Updates in the Battle to Secure America's Border

A lot has taken place in the last month related to immigration and the decades-long battle to secure America’s border.  Let’s take a look at what has happened and the implications on state and national politics:

A Tale of Two States

In New York, lawmakers have decided to make their state more enticing to illegal immigrants by passing legislation to give them driver’s licenses.  Since most of the illegal immigrant population lives in the New York City area, where public transportation really eliminates the need for cars, this legislation really makes no sense, unless, of course, the Democrats in Albany have a different goal: registering them to vote.  After all, voter registration often takes place concurrently with the issuance of driver’s licenses. According to Republican Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, Democrats “did try to slip in a bill that would allow for automatic voter registration and basically what the bill said is ‘Anyone who applies for a driver’s license would be automatically registered to vote except if they opted out.”

Believe it or not, most of the pushback to this law has come from a county that routinely votes Democratic in presidential elections: Erie County, home to Buffalo.  Stefan Mychajilw, the county’s comptroller, has sent a letter to all the county clerks across New York State and asked them to contact his county’s whistleblower hotline if they wish to report anonymously the names of illegal immigrants who apply for driver’s licenses. According to Mychajilw, “There needs to be a mechanism for members of the county clerks offices to report illegal immigrants applying for driver’s licenses without getting into trouble.” Mychajilw said he would turn over the name of the illegal immigrant to ICE.  Erie County’s clerk, Democrat Michael Kearns, has promised to defy the new law by refusing to issue driver’s license to anyone in the country illegally.

Contrast New York State’s decision to roll out the welcome mat to illegal immigrants with Florida’s newly elected Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis’s, decision to ban sanctuary cities.  Despite the fact that conventional political wisdom would say that such an action will alienate DeSantis’s standing with “moderate” voters in a swing state, his approval numbers tell a different story.  Quinnipiac pegged DeSantis’s approval rating at 55 percent; quite impressive for a governor of a 50-50 state.  Keep in mind that Quinnipiac has also shown President Trump losing by quite a bit to most of his 2020 challengers.  The conservative DeSantis has a higher approval rating than the state’s two Republican Senators, both of whom have tied themselves closer to the political establishment.  If DeSantis can win re-election in a state that Democrats have done everything in their power to turn blue, then he should instantly enjoy frontrunner status for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.  By then, his state will have the third biggest batch of electoral votes in the country. 

Congress Asks for One More Chance

At the federal level, efforts to crack down on illegal immigration and fraudulent asylum claims have not had quite as much success.  After securing a deal with Mexico where they would work to secure their southern border in exchange for his calling off proposed tariffs, President Trump announced that ICE would begin deporting millions of illegal immigrants who face orders of deportation.  However, he postponed the raids for two weeks at the request of Democrats.  After an apparently successful negotiation with the Mexican government, President Trump apparently thought that his promise to deport more than a million illegal immigrants motivated Democrats to come to the table and pass legislation that will fix our asylum laws.  Strangely, President Trump thinks that Congress will actually come up with something in the next two weeks despite the fact that this time period includes a major holiday: the Fourth of July.  In other words, Congress only has to work one of the next two weeks; giving them even less time to do their job and “work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.” Even without the Fourth of July on the calendar, Congress has already proven that its real priorities consist of harassing Hope Hicks, not securing the border and fixing asylum laws.

President Trump should definitely have taken the request for a two-week delay with the same kind of skepticism that I should have had when girls have told me “I’ll e-mail you” so we can hang out again, “here’s my number-maybe we can go get food” and “we can hang out again.”  Long story short, none of them ever got back to me.  In the long run, it probably worked out; since most, if not all of them, vote Democratic.  But that’s not the point.  President Trump should expect the same results from Congress in the next two weeks.  When Nancy Pelosi first begged him for a delay, he should have given them the same response that I would give the aforementioned girls if they ever begged me to go out with them: “you had your chance.”  After all, President Trump waited patiently in the White House over Christmas vacation rather than go to Mar-a-Lago as planned so he could meet with Democrats to make a deal on immigration.  The Democrats declined to take him up on his offer; spending part of the government shutdown that resulted from their failure to fund President Trump’s border wall in Puerto Rico, chatting shirtless on the beach with bikini babes.    

Now, a word of advice: President Trump should not announce his plans to deport illegal immigrants.  He should just do it.  Maybe Congress has an ulterior motive to asking for this two-week delay: giving traitorous mayors like Oakland’s Libby Schaaf time to warn the illegal immigrant population of upcoming ICE raids.  After all, the Democrats see immigration as a long game; viewing every low-skilled immigrant who pours across the southern border as a future voter.  While the law obviously prevents illegal immigrants from voting right now, the Democrats seem to have no problem with letting illegals vote; as demonstrated by their support for the “Dream and Promise Act,” which would give amnesty to 2.5 million illegal immigrants.  Mark my words: the Democrats will include all of the new arrivals that have poured into the country over the past few years in their next amnesty. 

