So many illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border that both Republicans and Democrats now claim that they have a plan that will “secure the border.” But there is a difference. Republicans want to complete the wall that President Trump started to build, and Democrats have hindered and blocked the border wall again and again. After four years under Trump and nearly four years under Biden, it should be clear that Republicans will actually close the border and Democrats will not.
The wall works
Some videos on YouTube show one man cutting through a section of border wall and another man climbing over the wall with a long ladder. Viewers might conclude that “walls do not work” and are a “waste of money.” One opponent said, “If you build a 30-foot wall, they will bring a 31-foot ladder.”
But these objections need to be more convincing.
President Trump successfully built about 458 miles of new, highly effective border wall made of steel bollards placed closely together. The six-inch square bollards are hollow pipes mostly 30 feet tall (18 feet in a few places). They are placed 4 inches apart, which allows border patrol agents to see what is happening on the other side. They are made of 3/16-inch steel, and in the bottom 10 feet of each bollard, they are filled with concrete and rebar. They have a foundation that extends between six and 10 feet underground, and fiber-optic cable is planted in the ground to detect digging. Another 250 miles of this kind of wall still needs to be built.
Opponents say the bollards can be cut through with modern power equipment, which I do not deny. However, cutting through steel, concrete, and rebar is difficult, noisy, and time-consuming, requiring from 20 minutes to one hour for one bollard. This is enough time for border patrol agents to arrest the intruders for damaging government property, and any damage can be quickly repaired.
But can US border agents arrest people on the other side of the wall? Yes. The border wall is not built exactly on the border but on US land just inside the border. There is a strip of land on the Mexican side of the border wall that is still United States territory, and border patrol agents have the authority to make arrests there. It might also be possible to negotiate an agreement with Mexico to allow US agents to pursue the intruders for a short distance into Mexican territory.
Once an intruder is arrested, if we simply return him to Mexico that leaves him free to buy more power tools and try the same approach the next day. But there is a better option: if he is charged with the crime of damaging U.S. government property and tried for that crime, he can be punished with a fine and/or imprisonment. And if word gets out that immigrants who try to cut through the wall are being arrested and possibly sentenced to significant prison terms in the United States, most attempts to cut through the wall will end.
Then what about individuals who use a ladder to climb over the wall? First, a 30-foot-high wall is a daunting obstacle, and getting down on the other side would be both difficult and dangerous. In addition, whether someone enters by climbing over the wall or by squeezing through a 14 inch breach in the wall, they can only come one at a time, not 500-1000 at a time as they could across an open field. The ladder can be quickly confiscated by border agents and the individual wall climbers can be immediately deported.
When Republicans are able to complete such a wall, coupled with motion detectors, lighting, cameras, underground tunnel detectors, and aerial surveillance with drones, it will effectively secure the border against pedestrian entrance.
Other benefits: clear symbolism and an increased sense of safety
A completed wall would also send a strong visual message – a symbol– that people wanting to come to the United States will not be allowed to do so illegally, but must make an application that complies with the law. They must wait their turn, as millions of others have already done.
And if the wall is completed, it would eventually give another benefit. We would gradually begin to experience once again a reduction in fear and an increased sense of peace and security within the United States.
Speaking as a professor who has taught Christian ethics for 47 years, I find it interesting that the people of Israel long ago recognized that a strong city wall gave people a sense of peace and security, a feeling that they were being protected from those who would harm them. One prayer of blessing for Jerusalem was, “Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!” (Psalm 122:7). In addition, rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem is a major theme of the entire book of Nehemiah. In fact, Nehemiah himself calls building the wall a “great work” (Neh. 6:3). In the teaching of the New Testament, this is consistent with the broader responsibility of civil government “to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Peter 2:14). Governments are supposed to protect a nation’s citizens from those who would do them harm.
How many immigrants have entered illegally?
No one knows the exact number of people who have entered illegally under the Biden-Harris administration because there are so many “gotaways” (people who were spotted but not caught) and others who were not even spotted. Still, estimates range between 10 and 20 million people who have entered the United States illegally or have entered using the loosened Biden asylum policies, which tell people, “Go and wait somewhere in the United States until we process your appeal.” Then, they disappear from our legal system but remain in the U.S.
I do not doubt that many of these immigrants are hard-working people who could ultimately benefit American society. If many of them are eventually allowed to stay, America will still have difficulty assimilating such a huge number of immigrants, but they are not the most significant problem.
