Traditionally, when migrants lacking legal documents entered America, they had sought to evade our border control officers, and if caught, were immediately deported. However, they now discovered that they could instead declare themselves to be refugees seeking asylum on a variety of different grounds, and simply turn themselves in. Given our overburdened judicial system, they would be granted a court hearing date well in the future, and generally released into American society for years, immediately disappearing into the local immigrant communities. As paroled asylum-seekers, they were under various legal restrictions regarding employment, but given the huge numbers, these were seldom if ever enforced.
So in effect, a quasi-Open Borders policy had been established in American immigration law through non-legislative means. What had once been intended as a small and narrow exception had swallowed our entire immigration system. This transformed the influx of what would have previously been considered illegal immigrants into quasi-legal “migrants,” much like the waves of millions of “migrants” admitted into Germany and other European countries about a decade earlier.
Full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/donald-trump-and-his-immigration-policies/#comment-7428887
The resulting size of the inflow was staggering:
With millions of foreigners casually entering the U.S. and only a small fraction of them ever being deported, the enforcement of laws against unauthorized entry largely disappeared as a matter of practical federal policy. And by effectively eliminating the notion of illegal immigration and allowing migrants to remain here, our country naturally began attracting more and more eager entrants from all across the world.
Given these developments, Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 holding some extremely strong ethnic political cards, but then proceeded to play them in disastrously poor fashion:
His support from our rapidly growing population of Hispanics and Asians was unprecedented for a Republican candidate, and he had attracted much of that support by promising a sharp crackdown on the completely uncontrolled immigration that our country had experienced under the Biden Administration.
He had merely to secure our borders as he had promised and drastically restrict our absurdly burgeoning asylum laws as the Economist now advocates, and he would both satisfy his right-wing base and also nail down much of his strong support from Hispanics and Asians. With Trump being perceived as having an election mandate and with vehemently anti-immigration Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, this should not have been especially difficult. Yet instead he has adopted policies that will likely prove utterly disastrous for both himself and his Republican Party, not to mention American society.
