Remember when progressives condemned as racists and bigots anyone who so much as expressed concerns about the southern border? And when the Biden administration said that extending permanent legal status to all illegal immigrants1 was a good thing? Or how about when the border crisis was dismissed as a provincial fixation of the populist Right?
I remember. I’m sure you do, too, since this sort of stuff is the kind of fare that the mainstream media dines out on, moralizing issues to the point where they become litmus tests that determine whether or not you’re a Good Person™.
It appears, however, that the winds might be a-changing. And by “winds,” I mean the liberal zeitgeist,2 a fickle and amorphous cloud of bullshit that casts a shadow over everything else in America.
Here’s the remarkably underwhelming D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser back in 2018:
And here she is now after imbibing a strong shot of reality:
Troops!? Crisis!? How dare you. What are you, some kind of xenophobic, Tucker Carlson-watching ultra-MAGAt? Goodness gracious, have a heart you bigoted scum.
A little background for those unfamiliar with how exactly all these illegal immigrants are showing up in select cities on the east coast: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona3 Gov. Doug Ducey are sending them by the bus load to the nation’s capital to prove a point about President Biden’s immigration policies. In April, Abbott announced the charter bus plan as a way to get Biden’s attention in response to his administration’s announcement that it was lifting Title 42, a pandemic-era health order invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020 that immigration authorities have used to taper the 24/7 stream of illegal migrants. The Biden administration sought to end the use of Title 42 as an immigration policy, but a federal court blocked the effort and the order is still in place.
I applaud the Abbott/Ducey move. Frankly, I think it’s brilliant; it gives a little taste of what much smaller cities in Texas and Arizona have to deal with nonstop because Biden and the Department of Homeland Security think it’s okay to basically keep metaphorical turnstiles in continuous motion at the border.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, in two letters sent last week to the Department of Defense and the White House, basically said that the city of D.C. is suffocating with aliens.4
“The regional service center we helped establish in Montgomery County, Maryland is at capacity; our homeless services system is already under great strain; and tragically, many families arrive in Washington, DC with nowhere to go, or they remain in limbo seeking onward destinations across the United States.
With pledges from Texas and Arizona to continue these abhorrent operations indefinitely, the situation is dire, and we consider this a humanitarian crisis — one that could overwhelm our social support network without immediate and sustained federal intervention.”
This Should Make You Mad
It should make you mad because D.C. has declared a humanitarian crisis and even requested troops after a mere 4,000 migrants have shown up since April. You know how that figure compares to the numbers that states like Texas and Arizona have been forced to deal with for years and years? It doesn’t. It does not compare.
Let’s break this down with help from the Center for Immigration Studies and take a gander at the latest Biden administration disclosures in Biden v. Texas, the most recent of which was filed on June 15. It shows that during the month of May, the DHS released 95,318 migrants encountered by Border Patrol, bringing the total of illegal immigrant releases under the Biden administration to a whopping 1,049,532—a population larger than the number of residents in the president’s home state of Delaware,5 at a rate of 2,115 per day.
By way of further comparison, 1,049,532 is more people released into the U.S. than the total number of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol in any given fiscal year between FY 2007 and FY 2020.6 In fact, as CIS’s Andrew Arthur points out, it’s more than the sum of migrants apprehended at the border between FY 2009 and FY 2010 combined (1,002,351). It’s also larger than the population of Austin, Texas, the 11th largest city in the United States, more than 2x the size of Atlanta, and more than 3x as great as Cincinnati.
It gets worse though. The 1,049,532 figure is from two months ago, which means it’s likely ballooned by another 120,000 or so since then, and it doesn’t include “got-aways” (entered illegally and successfully evaded apprehension) and unaccompanied alien children (UACs).
Last month, Fox News reported that there were 440,000 such got-aways in 2022, on top of an additional 400,000 in FY 2021. Even if we give Biden the benefit of the doubt and say he’s responsible for only two-thirds of the got-aways last fiscal year, or 266,667 illegal immigrants, that brings Biden’s got-away total to 706,667.
And UACs? Starting on February 1, 2021 through the end of May, Border Patrol encountered 227,075 of them. Significantly, it turns out that due to an imprudent 2008 law DHS is required to release every UAC from a “non-contiguous country” (meaning every nation other than Canada and Mexico) to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, nearly all for placement with a “sponsor” (usually the UAC’s own parent or a close relative, most of whom are here illegally) in the United States. In other words, there’s no stopping them.
Of those 227,075 UACs encountered by Border Patrol under the Biden administration, 190,053 are nationals of non-contiguous countries. Were you to place those 190,053 UACs into one school district, it would be the nation’s 10th largest.
If you add the 706,667 got-aways to the 190,053 UACs and to the 1,049,532 migrants that DHS has released, a grand total of 1,946,252 illegal aliens have crossed the border under Biden.
Build The Wall
I laugh at people who think it’s racist to say we shouldn’t let millions of people saunter across the border every year. You know what I think? I think they should stop letting in illegal immigrants and take every penny of the millions and millions of dollars that’ll be saved and use it on kids in places like Detroit and Chicago, places where a young black man has 15x the chances of dying from violence as his white counterpart and violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined.
