The surge in illegal border crossings is what the American people have determined is the single most critical issue in this election because of the often-devastating effects across our country. Here is a different view of this issue.
Most Americans do not know that the number of naturalized citizens in 2022 was 969,380 and was 878,500 in 2023. That is a lot of people to embrace as new citizens each year. Some politicians talk in platitudes about how so many people want to come to America and how there are many refugees in their native countries due to poor circumstances. As someone who has been to nearly 90 countries worldwide, I can tell you from our discussions that America is a popular place, and a lot of people want to come here. The question is whether we should admit them.
More importantly, are we prepared to do that? In my column on the Harris housing proposal, you learned we already have a shortage of 4.5 million homes for citizens. That is without considering the burgeoning homeless problem, particularly in Democrat-run cities like Los Angeles and Seattle.
Think of this other aspect. If we want to greet more future Americans, we need to be prepared to do so. When Wal-Mart opens a new store, they take months hiring and training their personnel. They stock their shelves and do test runs before the doors open. If you open a restaurant, you have to develop your menu, hire your cooks and chef, get the front of the house personnel in place. Then you have dry runs and a soft opening before you can operate at full throttle.
I can tell you with the number of naturalized citizens we are currently processing, our system is stretched beyond its limit. People may want to come here, but if we don’t have the infrastructure to manage those people and the housing to offer them then it does not matter whether they can obtain work. We must have all the elements in place before we have our “grand opening” event and tell them we are ready for them. It is unfair both to us and to them.
I wrote the following ten years ago during my interview with an immigration attorney, Warren Winston. He now has 50 years with the system:
“We cannot have a legal immigration system without the assets and personnel to be able to efficiently approve the immigrants allowed under the current law. Winston described the decrepit court facilities, overcrowded courts without sufficient personnel to manage the workload, and inadequate systems to process the immigrants we do allow. Immigration Judges are often forced to postpone cases because government lawyers either don’t have the immigrant’s files or are not prepared to complete the cases. Requests for short continuances are often granted, but for years instead of months because of overwhelmed court calendars.”
That situation is demonstratively worse now.
President Biden has on multiple occasions stated if he had the assets he could do the job on immigration. He and Harris constantly talk about the bipartisan border bill that was proposed and supposedly shut down by Trump for political reasons. There was a very well-respected Republican senator, James Lankford, who participated in drafting the bill. By time the bill got to the U.S. Senate, there were a sufficient number Republican senators and six Democrats rejecting it that so it would never have gotten to the floor for a vote. Trump followed their lead when he rejected the bill, not the other way around. The bill would have allowed 1.5 million immigrants to enter annually without going through the legal process. That is why it was rejected.
The bill would have covered some aspects of what needs to be done at the border, but not enough. We urgently need to add at least 3,000 judges. Where exactly are we going to get those people? You can’t simply be an attorney. You must be extremely knowledgeable in one area of the law – immigration.
Then we need 3,000 more court rooms. That is a lot. Here is an idea: Utilize the empty classrooms in many of our cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. There are numerous reasons the student population has shrunk, and fewer kids are going through these rotten municipal school systems than ever. The teachers’ unions will not free up the classrooms for charter schools or other independent operations. Why not convert the classrooms into courtrooms?
In addition, we need the support staff (bailiffs and secretarial) to add to those darn Judges.
You get the point. We are nowhere near ready for the scale of immigration we are getting – legal and illegal. Not only are we incapable of managing the legal immigrants; we are way far away from being able to manage the illegal ones. It is not only unfair to our citizens, but also unfair to the people coming here.
We need to get a handle on this process. Before we let any more people in, we must have the operational structure to manage them. We need the store manager, the department heads, the support staff, and the janitorial staff before we open our doors.
That is what Ms. Harris is missing and that is why her plan is a complete bust.
