About Migration

Administration Speaks in Forked Tongues

Only the most trusting among the general population believe a single utterance from establishment Washington, D.C. In fact, an inverse relationship exists between an issue’s importance and the likelihood entrenched D.C. speaks about it honestly. The more important, the less probable that the public will hear the truth.

The best the populace can hope for is that decades after the damage has been done, architects of the ruinous policies will make half-hearted apologies. A sampling: in the mid-1990s, 20 years after 58,000 American soldiers died in Southeast Asia, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the war’s chief prosecutor, confessed, “We [President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara] were wrong, terribly wrong.” The war cost $168 billion, or adjusted for inflation, $1 trillion in today’s dollars

Then, in March 2003, speaking from the White House, President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction that Iraq allegedly kept at the ready. Bush ominously added that those WMDs could “kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.” But in January 2004, David Kay, a former U.N. Weapons Inspector, told Bush that his intelligence was wrong; Iraq had no WMDs, and he resigned. Nevertheless, and largely on Bush’s bad information, the Iraq War lasted from 2003 until 2011, and cost $2 trillion. About 4,700 U.S. and allied troops were killed, as well as more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens. In 2022, Bush sheepishly admitted that the Iraq invasion was “unjustified and brutal.”

The 20-year war in Afghanistan, 2001-2021, purportedly launched to beat back the Taliban, ended in a humiliating withdrawal, but not until the Department of Defense squandered $2.3 trillion, and 243,000 U.S. soldiers, allies and citizens died, exclusive of fatalities by disease, inadequate diet, dehydration and other indirect consequences. Two decades, apparently, isn’t long enough for Presidents Bush, Obama or Trump to apologize for their collective misjudgment in sustaining the Afghan war that the nation could never have been won.

The Biden administration has kept Washington’s commitment to dishonesty alive and well, this time as it mischaracterizes the Southwest border invasion. To hear Biden and his Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas describe conditions, agents have operational control of the border; asylum seekers have been thoroughly vetted, and the president’s open borders largesse reflects Americans’ generosity. The inconvenient truth is the opposite of the official narrative.

Since Biden took office, Customs and Border Protection has encountered 6.2 million illegal immigrants and released more than two million of them into the interior. Another estimated 1.5 million gotaways, those who escaped CBP’s detection, are also now part of the general population. Although the official patter is that the border crossers are vetted, the statistics tell a different story. A significant portion of arriving migrants have criminal convictions for rape, assault and murder. A 2021 Department of Justice report revealed that 64 percent of federal arrests in 2018 involved illegal aliens, despite then comprising only 7 percent of the population.

Biden’s open border has lured hundreds of migrants to their deaths. For example, 38 illegal aliens were killed after a fire broke out in a Ciudad Juárez holding facility, and last year, more than 850 illegal aliens died while trying to traverse rough southwestern terrain into the U.S.

In 2022, fentanyl overdose deaths hit 110,000, a record, and are climbing daily. About 150 people O.D. every day from the drug that smugglers bring across the poorly defended Southwest Border. The administration’s welcome-the-world approach to immigration has spawned other crises – sex trafficking, migrant child labor abuse, overwhelmed school districts and hospital overcrowding.

Comparisons between the fallout from long foreign wars and today’s border crisis are not exact. But the similarity is that when a subject affects all Americans – wars and sovereignty-busting open borders – people are lied to. The border mess is still in its earliest stages; Biden has been in office 30 months with 18 months remaining, and possibly four more years if he is reinstalled for a second term. The annual taxpayer cost per the ever-mounting illegal immigrant population including its U.S.-born children is $8,766 per illegal alien. Americans oppose everything about Biden’s law-breaking immigration agenda. A quick rule of thumb: when the subject is immigration, the administration speaks in forked tongues.

Joe Guzzardi is a Project for Immigration Reform analyst. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.