A much more severe problem is the number of socially destructive immigrants who will damage our country. Surely, some illegal immigrants have come from enemy countries who seek to harm the United States (Chinese men of military age, Islamic terrorists, Russian agents, and others), and some are convicted criminals who have been let out of prisons and sent here. In addition, many are members of violent gangs, and many are carrying illegal drugs, especially fentanyl.
Convicted criminals are allowed to enter.
On Friday, September 27, 2024, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) released a report on the number of known criminals who have been allowed to enter the United States and are currently somewhere at large within the nation. The statistics are shocking:
convicted criminals from other countries: 425,431
persons with pending charges in other countries: 222,141
TOTAL 647,572
When these numbers are broken down according to the crimes committed, the situation is extremely sobering. This is the number of known convicted criminal immigrants now in the United States.
murder 13,099
sexual assault 15,811
assault 62,231
burglary 14,301
drugs 56,533
kidnapping 2,521
ICE has initially processed these persons and then released into the U.S. In addition, there are thousands more who were spotted by border patrol agents but not apprehended (“gotaways”) and also an unknown number who were not even spotted when they sneaked in. And we have no idea of the number of terrorists and enemy agents who have entered while pretending to come in for business or education or some other innocent purpose.
None of these dangerous people should have been allowed to enter. More than 600,000 individuals are making our cities and highways more destructive, and others are conspiring to undermine our national security.
Comparing Trump and Biden:
When Donald Trump was president, Democrats fought tooth and nail to oppose and hinder any construction of an effective wall. For example, on October 31, 2019, Democrats, for the second time, blocked passage of a Pentagon funding bill because it included money for a wall. And in January 2019, Kamala Harris said at a CNN event, “I am not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances.” I do not put much stock in a recent statement from her campaign that she now supports the idea of a border wall because if that were true, why have she and President Biden not restarted its construction in nearly 4 years in office? Just as President Biden stopped construction of the wall on his first day in office with an executive order, he could at any time restart the construction with the stroke of a pen by signing another executive order.
In spite of Democratic opposition, President Trump continued to find ways to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants into the country. He established an effective Remain in Mexico policy that specified that applicants for asylum had to stay in Mexico until their case was decided.
President Trump also declared that the influx of illegal immigrants was an “invasion” and because of that declaration he was able to use money from the Defense Department to build hundreds of miles of a wall.
As a result of these and other presidential actions (such as immediate deportations of border crossers under regulations that were called Safe Third Country and Title 42), the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States was falling every year during Trump’s presidency. For example, during the last year of Trump’s presidency, the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border ranged from 800 to 1,500 per day, the lowest number in several decades.
But then on January 20, 2021, the first day of his presidency, Biden issued an executive order to stop all construction of the border wall. And he issued statements essentially welcoming unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants into the United States. Then the next month (February 2021) he stopped the Remain in Mexico policy and began once again allowing immigrants to file a claim for asylum and then disappear inside the United States.
The results were predictable. By the time Biden had been president for only four months, the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border rose to 6000 per day, and for 2022 the daily average was 6575 illegal immigrants apprehended per day. In 2023, the average was up to 8219 persons per day trying to enter.
There was an apparent decline in illegal crossings in 2023 and 2024, but this is misleading because the Biden administration started guiding people into accelerated asylum-processing gates in the wall where they could be quickly given the right to enter the United States until their claims for asylum could be decided. This process was essentially an open border for hundreds of thousands of new immigrants whose names would be recorded as people requesting asylum, and then they would be released into United States, where most of them would disappear from our legal system.
When will it stop?
The current US population is 346,000,000.
The current world population is 8,200,000,000 (24 times the population of the United States).
The United States has the largest, most prosperous economy in the history of the world. According to information on Wikipedia, our gross domestic product (GDP) is $29 trillion, which is 26% of the world’s economic production per year ($110 trillion). But our population is only 4% of the world’s population. Our total income per person (technically, GDP per capita) is $85,373, which ranks sixth highest among the nations of the world. (Only five small countries rank higher than the United States: Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, and Singapore.)
In addition to our economic prosperity, people living in America enjoy more personal freedoms than people in many other countries.
What is the result? “Everybody in the world wants to move to the United States!” exclaimed the taxi driver that I was talking to in New Delhi. I think he was exaggerating, because many people in the world are happy in their home countries. But just for a moment, think what would happen if only half of the people in the world would try to become American citizens if given the chance.
This would mean increasing the US population from 346,000,000 to 4,446,000,000 (more than 12.8 times the current population). It would mean increasing the size of Metropolitan Phoenix, where I live, from 5 million people to 64 million people – an impossible number of people to assimilate into an economy or a culture. Eau Claire Wisconsin, where I grew up, would expand from 70,000 to 896,000 people. And similar increases would occur in every other city. Schools, hospitals, and roads would be overwhelmed and housing prices would be astronomical.
