimed to be their family members (but who often proved to be human traffickers).

Trump insisted on DNA tests, for instance (which Biden later inexplicably abandoned). The media painted this as “putting children in cages” and “separating families.” While Latino pro-life leaders like Eduardo Verastegui were praising Trump for taking those children’s safety seriously, politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were posing for pictures and oozing crocodile tears.

AOC tweeted these pictures of her at the fence… heartbroken. In tears.
…..if you look at that fence in the black and white photo, you will see SHE IS CRYING AT A FENCE TO THE PARKING LOT. She is no where near anyone detained. pic.twitter.com/kZxBY5BooE

— Todd (@Doc_Relentless) June 26, 2019

Once Biden was in power, children were left in the clutches of whoever claimed them, and in just 2024 alone, more than 300,000 of them have gone missing — many of them likely into the hands of the illegal sex traders or sweatshop owners. From the media and the church groups we heard only crickets.

Trump Must Outwit the Manipulators

The Biden administration willfully and lawlessly lured at least eight million people into the dangerous underground economy to be exploited. Even now, he is selling for pennies on the dollar the materials Trump gathered to build a border wall, in an act of civic sabotage without precedent in our history. Trump won reelection in part by promising to reverse Biden’s policies.

When he tries to do that, expect the same manipulative images, dishonest rhetoric, and rending of pricey garments by the same pack of Pharisees who wailed in 2017. If Trump is to succeed in imposing some kind of order at our borders, he will have to be savvy. He will need to minimize the opportunities for playing on people’s heartstrings for the benefit of the exploiters.

He will need to focus first, and almost exclusively, on removing migrants with serious criminal records, perhaps by offering green cards to non-criminal migrants who are willing to turn them in. It will be hard for bishops and congressmen to whip up a moral panic over apprehending MS-13 members and sending them back to prisons in their countries of origin.

Beyond that, Trump’s plan should focus on encouraging self-deportation by cutting off the government benefits that many migrants rely on so they have no financial incentive to stay here. He should fight to make E-Verify mandatory nationwide so employers can’t go on exploiting illegal labor behind a veil of willful ignorance. Once that’s in place and the artificial job magnet has been switched off, many migrants will return to their fatherless families and villages. And the wages of Trump’s electoral base, working-class Americans, will finally go up again.

These simple, commonsense measures would undo much of the damage Biden willfully did to our country, and dial down the sense of crisis in hapless “sanctuary cities.”

Once all these crucial measures have been accomplished, I agree with Jason Jones that it might make sense to negotiate some path to citizenship for the DREAMers who have deep roots in our country. That wouldn’t harm the nation, provided we got something crucial in return: an end to chain migration. We can’t reward the parents who ferried their children illegally into our country by giving those now-grown children the right to sponsor the people who broke the law in the first place. A mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, however nonculpable they are, is a major “ask,” and we must either demand something proportionate in return or walk away from the table.

For decades, the Democrats have been squeezing concessions out of us on this issue and offering nothing in return. Americans of every ethnic group, including many Latinos, showed what they thought of that scam when they reelected Donald Trump. It ends on January 20, 2025.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.