Between 2021 and 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than five million encounters at the southern border, a number that exceeds the population of Ireland. That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of known “gotaways” who crossed without any encounter at all. We are not talking about a system under strain. We are talking about a system that was, for a period, essentially suspended, and the people who suspended it called it compassion.
What has been done to this country’s borders over the past generation is not the result of bureaucratic incompetence or underfunding. It is the result of a deliberate ideological commitment, held by a bipartisan managerial class, to the proposition that national borders are embarrassing relics, that the people who live inside them have no special claim on the government those borders define, and that the most efficient allocation of human labor is achieved when sovereign lines stop meaning anything at all. The border crisis is not a failure of governance. It is governance, working exactly as the people in charge intended it to work.
There is a tradition in American political life, older than either party in its current form, that insists a republic is not a marketplace. It is a community of obligation. The men who built this country’s early industrial and immigration policy understood something that their successors in both parties forgot: the duty of a national government runs first and exclusively to the people who constitute that nation. Not to the world, not to abstractions about global dignity, not to the quarterly earnings of industries that have decided cheap and vulnerable labor is preferable to a stable and organized workforce. To the people who are already here, who built this place, who buried their dead in its soil.
The diagnosis requires honesty about the facts on the ground. Wages in meatpacking, construction, hospitality, and agriculture have been suppressed for decades in direct correlation with the mass recruitment of unauthorized labor. The Harvard economist George Borjas produced research showing that a ten-percent increase in labor supply from immigration lowers wages for native workers in that skill bracket by three to eight percent. One need not accept every jot of every model to understand the direction of the effect. Working-class Americans, particularly those without college degrees, have been competing for twenty years against a labor supply that was artificially and illegally enlarged, and the people who enlarged it faced no consequences whatsoever. The people who paid the price never had a vote on the arrangement.
The named enemy here is not any foreign worker seeking a better life. That impulse is human, and it deserves acknowledgment without sentimentality. The enemy is the class of employers who recruit unauthorized labor precisely because it cannot organize, cannot complain to regulators, and cannot leave easily. It is the political class in both parties that has taken campaign contributions from that employer class and delivered the desired labor policy in return. It is the foundation-funded advocacy network that has spent thirty years branding any enforcement of immigration law as cruelty while remaining studiously silent about the cruelty of driving down the wages of a West Virginia coal miner’s son who is now competing for the only local job that does not require a degree. That silence is not oversight. It is interest.
The prescriptions are not mysterious. First, enforce the law that exists before passing new law. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 included employer sanctions that were never seriously enforced. A sustained federal campaign of worksite enforcement, targeting the industries most reliant on unauthorized labor, would do more in eighteen months than any wall proposal has done in twenty years. Dry up the demand and you alter the calculation at the source.
Second, end the policy of categorical non-enforcement for entire classes of violations. The executive branch does not have the authority to simply decide which laws apply and which do not. Congress should use its appropriations power to require enforcement rather than to fund its theatrical simulation.
Third, reduce overall legal immigration to a level that allows genuine assimilation rather than the production of permanent ethnic enclaves disconnected from civic life. This is not hostility to immigrants. It is the recognition that assimilation is a real process that takes time, resources, and genuine national will, and that a country importing hundreds of thousands of people annually faster than it can absorb them is not being generous. It is being reckless with everyone involved.
Fourth, condition any normalization arrangement on genuine enforcement first, not enforcement as a future promise attached to a bill that will never be implemented. The 1986 amnesty offered legalization now and enforcement later. Later never came. A nation that cannot remember being deceived once is asking to be deceived again.
The deeper wound is not logistical. It is the message that three decades of open practice have sent to the working people of this country: that their government regards the labor market as a global commons, that their wages are acceptable casualties, that their neighborhoods can be remade without their consent, and that objecting to any of this marks you as someone whose opinion need not be weighed. A political class that communicates that message long enough will eventually find that the people receiving it have stopped believing the republic belongs to them at all.
And a republic that its own people no longer believe belongs to them is not a republic anymore. It is just a set of institutions waiting for someone worse than the current tenants to move in.
Tiberius West is a columnist for The Republic Standard.