In addition to that—yeah, build the wall. Hell, call it a fence if that’ll assuage your delicate sensibilities, just make sure it’s a wall. The book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opioid Epidemic should be required reading for anyone that thinks we shouldn’t build one.
Speaking of which, I humbly submit that I’m something of an amateur expert on the opioid epidemic (try me), and that if people knew 10% of what I’ve picked up they’d be clamoring for a border wall.7 You have no idea how sophisticated the heroin/fentanyl operation in this country is. Black tar heroin can be traced all the way back to a middle-of-nowhere little Mexican town called Xalisco, a place where kids grow up with the dream of becoming blue jean-wearing drug mules in America.
“Their success is based on a system they’ve learned. It’s a system for selling heroin retail. Their system is a simple thing, really, and relies on cheap, illegal Mexican labor, just the way any fast-food joint does.
From then on, Chavez sat with the informant, at bars and in a truck outside the man’s house, as the informant talked on about these guys from Xalisco and their heroin retail system—which was unlike anything the informant had seen in the drug underworld.
Think of it like a fast-food franchise, the informant said, like a pizza delivery service. Each heroin cell or franchise has an owner in Xalisco, Nayarit, who supplies the cell with heroin. The owner doesn’t often come to the United States. He communicates only with the cell manager, who lives in Denver and runs the business for him.
Beneath the cell manager is a telephone operator, the informant said. The operator stays in an apartment all day and takes calls. The calls come from addicts, ordering their dope. Under the operator are several drivers, paid a weekly wage and given housing and food. Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth. They look like chipmunks. They have a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons. The balloons remain intact in the body and are eliminated in the driver’s waste. Apart from the balloons in their mouths, drivers keep another hundred hidden somewhere in the car.
The operator’s phone number is circulated among heroin addicts, who call with their orders. The operator’s job, the informant said, is to tell them where to meet the driver: some suburban shopping center parking lot—a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a CVS pharmacy. The operators relay the message to the driver, the informant said.
The driver swings by the parking lot and the addict pulls out to follow him, usually down side streets. Then the driver stops. The addict jumps into the driver’s car. There, in broken English and broken Spanish, a cross-cultural heroin deal is accomplished, with the driver spitting out the balloons the addict needs and taking his cash.
Drivers do this all day, the guy said. Business hours—eight A.M. to eight P.M. usually. A cell of drivers at first can quickly gross five thousand dollars a day; within a year, that cell can be clearing fifteen thousand dollars daily.
The system operates on certain principles, the informant said, and the Nayarit traffickers don’t violate them. The cells compete with each other, but competing drivers know each other from back home, so they’re never violent. They never carry guns. They work hard at blending in. They don’t party where they live. They drive sedans that are several years old. None of the workers use the drug. Drivers spend a few months in a city and then the bosses send them home or to a cell in another town. The cells switch cars about as often as they switch drivers. New drivers are coming up all the time, usually farm boys from Xalisco County. The cell owners like young drivers because they’re less likely to steal from them; the more experienced a driver becomes, the more likely he knows how to steal from the boss. The informant assumed there were thousands of these kids back in Nayarit aching to come north and drive some U.S. city with their mouths packed with heroin balloons.” — Dreamland
Let’s look at some recent fentanyl busts while we’re at it, as these, too, might prove edifying. On June 6, officers with the Colorado State Patrol seized 114 pounds of pure fentanyl—enough to kill 25 million people. I’ll let you guess the nationality, but here’s a little hint: His name has been withheld by the cops “to protect him from Mexican cartels, who may want to hurt his family.” A couple of weeks later, the California Highway Patrol found enough fentanyl on one dude to kill 12 million people. Again, I’ll let you guess what country he was from. Back in April, Buena Park, CA police officers recovered 821 pounds of meth, 189.7 pounds of cocaine and 20.5 pounds of fentanyl pills (enough to kill 4.7 million). Again, guess.8
I’m not cherry picking examples. Google “enough fentanyl to kill millions found” for yourself. And while we’re at it, if folks did a little research on MS-13, maybe they’d understand why Trump said, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” You know what MS-13’s motto is? “Kill, rape, control.”9
If any of this makes me a “racist,” so be it. Build that fucking wall.
At least Obama and I seem to be on the same page. In September of last year, the former president opined:
“Immigration is tough. It always has been because, on the one hand, I think we are naturally a people that wants to help others. And we see tragedy and hardship and families that are desperately trying to get here so that their kids are safe, and they're in some cases fleeing violence or catastrophe. ... At the same time, we're a nation state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that ... as a practical matter, is unsustainable.”
Yup. It is indeed unsustainable. And the true cost — the total cost — is incalculable. These migrants are virtually all destitute, often with low levels of education, few job skills, and a rudimentary grasp of the english language. Think of the fiscal drain on states and municipalities, on school systems and hospitals, on local utilities and services, that will result for decades. You know who pays for that? Ordinary Americans. You know who benefits? Businesses looking for cheap labor.
But let’s consider this from an angle that might get through to the I’m-a-Good Person™ numbskulls.
