Crisis at border will be key to November election

In 1980, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro decided to open his country’s border so people could leave. Communist nations had tough border security, not to keep people out, but to keep people in.

Castro announced on May 1, in what turned out to be the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, that anyone who wanted to get off the island could go to the Port of Mariel, get on a boat and leave.

Carter responded with open arms. He set up the Cuban-Haitian Entrant Program to provide temporary status to the migrants along with access to asylum processing. Under the authority of the Refugee Act of 1980, Carter offered to grant asylum to 3,500 people

More than 125,000 came. The Mariel boatlift, as it is known, lasted into October.

Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan in November.

It may have been Democratic muscle-memory that made President Joe Biden’s team hastily schedule a visit to the U.S. Southern border on the same day that former president Donald Trump had previously announced he would be going to the border. Polls show Biden’s approval rating at around 40% and his disapproval rating getting close to 60%. On the issue of immigration specifically, which shows up in polls as one of voters’ top concerns, the February Harvard-Harris poll of more than 2,000 registered voters found 65% disapproval of Biden’s job performance.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, there were 301,983 enforcement encounters at the Southwest Land Border in December 2023. That’s a record-breaking number. In  December 2020, the month before President Joe Biden took office, there were just 73,994.

CBP reported 1,734,686 enforcement encounters at the Southwest Land Border in fiscal year 2021 (October 2020 through September 2021). The next year the number rose to 2,378,944. Then to 2,475,669.

But Biden didn’t want to be photographed with massive numbers of migrants. “The President’s team has selected an area to visit that has had virtually nonexistent activity in recent days, weeks, and months compared to elsewhere along the border,” reported Fox News’ Bill Melugin, “San Diego sector, Tucson sector, and El Paso sector are where the overwhelming majority of illegal crossings are taking place right now.”

Pretty pictures don’t fool anybody. Millions of people, hundreds of thousands per month, have entered the United States as illegal immigrants since Biden took office and signed a stack of executive orders that aggressively changed the nation’s policies.

“We have rescinded so many Trump immigration policies, it would take so much time to list them!” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told MSNBC in a 2021 interview.

In February, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson released a list of 64 things Biden did to “open the border.” New York radio personality Mark Simone posted the list on WOR’s website, an indication that there are voters even in deep-blue New York who are especially interested in the details of this issue.

And that’s no surprise, given that New York taxpayers have to pick up the cost of housing an estimated 178,000 undocumented migrants who have recently made New York City their new address. “The city has spent $1.45 billion on migrants over the 2023 fiscal year, and once estimated that the cost of housing migrants could balloon to $9 billion over the next two years and $12 billion over the next three,” reported Commercial Observer. The Hotel Association of New York said migrants now occupy 16,000, or about 12%, of New York City’s hotel rooms.

If that’s the impact of just 178,000 asylum-seekers in one city, what’s the total cost to taxpayers of providing for millions all across the country?

Another growing concern, and one with intense political ramifications, is the impact on public safety. Last week, 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley was kidnapped and brutally murdered in broad daylight while she was out for a run on the University of Georgia campus. The suspect is a Venezuelan migrant. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that Jose Antonio Ibarra entered the country illegally near El Paso in September 2022 and was released due to lack of detention space. There are also recent reports of unlawfully present individuals arrested for the rape at knifepoint of a 14-year-old girl in Louisiana and murder of a 2-year-old in Maryland.

In 2016, the shooting death in San Francisco of 32-year-old Kate Steinle by a homeless illegal immigrant became a flashpoint in the presidential election.

This time we’re sure to hear more about the dangers of drugs coming over the open border. In May, the Centers for Disease Control reported that U.S. deaths due to fentanyl almost quadrupled in the last five years.

Politicians often defend unlimited illegal immigration with anecdotes about hard-working people who provide essential services to Americans while supporting their families in their home countries. Here’s a number for you: $656 billion. That’s the estimated total of money transfers in 2023 to and from the U.S. and other countries, up from $647 billion in 2022. It’s more than double the budget of the state of California, every year.

Those numbers were cited in a lawsuit filed in federal court last week against Western Union and MoneyGram. Based on documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawsuit seeks an end to the companies’ practice of providing the personal data from money transfer transactions to be analyzed for “money laundering technique and trends.” An Arizona non-profit called the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC) receives the data, primarily “money transfer records for transactions exceeding $500 sent to or from Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, as well as to or from Mexico,” and distributes it to approximately 700 law enforcement agencies including the Department of Homeland Security.

You’d almost think U.S. border policy is intentionally enabling drug dealing, human trafficking and organized crime, and all the government wants to do is watch.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley