AUSTIN, Texas – That’s news and a question for Democratic mayors of huge cities, who have recently been complaining that illegal immigrants are filling homeless shelters and otherwise straining city social safety nets. First, some news: hundreds of thousands of foreigners who cross the border illegally have been flooding your cities non-stop for 18 months. Now the question: Did mayors live in a news-free cave?
First, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser complained that approximately 6,000 recent border crossers who volunteered to ride buses provided to her city by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott were burdening homeless shelters and taking over social services resources American homeless and needy. She blamed it on Abbott “cheating” these immigrants to fill buses going to DC.
Next up was New York Mayor Eric Adams, who complained about the thousands of immigrants crossing the border they were downloading resources drawing the attention of American citizens to their happiness, somehow implying that the Republican governor of Texas had something to do with it.
I strongly suspect that mayors, governors, school superintendents, and hospital administrators across America have been silently suffering at the hands of undocumented immigrants for many months now. Now that Adams and Bowser have voiced their grievances, no one should be surprised if a fresh kind of Me Too movement erupts among them, especially if federal money is earmarked for them.
But rest assured, the strain America’s huge cities are feeling has nothing to do with Texas Governor Abbott. Only the Biden government has done this, starting on Inauguration Day 2021, with a radical policy of gutting routine detention, deportation, and deterrence policies. The emasculation of almost all congressionally passed immigration law has created a mass migration crisis far beyond anything found in the American experience, greater even than the number of people arriving at Ellis Island during its early 20th century heyday, which shattered every illegal immigration record on the books.
As things currently stand, a Texas court case requiring regular government reports on the number of people who have been granted an internal pass or who have just crossed the Border Patrol border, over two million people crossing the border spread throughout America. If the administration doesn’t change course, millions more will be admitted over the next two years. At this rate, by the end of Biden’s term, the number of people allowed at the border will likely top six million, by my conservative estimate.
Where do the mayors think all these hundreds of thousands of people went? Let me give you an idea.
From those hectic early days of the crisis to today, when hundreds of thousands of people a month stormed in to get Biden’s quick, free ride, I was there to observe the human conveyor belt system they roar to life all along the Texas border. Throughout the day and often through the night, it ferries thousands of illegal border crossers out of the river for a day or two to be processed by Border Patrol and then, with the facilitate of local nonprofits, to the charter and commercial buses and planes that pick them up to almost every city in the nation.
I first discovered the conveyor belt in Del Rio and San Antonio, Texas in March 2021. The newly processed immigrants who filled the buses told me they were going to: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
Recently I visited the conveyor belt in Del Rio it was at the end of May 2022. The only thing that has changed is that it has become a real colossus. Throughout the day, seven days a week, fully packed Border Patrol buses pulled up to the nonprofit facility – right behind Greyhound buses carrying others to cities across the country – and unloaded them to get on to commercial buses.
They told me they were going to: New Jersey, New York State, Florida, Oregon, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, Utah, California, Minnesota, Wyoming, North Carolina and Colorado.
Most were released on the condition that they eventually apply for asylum; the Biden government has long since stopped even pretending to follow lawful processes. It’s an honor system now. However, all the statistics show that most of them will either never apply or will be rejected. None of them will leave the country once their legal documents expire, and the Biden administration has ended deportations, as America has always known. Unless they are terrorists or serial killers, these illegal immigrants will not be deported under Joe Biden or likely ever.
This means that American cities will be stuck with literally millions of undocumented people who are not entitled to support themselves, whose children will attend public schools, who will have no medical insurance but will need health care, and who will never voluntarily return home after graduating. asylum applications inevitably fail.
City mayors are likely not the only local leaders publicly or quietly fulminating about the massive fresh burdens, and certainly not because their homeless shelters are overflowing with destitute immigrants, as Joe Biden has acknowledged. School district superintendents should already be recognizing the need for costly, portable classrooms to cope with the influx of undocumented immigrant children, who make up a significant portion of Biden’s admitted children. Parents of school-going children across America will see bond elections and higher tax rates to cover the costs of fresh schools and expansions and English-as-a-second-language teachers. Hospital administrators should already be noticing emergency department backlogs and operational deficiencies.
It is too early to calculate the impact of this historic crisis on American cities.
But with mayors, administrators, teachers, parents and everyone else acting like they have no idea what’s going on, it’s time to find a clue. Stop blaming it on some distant Republican governor. This is President Joe Biden’s legacy. And get your wallets out. This has only just begun.
