By a stunning 20-point margin, the conservative New Democracy Party in Greece prevailed in its national election on Sunday. For decades socialists had badly governed that ancient birthplace of democracy, running up immense debt and causing other problems which the conservative leadership has since overcome.
This landslide surpassed the polling predictions, and is being described as a political earthquake. The reason for this triumph is clear: the conservative party there took a tough stance against migration, which is the opposite of what Biden is doing here.
On the eve of this election a video went viral purporting to show mistreatment of migrants, many of whom sneak in by sea. Supposedly the conservative candidate, currently its prime minister, was allowing the placement of migrants on rafts and then abandoning them in the middle of the Aegean Sea.
That video did not hurt Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis with voters. “We protected our country’s borders both on land and at sea, and reduced irregular arrivals by 90 percent,” he said at a recent campaign rally until he was drowned out by applause.
Greece was getting 10,000 migrants a month from Turkey, while Biden is allowing many times that number to enter the U.S. from Mexico. The Republican Party should take a stronger stance against this than it has, and the Greek election shows where voters are on this issue.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) should be telling Biden that there will be no deal on increasing the debt ceiling until Biden closes the southern border to illegal immigration. Texas Governor Greg Abbott should demand action by the Texas legislature before it adjourns on May 29, or else force them to return in a special session.
All of Europe has quietly reversed its pro-immigrant policy of five years ago, and now the European Union seems fine with countries closing their borders. In other words, political leaders in Europe have come around to agree with the position first espoused by Donald Trump, despite snickering against him while he was president.
Yet Republicans remain slow on this issue. It has not been a priority in the legislative session in Texas, which along with Arizona receives the largest hordes of illegals pouring into our country. Drugs come in with them, and make their way into schools and communities thousands of miles into the interior of our country.
Last week 11,000 migrants were deported after crossing our border illegally, while another 21,000 were released to await a court appearance scheduled in the distant future. Most of those migrants will never show up in court, but instead will travel to another unsuspecting American community, and if arrested there authorities will typically release them again.
Biden is not going to overcome illegal immigration this way, and probably does not want to. Many Democrats see the migrants as future voters for their party, while the globalists backing both Biden and rivals to Trump see migrants as providing cheaper labor and thus bigger profits for the globalists’ private equity investment funds.
Illegal aliens sleeping in the streets in El Paso, Texas, were being urged to turn themselves in to begin the processing for citizenship. Biden terminated President Trump’s secure border policy known as “Remain in Mexico” and then allowed Trump’s Title 42 policy to expire earlier this month.
Hours before Title 42 was set to expire, a federal judge appointed by Trump in Florida slapped Biden with an injunction against opening the floodgates now. “The Southwest Border has been out of control for the past 2 years,” Judge T. Kent Wetherell said in his court order against Biden’s open border policy.
Biden had planned to release thousands of newly arriving illegal aliens on “parole” into this country, while supposedly evaluating their applications for asylum. But as Americans painfully learned during crime waves in this country, the public is not protected against violence when criminals are out on parole rather than deported or locked up.
On CBS Face the Nation on Sunday, Miami’s Republican Mayor Francis Suarez criticized the new immigration laws signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as "headline grabbers." The billionaire globalists funding DeSantis’s campaign, and the campaigns of other opponents of Trump, see greater profits in more illegal aliens as they work for lower wages.
Meanwhile in Texas, its Republican Gov. Abbott sent a busload of illegal aliens to Denver, which is the fifth Democrat-run city that has received busloads of migrants from Texas. As Title 42 was expiring, Gov. Abbott even bused some to Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence.
While that is good theater, it does not explain the lack of progress by Gov. Abbott in securing the Texas border. Abbott has failed to endorse Trump and failed to strengthen border security in Texas, because many Never-Trump Republican mega-donors actually support Biden’s open borders.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.