Per CIS’s Andrew Arthur and the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan, the United States — which has less than 5% of the world’s population — consumes 16% of the world’s energy. In 2019, each person in this country emitted 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide. By comparison, the average person in Mexico emits 3.58 tons of carbon dioxide per year; in Guatemala, 1.12 tons; in El Salvador, 1.08 tons; and in Honduras, 1.01 tons. If we extrapolate from there, then the aforementioned 1,946,252 aliens will account for an additional 38,925,040 metric tons of carbon dioxide, annually.
The disparities between the U.S. and the aforementioned countries makes sense. America is obviously a big place, and many people have to take some form of transportation to get around. It’s also heavily industrialized (15% of the world’s GDP). Consequently, whenever an illegal immigrant moves here, their carbon footprint is going to increase by several magnitudes or higher. So if you’re someone who likes to beat the climate change drum, you should damn well oppose millions of illegal immigrants whimsically crossing the border every year.
No 👏 human 👏 is 👏 illegal!!!👏
The Biden administration is (trying to) quietly close four wide gaps in the U.S.-Mexico border wall — you know, the wall we were just talking about, which the Left lost its collective mind over during Trump’s tenure — in an open area of southern Arizona near Yuma, to “address operational impacts” and “immediate life and safety risks.”
In the Yuma sector alone, U.S. border agents stopped illegal immigrants 160,482 times from January through June, a figure nearly 4x that of the same period in 2021, according to Border Patrol data. Apparently this particular locale is popular among foreign nationals, who fly to Mexicali, Mexico before taking a short bus or taxi ride to Algodones, whence they walk across the border before being released into the U.S.
If you’ll recall, the wall project was left unfinished after Biden made this promise multiple times:
But no worries on the bad optics; the media’s got this.
Last year, Biden sent back $2.2 billion in border wall funds to the Department of Defense to be used for overseas defense construction projects. The funds had previously been diverted by Trump to build the border wall—which at one time was going up at the pace of one mile a day, mind you. A report by Senate Republicans in July 2021 said that Biden’s decision to halt border wall construction was costing American taxpayers $3 million per day, and the administration is estimated to have spent at least $1.8 billion by July of last year.
The Left has a fetishistic attachment to euphemisms and literally changing the definition of words (q.v. - “woman,” and “recession”) so that concepts better conform to the ridiculous “reality” they inhabit. They’ve transformed “illegal alien” into “illegal immigrant” and therefrom to “undocumented worker” and so on. I will use illegal immigrant, illegal aliens, and alien interchangeably, and perhaps even some more random monikers and neologisms like “people-who-shouldn’t-fucking-be-here.” If you don’t like it, start a movement to cancel me. (Frankly, I’d be flattered that anyone thinks I’m that important.)
There’s a secret society of people living amongst us that are keeping Del Taco in business, and I’m convinced they’re of the liberal variety.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has also been getting his sup of reality courtesy of Texas and Arizona. After promising on the campaign trail to keep New York City as a sanctuary city rife with social benefits, he’s now warning that a recent influx of illegal immigrants will impact every block and the daily way of life throughout the city, and that it’s already been “a real burden” on New Yorkers. “Our system … was inundated with … you know, those who were seeking shelter because of the callousness of those other states that pushed them out,” Adams said. If it’s callous, how do you propose other much smaller cities take on hundreds of thousands year-round because the Left thinks maintaining a border is racist?
59,198 more people than there are residents of the president’s home state of Delaware, to be precise.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recorded over two million encounters with illegal immigrants so far in fiscal year 2022. That’s the highest number ever recorded by the agency in one year, and the fiscal year still has over two months remaining.
If you know of a better way to address the issues of illegal immigration and the flow of drugs across the border, I’m all ears. A reminder, however, that the border wall used to be a relatively popular bipartisan solution and opposition to it was mostly based on reflexive opposition to Trump, much like everything else.
Another fun fact: In 2019, Border Patrol found enough fentanyl to kill 794 million people. Fentanyl is no joke. It’s 50x stronger than heroin, and upwards of 100x stronger than morphine. If you’ve had morphine before like I have, that should blow your mind. They use fentanyl in elephant tranquilizers for God’s sake.
They’re also cowards. They lure individuals into ambushes in the woods by promising them girls and weed, that sort of thing. Then, as a group, they attack with machetes and knives. Q.v. — “The details of the trial are horrific. Leniz Escobar, also known as ‘La Diablita,’ is a 22-year-old woman accused of luring five teenagers to a Long Island park in 2017 to smoke marijuana – where they were then ambushed. Four of the five young men – Jorge Tigre, 18; Michael Lopez, 20; Jefferson Villalobos, 18; and Justin Llivicura, 16 – were hacked to death by more than a dozen members of MS-13, a street gang with its roots in El Salvador’s civil war of the 80s and 90s.”
Liberals are assholes.
I was given Fentanyl once by an NP in an ER. Due to serious belly pain, my BP was 240/160. The instant she gave it to me I knew I could never take it again. I was euphoric.
The lies told by Democrats to cover up this wave of murders (not overdoses) is heinous.