My point is that we cannot allow the Democratic policy of open borders to continue unchecked forever. No matter how much we might care about other people in the world, we have to set some limits on immigration.
Congress sets those limits within our current legal system. We currently allow just over 1,000,000 people per year to immigrate legally into the United States, with specific allocations for each country of origin. No other country in the world allows this many legal immigrants per year.
Should we allow more immigrants to enter legally?
Some people think we should allow more than 1,000,000 legal immigrants per year. I share that viewpoint. I think we should increase the number allowed to enter legally, especially highly trained individuals in math and science, but also others who will make valuable contributions to American society.
For everyone who shares this viewpoint, there is a perfectly legal way to make this happen: Tell your member of Congress that you think we should increase our immigration quotas and see if you can get his or her support. Then, attempt to persuade other people that such a change is right.
But refusing to enforce the law, or funding to enforce the law, is wrong because it means that “open border” advocates are taking the law into their own hands and refusing to be subject to the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. When government officials refuse to enforce the laws that have been passed, they are the true threat to our democracy.
Democrats wrongly blame Republicans for rejecting a bipartisan proposal
On May 22, 2024, the U.S. Senate voted 43-50 on a border security bill crafted by a small, bipartisan committee representing both Democrats and Republicans. That was 17 votes short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by opponents of the bill. All Republican senators except one (Murkowski) opposed the bill, as did six Democrats.
Democrats then said that Republicans had rejected the proposal because they wanted to keep immigration alive as a campaign issue in the presidential election.
However, the real reason it was rejected was the proposal's deficiency. It was not an indeed “comprehensive” immigration reform plan because it had no provision for completing the border wall, meaning many Republicans automatically rejected it. The bill also would have locked in a provision that the president would not have to close the border until the number of amnesty applicants exceeded a 4-week average of 5000 per day (!). However, that provision would implicitly allow for 1,825,000 new immigrants every year in addition to the 1 million immigrants per year that we currently allow under the present quotas.
Rather than securing the border, it would establish as a law much of the current catch-and-release practice of the Biden administration. In addition, the bill loosened the requirements an applicant would have to meet in order to be granted asylum. In short, the bill was simply a proposal that would give an appearance of doing something about immigration, but it came nowhere close to solving the problem.
Why do Democrats oppose the border wall?
Why do Democrats oppose completing the wall? One possible motive is that they think the wall is too expensive and do not want to add anything more to the national debt. However, no one who knows American politics would believe that a reluctance to spend money is the strongest motive of the Democrats on any issue.
A second possible motive is compassion for immigrants seeking a better life. That is undoubtedly a part of their motive, but I do not think it is the dominant part. And even if compassion were the dominant motive, blocking enforcement of immigration laws by blocking the completion of a wall still encourages continuing illegal immigration at places where the wall is not in place.
There is a third possible motive. I’m convinced that the most likely motive for blocking the completion of a border wall is to gain votes for Democrats. When Democrats refuse to approve funding to finish the remaining 250 miles of wall, and when they cancel the Remain in Mexico policy and throw open the border to millions of immigrants who apply for amnesty and then quickly disappear inside the United States, they show that their true motive is open borders. They expect that open borders will be followed by the granting of amnesty or some other kind of temporary legal status to illegal immigrants. Soon after that, they expect to grant these immigrants the right to vote. In fact, non-citizens have already been granted the right to vote in some Democratic city elections in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, and some jurisdictions in Vermont and Maryland.
Because our country is currently divided about equally between Democrats and Republicans, adding 10-20 million (mostly) Democratic voters would mean locking in Democratic supermajorities in many states and guaranteeing Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and eventually the Supreme Court, for decades to come.
This explains why the 2024 Republican platform states plainly:
We will complete the Border Wall, shift massive portions of Federal Law Enforcement to Immigration Enforcement, and use advanced technology to monitor and secure the border. (Chapter 2, paragraph 1).
By contrast, the Democratic platform for 2024 talks about increasing the number of border patrol agents, because they want to appear to be doing something, but it says not one word about a border wall. An effective border wall is the one thing they definitely do not want, because an effective wall is the one thing that will enable the entire border-protection process to work.
One reason I am going to vote for Donald Trump and other Republicans is that Republicans have shown that they will stop the flood of illegal immigration, and Democrats have shown that they will not.
Wayne Grudem is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona. The opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and should not be understood to represent the opinions of Phoenix Seminary.