AUSTIN, Texas – Here’s a news flash and a question for big city Democratic mayors who of late are complaining that illegal immigrants are filling homeless shelters and otherwise straining their municipal social safety nets. First the news: Hundreds of thousands of foreign national illegal border-jumpers have been flooding your cities nonstop for 18 months straight already. Now the question: Have mayors been living in a news-free cave?
First, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser complained that some 6,000 recent border-crossers who volunteered to ride buses provided by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to her city were burdening homeless shelters and taking social service resources for American homeless and needy. She blamed Abbott for “tricking” these immigrants into filling the D.C.-bound buses.
Next came New York Mayor Eric Adams griping that thousands of border-crossing immigrants were taking resources from American citizens down on their luck, somehow also intimating that the Texas Republican governor had something to do with it.
I strongly suspect mayors, governors, school superintendents, and hospital administrators across America have been suffering illegal immigrants in silence for many months already. Now that Adams and Bowser have voiced their complaints, no one should be surprised if a new kind of Me Too movement breaks out among them, especially if there’s federal money in it for them.
But rest assured that the burdens America’s big cities are feeling have nothing whatsoever to do with Texas Gov. Abbott. It was only ever the Biden government that did this, starting on inauguration day 2021, with radical policies gutting routine detention, deportation, and deterrence policies. The neutering of almost all congressionally mandated immigration law unleashed a mass migration crisis far beyond anything in the American experience, greater even than the rates of those incoming at Ellis Island in its early 1900s heyday, one that has smashed every illegal immigration record on the books.
As things stand, a Texas court case that requires regular government reports as to how many were granted interior admittance or who just got past the Border Patrol, well over two million border crossers have fanned out across America. Millions more will be granted admittance in the next two years if the administration stays this course. By the end of the Biden term, at this rate, the number of people let in at the border will probably exceed six million by my conservative estimation.
Where did these mayors think all these hundreds of thousands of people went? Let me give you an idea.
From those hectic first early days of the crisis to the present, as hundreds of thousands a month were storming over to get their quick Biden free passage in, I was there to observe a human conveyor belt system roar to life all along the Texas border. All day and often all night, it moves thousands of illegal border crossers from river, to a day or two of Border Patrol processing and then, with the help of local nonprofits, onto charter and commercial buses and planes that take them to just about every city in the nation.
The first time I discovered the conveyor belt in Del Rio and in San Antonio, Texas was in March 2021. The freshly processed immigrants who were filling buses told me they were going to: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky.
The most recent time I visited the conveyor belt in Del Rio was in late May 2022. The only thing that had changed was that it had become a true behemoth. All day, seven days a week, completely full Border Patrol buses were pulling up to the nonprofit facility – right behind Greyhound buses taking others to cities across the country – and offload them to get onto commercial buses.
They told me they were going to: New Jersey, New York State, Florida, Oregon, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, Utah, California, Minnesota, Wyoming, North Carolina, and Colorado.
Most were released on a presumption that they’ll eventually apply for asylum; the Biden government long ago stopped even pretending to follow lawful processes. It’s an honor system now. But all statistics show that most will either never actually apply or will be declined. None will leave after their legal permission slips expire, and the Biden administration has ended deportation as America has always known it. Unless they are terrorists or serial killers, these illegal immigrants will not be deported under Joe Biden, or probably ever.
That means America’s cities are to be stuck with literally millions of illegally present people who are not authorized to support themselves, whose children will attend public schools, who will not have medical insurance but need health care, and who will never voluntarily return home after their asylum claims inevitably fail.
City mayors are probably not the only local leaders publicly or silently fulminating about huge new burdens, and certainly not about how their homeless shelters are overflowing with destitute immigrants that Joe Biden has admitted. School district superintendents should already have noticed a need for expensive portable classrooms to handle influxes of illegal immigrant children, who make up a significant portion of those Biden has admitted. Parents with kids in school across America will notice bond elections and higher tax rates to pay for new schools and expansions and English As a Second Language teachers. Hospital administrators should have noticed by now emergency room backlogs and operation deficits.
It’s too early to calculate the impacts of this historic crisis in American cities.
But big city mayors, administrators, teachers, parents, and anyone else acting like they had no idea this was going on, the time has arrived to get a clue. Stop casting blame on some Republican governor far away. This is a President Joe Biden legacy. And pull out your wallets. This has only just begun.
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