AUSTIN, Texas – Following Donald Trump’s inauguration, it took his new administration all of an hour to bring the greatest mass migration border crisis in American history to a shuddering halt, with the first full month of apprehension numbers in February hitting the lowest levels in decades. The great mass migration crisis is, in my estimation, over thanks to a simple combination of Trump’s restoration of lawful detentions, rapid expulsions, interior deportations, and an end to releases. RIP to January 2021 — January 2025.
But before anyone moves on from this funeral, however, a different ceremony is necessary, an autopsy for the high purpose of serious national reflection. One for the pantheon of border security ideas and theories the Democratic Party and its academic, pro-migration think tank allies relentlessly sold the American public for years on end as the only means to save the Republic from the unmitigated mass border migration it started as soon as Joe Biden took office.
Now debunked, disgraced, and shot full of holes by what Trump accomplished in an hour on is first day in office, may all of us bury these pseudo-scientific political theories and ideas forevermore in the dung heap of political scams where they belong, and to salt the Earth around them.
The Scam ‘Senate Bill’
In retrospect, Democrats used these untested, yet seemingly plausible immigration policy ideas to distract Americans from what they were really doing, which was dismantling the despised policies that actually worked to keep illegal border crossers at bay.
Start with the most emblematic of these bait-and-switch ideas, the “bipartisan Lankford senate bill.” Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris relentlessly sold this piece of legislation to the American public as the only possible panacea to control the border. Trump and Republicans had the bill killed, which set the stage for Harris and many Democrats running for office to promise its resurrection as a central plank of the party’s immigration policy platforms.
Harris, Biden himself, and Democratic Party influencers would chant almost in unison, for instance, that the legislation’s provisions would finally give a President the absent necessary authorities to really crack down on illegal immigration. Under the Biden administration enforcement encounters at the Southern border averaged more than 200,000 a month, and more than 7,000 per day. Remember they would cite how it would even provide more Border Patrol agents and CBP officers to seize more fentanyl and blamed Trump for killing the bill to perpetuate the border crisis for political advantage?
(Photo by SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images)
“I will make sure that it comes to my desk, and I would sign it,” Harris told CNN during a typical August 2024 interview about the desperate need for a big piece of legislation like the Lankford bill.
But here’s what we can all now see on naked obvious display with Trump’s border crossings averaging south of 300 per day, on track for an historically low 8,300 per month (all quickly expelled back into Mexico): No legislation providing extra presidential authorities were then, now or in the future ever needed for a president to substantially reduce illegal immigrant crossings. It was all a big fat lie.
Those lowest numbers in recorded American history are happening because everything that Trump (or Biden) needed to drive them down was already available in the existing Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA), which required authorities to use them to achieve zero illegal entries. By contrast, the envisioned Lankford bill would have statutorily okayed the releases into the country of 5,000 alien border crossers per day – up 1.8 million per year – before a president could, if she or he felt like it, crack down with expulsions.
And all those new Border Patrol agents? Their real purpose was to process those 5,000 per day for release into the country, not to catch and expel.
Now that Trump’s plan is working magic, the whole “we-must-have-legislation” narrative or something called “comprehensive immigration reform” must never be let out of its crypt.
Digging Up ‘Root Causes’
You’ll have to dig a deep hole in the dung heap of tin foil hat ideas to find one of the most pernicious of the Democratic Party’s immigration theories that Trump’s border has now exposed: the so-called “Root Causes Strategy.” The Biden administration appropriated this idea from European progressive liberals as its central immigration policy with a February 2021 Executive Order that claimed this was the best way to control the U.S. southern border. Biden appointed Vice President Harris to oversee the whole stupid thing.
The theory held that fewer citizens of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador would want to emigrate if the United States invested billions in tax and development money to rebuild those troubled Central American sending countries.
During an April 2021 state visit to Central America, the new border czar laid blame for the already surging illegal crossings on “extensive storm damage because of extreme climate.” And kept going.
“We’re looking at drought in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important bases for their economy,” she explained. “We’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that.”
After billions in U.S. foreign aid, it worked about as well as the idea worked for European liberals who first concocted the bizarre notion in the early 1980s. The most cursory glance at Europe’s experience would have shown it failed miserably there, just as it has here. For example, the European Union-funded policy think tank MIGNEX reviewed some 10 studies spanning more than a decade where development aid was invested to reduce Europe-bound emigration from poor countries.
“In its current form, development aid does not seem to be big enough to create the underlying changes that effect migration decisions,” the MIGNEX report concluded, in part. “In cases where we do see a deterrent effect of aid on migration, a noticeable impact would require an unrealistic increase in aid.”
Writing for the International Institute of Social Studies in 2007, social scientist Hein de Haas concluded that, “Besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people’s capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration.”
We now know the Biden administration dangled the root-causes strategy like a shiny bauble over here, while opening the border over there.
America must now strike this idea dead and bury it deep.
Simple Causes, Simple Solutions
Trump’s quick border closure now requires that the American public, lawmakers, students of immigration policy and policy practitioners finally and forever accept that starting and stopping mass migration events was never the complex undertaking that Democrats constantly asserted while keeping the southern border wide open.
Neither the border nor the “immigration system” were ever “broken” like they always claimed in need of drastic “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images
On Trump’s inauguration day, supposed emigration-driving climate change, foreign government persecution, gang crime and all the other Democrat-claimed causes of the American border crisis did not – all of a sudden –relent.
Trump used a few policy tools that past Congresses provided presidents under existing law to address the only real and simple “root cause” of mass migration, which was to dramatically lower the chances that smuggling fee money will buy entry into the United States for a long enough time to pay it back many times over.
They’re coming in mass when the payoff odds of release-and-stay are high like Biden-Harris mass-release policies made them. They’re staying home when the payoff odds are really low, like Trump just made them with detention, expulsion, and deportation.
That’s the only idea now proven and left standing for all of America to see and know. The rest of them should be pronounced dead on arrival and then be buried, hopefully forever.
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Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
