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June 20, 2024
Editor, The News-Gazette: In his recent letter, Barry Nolan disputes Mike Lowry’s claim that 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border under President Biden.
Mr. Nolan points out that the Department of Homeland Security has released 2.5 million people into the country and expelled another 2.8 million. True, that’s not 10 million. But 5.3 million in three years isn’t insignificant. And that only includes illegal immigrants who were apprehended and processed. Surely, some number crossed undetected and are unaccounted for in DHS data. Moreover, that 5.3 million isn’t spread evenly across the entire country, and the impact of illegal immigration is greatest on low-income Americans.
A CBS/YouGov poll found that majorities of almost all demographics favor mass deportation. Yet the Biden administration recently announced a new plan to offer legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. CBS News called it “one of the largest immigration relief plans in recent history.” Given that his opponent, whose signature issue is “building the wall,” has been running ahead of Mr. Biden in polls for months, this seems poor timing.
If Mr. Biden had instead used his four years to build a coalition on immigration, we might be in a different place. Most Americans support commonsense border security and reform of our legal immigration system to streamline processing. A president who successfully achieved both would have credibility to pursue further changes.
Instead, we have the current mess. Legal immigration is a bureaucratic nightmare. Desperate migrants flood the border and swamp towns which lack the infrastructure to accommodate them. For those who favor high levels of legal immigration, including myself, this is the worst of all possible worlds. If Mr. Trump wins in November, we will know why.
One final note: Mr. Nolan refers to the Cato Institute as a “conservative” think tank. This would be news to the Cato Institute, which was established to advance libertarian polices, not conservative ones. While he would not be the first to mistake libertarians for conservatives, if Mr. Nolan is confused about the difference, he could do worse than to read Friedrich Hayek’s 1960 essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” While conservatives and libertarians agree on many issues, immigration is not one of them. BEN CONNELLY Charlottesville (formerly of Lexington)
