December 20, 2022 - 7:10am

If two million people illegally crossing America’s southern border in just one year was bad, things are about to get a lot worse. On Wednesday, a Trump-era policy aimed at curbing illegal immigration is set to expire. The policy, called Title 42, was part of the U.S. public health code, and allowed border patrol agents to immediately turn people back to Mexico due to the threat posed by the pandemic. Under Title 42, the U.S. expelled upwards of two million illegal immigrants.

We may not be in a pandemic anymore, but given the Biden administration’s lax attitude toward the southern border, Title 42 has effectively been the only means of border control currently in operation, and that policy is now set to lapse after an appeals court denied a GOP effort to keep it in place.

Border patrol agents, border towns and southern states are bracing for the huge influx of migrants in already taxed systems. El Paso has declared a state of emergency. But they aren’t the only ones. New York City Mayor Eric Adams released a panicked statement on Sunday about the influx of 1,000 migrants a day that he is expecting to arrive in New York once Title 42 expires.

“Our shelter system is full, and we are nearly out of money, staff and space,” Adams said in his statement. “Truth be told, if corrective measures are not taken soon, we may very well be forced to cut or curtail programs New Yorkers rely on, and the pathway to house thousands more is uncertain. These are not choices we want to make, but they may become necessary, and I refuse to be forced to choose new arrivals over current New Yorkers.”

Unfortunately, that choice has already been made — and not in favour of New Yorkers. The Independent Budget Office projected that the city will spend $600 million a year to provide shelter, education, health care and legal aid to the asylum seekers who have already made their way to New York. Meanwhile, New York City’s public housing residents have a backlog of repairs to the tune of billions of dollars.

Immigration advocates argue that Title 42 unfairly denied migrants the opportunity to seek asylum. But reporting has repeatedly found that the majority of the migrants illegally crossing the border are economic migrants and their families who don’t have a legitimate asylum claim. In fact, it’s something Nancy Pelosi herself admitted in her infamous comments about how we need these illegal migrants to “pick crops.”

Ironically, after calling Trump’s border policies cruel and inhumane, President Biden now seems poised to start copying his predecessor, Axios reports. The Biden administration is considering imposing a version of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy which would bar single adults who cross illegally when they have not first applied for asylum in countries they passed through in order to reach the U.S., as well as possibly ramping up criminal prosecutions for illegal border crossings.

Democrats cast Trump and his base as cruel, hateful bigots for thinking that this country should have a secure border. They called them racists for thinking American citizens should come first, smeared them as white people obsessed with losing status to “people of colour.” Leftist journalists and academics and politicians went to great lengths to cast their fellow Americans as hateful — only to have it made clear what their privilege had protected them from having to acknowledge.

It’s not morality but privilege that protects you from having to worry that an immigrant will take your job. It’s not virtue but economic security that grants you the ability to put signs in your window saying “Immigrants are welcome here!” — though we saw how far those signs got the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard.

Liberals “welcoming immigrants” aren’t better than the working-class Americans who vote on restricting immigration: they’re just richer.

But it seems that now, even some on the Left are finding their voices and are able to admit the truth: the southern border is a mess, and this isn’t a partisan issue. Americans living in every part of the country are going to feel the impact of millions more illegal migrants crossing the border.


Batya Ungar-Sargon is Deputy Opinion Editor of Newsweek and author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

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