Immigration: Still the Number One Issue

Which GOP Presidential Candidate Will Seize the Initiative on Immigration?

Immigration remains the most potent single political issue for the American Right.

As such, Republican leaders must grasp the full gravity of the present crisis and embrace the achievable solutions. This issue should become particularly paramount as the GOP presidential primary now heats up. Why? Because legal remedies exist for the next commander-in-chief to make swift progress to reclaim America’s sovereignty, protect our culture, and restore prosperity for working-class citizens.

Biden’s economic failures create misery for middle and lower income households in America. Real Wages, meaning incomes adjusted for the costs of living, have now crashed lower for 24 straight months. This unprecedent streak makes Americans poorer every day. The rewards of hard work steadily erode due to Biden’s inflationary explosion in prices, especially for the staples of life like food.

Given this harsh reality, unsurprisingly credit card balances soar at the highest clip ever and the savings rate plunges to the lowest level in 15 years.

But concurrent with this economic pain, Biden has effectively opened America’s borders, inviting in millions of new workers to compete unjustly and illegally in the labor market against American citizens, further depressing Real Wages. Per analysis from the Daily Mail, the total onslaught of unvetted trespassers now reaches over 6 million Biden illegal aliens.

Simultaneously, the pace of lawful immigrants also soars, and nears record highs. In fact 2022 saw a massive jump of nearly 3 times the legal immigrants vs. 2021. Prior to Biden, America allowed fewer legal immigrants for five consecutive years.

Here is the data in chart form:

Source: Axios

As the graph shows, over 1 million legal immigrants joined the wave of illegals in 2022, and the trend points to even more lawful immigrants for 2023 as Biden aggressively expands work visas for foreigners to replace Americans.

So, given this scenario of a vaporized border for illegals plus a wide open door for legal migrants, huge political opportunity arises. Which Republican leaders will step up and seize this chance to rally the Right on the issues of sovereignty, culture, and prosperity?

The issue is especially pertinent for the presidential race, because the president possesses almost king-like powers under US immigration statutes. Under Title 8, Section 1182 of US Code, the president may prevent the entry of “any aliens or any class of aliens into the United States [who] would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

This issue vaulted President Trump to national prominence and sparked his historic upset victory in 2016. As president, he clearly worked diligently to slow legal immigration and achieved marked, welcome reductions, even before the lockdowns nearly halted all migration. Trump’s accomplishments faced constant interference from liberal activist federal courts trying to stymie him, inventing laws from the bench out of whole cloth.

But Trump’s record on deportation disappointed. During the three pre-pandemic years 2017-2019 the Trump administration removed 975 thousand illegal migrants. But during the prior three years, President Obama had removed 1.06 million illegal migrants. In fact, Obama proved surprisingly effective at law-and-order deportations – a legacy now totally squandered by his former vice-president.

The point here is that America faces a fulcrum moment. Biden creates a massive border crisis…and at the worst possible time economically for America. Taking a long-term historical view, America currently has a foreign-born percentage that nearly matches the all-time record of 14.7% from the Ellis Island days of the Industrial Revolution. But in that era, we had an endless need for unskilled laborers and zero safety net – the opposite of today’s reality.

Source: Center for Immigration Studies

So, our country confronts key questions. Do we have a country if we do not have a border? Does any legal immigration make sense for America right now -- at least at this torrid pace? Why are we granting hundreds of thousands of work visas at a time that Real Wages collapse for our own citizens?

These questions should be answered by the candidates for the GOP nomination.