By Stephen Smoot
Last May, a report composed by the United States House of Representatives stated that “the border crisis remains at catastrophic levels.” The same report shared that the Biden-Harris Administration has overseen 10 million encounters with illegal immigrants trying to cross the border – likely only the surface of a much deeper problem.
In the past several weeks, the conversation turned to groups of Haitians that the federal government has tried to surreptitiously ship to small towns in swing states. Despite official and media denials, reports on the ground persist of family pets, community fixtures, and feral animals being captured and consumed.
The rise of crime, the cost of managing difficult alien populations, and the historic example of Emperor Valens will not sway die hard Leftists from believing that the best way to address the social problems of the globe is to bring them here and to force Americans to live with them too.
No one on the Left or the Right has talked about the biggest disaster of all – the demographic effect of illegal immigration to the richest Western nations from some of the poorest countries on Earth.
Providing incentives to come to Europe and the United States has certainly attracted a criminal and anti-social element, but has also drawn rising numbers of people – mostly young adults of productive working and childbearing age.
Western policymakers see this as a win as natives increasingly turn their noses up at the dirty and difficult jobs that society needs done. They see immigrants, legal or illegal, as the solution to a labor gap problem that afflicts mostly entry level and low paying positions. Immigrants historically turn to these jobs when arriving in a new land.
Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris became border “czar” (a ridiculously stupid government title for a republic with democratic features) the crisis has expanded exponentially. Meanwhile, the system that ships in workers for low paying jobs also spreads grift, also, in this case at least, known as grants, among local politicians looking for a few extra general fund bucks to pave a public parking lot or pay for an arts project.
Who loses in this dynamic? Conservatives have painted the picture of what this burden does to communities as small as Springfield, Ohio or as big as New York City.
But no one counts the cost to the countries of origin.
Oddly enough, West Virginia understands the problem. John Alexander Williams, Appalachian historian, called the relationship between the Mountain State and the industrial core of the United States as a colonial one. Resources and many of the best and brightest people left the state to find their full potential in these core areas. West Virginia got little return on resources and none for the population lost.
The drain of both until the past decade kept West Virginia among the lowest performing states economically and in other key measures.
Imagine what the same process does to a country like Guatemala or El Salvador that has no backstop in a federal government with advocates like Robert C. Byrd, Joe Manchin, or Shelley Moore Capito.
The United States Agency for International Development operates programs in developing nations to try to improve the quality of life of the people there. Its website for the program in Guatemala states that they advance that nation’s“self-reliance by focusing on indigenous peoples, women, and youth to address a lack of economic opportunity, insecurity, and inadequate access to basic services, enabling them to achieve prosperous, secure, and dignified lives at home in Guatemala.”
Make no mistake. This is hard work both for American officials and Guatemalans. Much harder than the arduous and dangerous trip from there to the north side of the United States border, especially with all of the cash and other incentives provided by the Biden-Harris Administration to either accidentally or purposefully draw illegal immigrants from all over the world to America.
Federal, state, and local officials spend approximately $110 billion per year on welfare and public education alone for illegal immigrants. That does not factor in other social costs, including law enforcement and corrections.
Guatemala in a three year period from 2020 to 2023 received just over $570 million from both Department of State and USAID efforts. That breaks down to $190 million per year, or less than two percent of the education and welfare cost of all illegal immigrants in the US.
The money spent on welfare and education alone would go much farther in an illegal immigrant’s country of origin than the United States. While it is true that corruption in these countries siphons off money meant for the most vulnerable populations, that process occurs too often above the table in the system of grants and their accompanying Byzantine rules and regulations in the United States.
One could imagine that an experienced deal maker in the White House could come up with a plan to increase aid to these countries and their leaders, giving them incentives that could be stopped at a moment’s notice to actually work to keep their people at home. Meanwhile, that same deal maker could pass policies to create responsible legal limits and pathways while stopping illegal immigration as much as possible and sending home those who should not be in the United States, especially criminals.
This would also help to counter the aid offensive launched by Red China and Russia, but ignored by the Biden-Harris Administration, to build their influence in the developing world.
Since Harris was handed her border responsibility early in Joe Biden’s presidency, she owns the outcomes. By encouraging and not discouraging mass illegal immigration to the West, and doing so to keep a ready supply of low earning labor, pro illegal immigration Western politicians are practicing a form of imperialism.
It makes little difference if the West colonizes the land in the 1800s or the people in the 2000s.
At the very least, the European colonization movement – outside of the Belgians – often worked to help the people in place while developing the land for the mother country’s priorities. In almost every instance the colonial power spent more on developing the colony than they ever received in profits. Cameroon, for example, siphoned from the wealth of the German Empire, but still relies heavily on public service infrastructure built by them before World War I.
Illegal immigration strips these regions of the very people they would need to build a stronger and more prosperous society. It brings them to the West where, within a few generations, they will assimilate and not provide any benefit to their country of origin.
The Left needs to look at the entire impact of the policies they champion, from the cost of illegal emigration from poor to rich nations as well as the heavy environmental toll taken in the up and midstream production process to make “green” energy.
Their gravest fault is that they focus exclusively on the outcomes they want and not the total costs paid to get there, as well as who has to pay those costs – usually the poor.