A Great, Destructive Migrant Mess

Meeting with U.S. allies in Europe this week, President Joe Biden said he would not let Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But since the first days of his presidency, Mr. Biden has allowed millions of illegal migrants into the U.S. Last week the Dutch government fell over the immigration issue, and the Biden government could fall next year for the same reason.

Mr. Biden’s border policy is easily explained: Reverse Trump. In 2015, Donald Trump began his improbable trip to the presidency with a simple idea—the Wall. By building some sort of wall along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border (roughly the distance from San Diego to Chicago), he would deter illegal border crossings.

The Trump and Biden border policies, though polar opposites, shared one reality. We got both the Wall and then nothing because the U.S. political system has proved itself incapable of shaping a coherent policy on immigration, which considering America’s history, should be seen as an embarrassment.

At the moment, our interest in the past has telescoped to just two aspects of American history, the slave trade of the early 17th century and the rise in the past two years of gender identity. The rest of American history has fallen into irrelevance. Some reminding is necessary. A cliché of our history is that immigrants built America. The emphasis in that phrase normally is on “immigrants,” to elevate a common heritage. Right now we need more focus on the phrase’s second half—“built America.”

An underappreciated astonishment of our history is how, beginning around the 1820s, a mass of people, most of them European migrants, moved outward from the eastern seaboard. They erected towns and cities, invented practical technologies and laid the basis for America’s economic and military might—all in less than a century. Arguably this dynamic of American greatness—new people, more workers, new breakthroughs—has never stopped. But it might be stopping now.

Immigrants have fallen out of favor, here and across Europe. Gallup’s long-term data on attitudes toward immigration in the U.S. indicates that in the past two years public opinion has turned in favor of decreasing immigration.

How could it not? The only immigration people see today is the policy fiasco and human tragedy in the middle of the Rio Grande River or the illegal-migrant mess overwhelming New York City. Which raises an important but fading distinction. What most people say they oppose is illegal migration and its abrupt cultural-economic dislocations. But the current mess means the numbers supporting legal immigration are falling almost everywhere.

The Biden do-nothing policy (appointing Kamala Harris immigration czar may have been one of the most cynical presidential acts ever) has let more than 1.6 million migrants into the U.S. illegally since 2020. Meanwhile, the number of foreigners waiting years for a green card to work legally in the U.S. is about nine million. What chumps. The visa system is a morass.

Mr. Trump may regain the presidency running against migrants, just as populist anti-immigrant movements are proliferating around Europe. Ron DeSantis

The effort to modernize U.S. immigration policy has famously failed for decades, hung up on words like amnesty and asylum. Allowing the immigration flow to dwindle has significant implications—and they’re not good—for the U.S.’s economic future and national security.

Consider another popular phrase: “We don’t do nation-building anymore.” That sentiment emerged from the Iraq and Afghan wars but has since become a belief on the right. Extend the thought: We don’t do nation-building, so we end up having to build walls around our own nation to stop people flooding into the U.S. from falling-apart places. The whole world is awash in refugees from corruption-ridden, half-built countries. So long as that’s the status quo, they’ll never stop.

Another idea abandoned by both parties is free trade. But if migrant-sender nations are cut off from trade, their inevitable impoverishment will—guess what—send them here. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott can erect all the Cristo-like orange-buoy walls he wants across the Rio Grande, but people won’t stop coming.

Biden national security adviser

A prediction: If the U.S. fails to find its way to a new system for legal immigrants, if it consciously chooses to flatline its human capital, America’s grandchildren today will grow to old age in a world where they’re No. 3, behind China and India, whose populations will overwhelm, outsmart and outbuild us.

Ergo, four more years of either Joe Biden’s open-river immigration or more of the Trump wall will squander U.S. development. We won’t be turning back the clock to a better time. We will be stopping the clock.

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