The Eagle Forum put out a report that explains why immigrants vote Democratic and the Center for Immigration Studies put out a report outlining the empirical results of the explosion in the immigrant population that explains perfectly why the Democrats would like to see the immigrant share of the population go up.  I have touched on the study before but I thought that it would make sense to dive into the findings more in detail.  The study looks at the 25 largest counties in the United States (as of 2008) and the immigrant share of the population as well as the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the vote in the presidential election that year in 1980, 2000, and 2008.  The chart also lists the population for each of the counties at all three time points.  For the sake of space, I have decided to leave out population figures and the data from 2000.  However, I have decided to add President Trump’s vote share in the 2016 Presidential Election to make the point that immigration has turned these counties, many of them already blue before the 1986 amnesty, even bluer. I do not have the data for the immigrant share of the population for 2016 but I can’t imagine it has gone down.  If this chart does not prove Ann Coulter’s point that “the American electorate isn’t moving to the left --it’s shrinking,” then I don’t know what does. 

County	1980 % Immigrant	1980 % Republican	2008 % Immigrant	2008% Republican	2016 % Republican
Los Angeles, CA	22.3	50.2	41.2	28.8	22.4
Cook, IL	12.0	39.6	25.1	22.8	21.0
Harris, TX	8.4	57.9	24.9	48.8	41.6
Maricopa, AZ	5.5	65.0	15.4	54.4	48.6
Orange, CA	13.3	67.9	34.1	50.2	42.4
San Diego, CA	12.7	60.8	23.6	43.9	36.6
Kings, NY	23.8	38.4	44.2	20.0	17.5
Miami-Dade, FL	35.6	60.4	58.1	41.7	34.1
Queens, NY	28.6	44.8	54.5	24.2	21.8
Dallas, TX	5.0	59.2	26.7	41.9	34.6
Wayne, MI	6.3	35.4	8.9	24.6	29.4
King, WA	8.0	45.4	18.5	28.0	21.8
San Bernardino, CA	7.7	59.7	18.1	45.8	41.5
Santa Clara, CA	13.6	48.0	41.7	28.6	20.6
Broward, FL	11.1	55.9	29.0	32.3	31.4
Riverside, CA	10.0	59.9	16.4	47.9	44.4
New York, NY	24.4	26.2	34.3	13.5	9.7
Philadelphia, PA	6.4	34.0	12.0	16.3	15.4
Middlesex, MA	9.5	40.3	19.4	33.9	27.2
Tarrant, TX	3.6	56.9	14.1	55.4	51.7
Alameda, CA	11.8	38.0	33.3	19.2	14.7
Suffolk, NY	7.4	57.0	12.3	46.5	51.5
Cuyahoga, OH	7.0	41.5	8.3	30.0	30.5
Bexar, TX	7.5	51.7	11.1	46.7	40.8
Clark, NV	7.6	59.8	16.9	39.5	41.7

In all but four of the counties, the Republican share of the vote has steadily declined from 1980 to 2016.  Immigrant-rich Suffolk County, based in Long Island, and Clark County, based in Las Vegas, actually swung to Trump in 2016 while Wayne County, Michigan and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, both of which have smaller immigrant populations, also swung towards President Trump but not by a lot.  President Trump won only three of the 25 largest counties in 2016 and every single one of them voted for their state’s Democratic Senate candidate in the 2018 midterms.

As President Trump told his thousands of supporters at his re-election kickoff, the Democrats “tried to erase your vote…they want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”  They merely see changing the demographics of the country through legal and illegal immigration as a means to that end. 

Mexico: Doing the Job Congress Won’t Do

For once, the Mexican government has actually decided to help the United States control its southern border by sending 15,000 troops to the US-Mexico border in addition to sending 6,500 National Guard agents to its southern border to stop many of the migrant families seeking “asylum” from their “oppressive” native countries (in many cases while waving the Honduran flag) from entering their country in the first place.  As Vice President Mike Pence pointed out, “in the last 10 days, Mexico has done more than Democrats have done in Congress in the last 10 years.”  It looks like the President’s tariff threat really paid off.

The battle to secure America’s border will play a major role in the 2020 Presidential Election. If President Trump wants to gain the upper hand, he must realize that the Democrats never have and never will act in good faith on the immigration debate and go ahead with the planned deportations of illegal immigrants who have had their asylum claims rejected.  If every illegal immigrant gets to stay forever and become a citizen, then California Governor Gavin Newsom’s prediction that the GOP will become a third party will come true. If and when that happens, America as we know it will cease to exist. At that point, liberals would finally have the opportunity to declare “mission accomplished.”