“There’s an awful lot of illegals coming in. . . . They’re coming in by the thousands, it’s just unbelievable. See, they’re coming in with the consent of the immigration service.”
Cesar Chavez’s comments from 1974 also describe the situation today, not least in his hometown.
Chavez was born 96 years ago on March 31, in Yuma, Ariz. As it happens, I’m leading a border tour this week which includes Yuma, and will be visiting the vicinity of his birthplace on this National Border Control Day.
Seeing the border at Chavez’s hometown highlights how bad the situation really is. Joe Biden’s La Invitación to the world’s potential migrants has created an unprecedented flow of illegal aliens. Once a relatively sleepy stretch of the border, Yuma has seen an explosion in illegal crossings; February’s 10,000 total “encounters” (the Biden crowd’s term for arrests) by the Border Patrol in the Yuma Sector were ten times higher than the pre-Covid February 2020 number. The last two months’ numbers were actually down from December, but mainly because of the Biden administration’s attempt to mask the total illegal flow by diverting more of it into purportedly “legal” crossings at the ports of entry. And the numbers will likely reach new heights with the lifting of Title 42 (which allows expulsion of border jumpers, no questions asked) in May.
At zero-dark-thirty one day this week, I watched the intake of the last batch out of a total 250 illegal aliens who’d turned themselves in, just along one part of the Yuma Sector’s border. And the prior nights had even higher totals.
“It’s just unbelievable,” indeed.
Yuma also exemplifies the Biden administration’s petulant and irresponsible response to Trump’s successful immigration measures — specifically in this case, the president’s reckless and costly Inauguration Day stop-work order for ongoing fence construction. This left numerous holes in the fence, most notorious among them at the “Yuma Gap” near a Colorado River dam. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had promised Arizona that the gaps would be belatedly filled, but when that didn’t happen, the state’s then-governor Doug Ducey plugged them himself with shipping containers. The feds sued, and the gaps are open again, with leisurely site work finally underway to plug them.
But while the broad outlines of the border sieve resemble Chavez’s experience, some things have changed.
While virtually all border-jumpers in Chavez’s day were Mexican men coming to work in the fields, migrants today come from all over the world in response to Biden’s Invitación. In Yuma, more than 90 percent of Border Patrol arrests are now non-Mexicans. Many are from South America, including Colombia and Peru. (And I found, among other things, a discarded Bolivian passport on the Mexico-facing side of the fence.)
Others come from beyond the ocean: Chinese, Uzbeks, Ghanaians. I saw an Angolan family who’d crossed in daylight waiting under a canopy for their taxpayer-funded ride. (They’d lived in Brazil for years, meaning any asylum claim would be a lie.) I myself spoke with half a dozen give-ups from Georgia (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) preparing to board the Border Patrol bus. I later found a print-out of one of their e-tickets outside the fence; the round-trip fare from Paris to Cancun was undoubtedly intended to support the lie told to Mexican visa officials that they came only for a vacation. Any asylum claim, if they even bother to make one, would be transparently bogus. One of the Georgians all but admitted to me they were coming in response to Biden’s lax policies, not any sort of persecution.
Another difference: In Chavez’s time, it was often Republican politicians who prevented border agents from stopping illegal entry, so that farmers would have continued access to cheap controllable labor. And it was Democrats like Senator (later vice president) Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor Ralph Abernathy who demanded border enforcement to strengthen the market power of legal workers.
The parties today have switched places, with the successors of Mondale and Abernathy taking the lead in undermining the ability of workers to better their lot. You can see that in Yuma by contrasting the area’s two congressmen; Republican Paul Gosar has a career grade of A from the immigration-control group Numbers USA, while Democrat Raul Grijalva has earned an F.
And the immigration service doesn’t consent to illegal immigration with the wink and nod of yesteryear; today’s DHS has been turned into a shuttle service benefitting alien smugglers. The Biden administration’s policies have rendered violations of our borders so routine and systematic that they have, in the words of federal district Judge Kent Wetherell, “effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.”
Agents I spoke with this week are demoralized by policies turning them into the Walmart greeters of the U.S. border. They’ve told me that smuggler buses pull up on the Mexican side, then disgorge their customers, who walk for a few minutes to cross the border, only to be loaded onto the Border Patrol’s counterpart buses, headed for rapid release into the U.S. That is not what border agents signed up for.
As a result of this inversion of responsibilities — from working to prevent illegal immigration to actively facilitating it — agents are retiring as quickly as they can. It used to be that most would stay until the mandatory retirement age of 57, and perhaps even fight for an exemption; now, agents submit their retirement papers at the earliest possible opportunity. The loss of law-enforcement experience and the interruption of institutional continuity will undermine border-control efforts for years to come, long after the Biden-Harris administration is consigned to the history books.
As harmful and depressing as all this is, it’s not insoluble, nor does it require extraordinary measures like using the military. Plugging statutory loopholes, providing adequate tools and resources, and letting border agents do their jobs can turn things around in short order. But it will require work to wake up apathetic parts of the electorate and effect political change.
As Chavez would have said, Sí, se puede!