Commentary
Since January 2021, the Biden administration’s policy actions have undermined U.S. national security vis-à-vis China, including plans to reduce Navy ships and aircraft, shrink the Army to fewer than 1 million soldiers for the first time in 20 years, divert military training focus to ideologically motivated personnel policies from foreign threats, and elevate “mitigating climate change” as a military priority.
But nowhere is the ongoing diminishment of U.S. national security more disastrous than the damage being wrought at the open U.S.–Mexico border.
Border security is absolutely a key component of national security. Secure borders directly affect the sovereignty, security, and well-being of the United States over time. Policies that promote tight immigration controls facilitate assimilation and stability over time. Such policies also minimize the entry of criminals, terrorists, sleeper agents from hostile countries, spies, drug runners (loaded with fentanyl produced in China), human traffickers, and disease-ridden people.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s open borders policy implemented after Inauguration Day in 2021 was a complete reversal of the Trump administration’s policies that emphasized border security and a return to the enforcement of preexisting U.S. immigration laws.
The Biden administration’s immigration policies have included the diversion of border wall funding to other uses, the directed nonenforcement of existing U.S. immigration laws by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement directorate, the acceleration of amnesty processing at the border, the coordinated dispersal of “asylum seekers” into the U.S. interior at taxpayer expense, and the repeal of Title 42 restrictions (an action that will clear legal objections and lead to an enormous wave of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the southern border).
The results have been predictably disastrous. As announced by the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in October 2022, “some 2.7 million migrants—those who illegally entered or were otherwise inadmissible at a port of entry—were encountered at our borders in FY 2022, bringing the total under President Biden to a whopping 5.5 million.”
These numbers don’t include 1.2 million illegal immigrants who avoided detection and incarceration when they crossed the border, as estimated by Customs and Border Patrol officials and reported by Fox News in January.
It gets worse. As reported by Axios, in January and February, “nearly 2,200 Chinese nationals have crossed into Panama through the thick jungle of the Darién Gap, according to migration data from Panama’s government.”
The United Nations and U.S. State Department are providing funding to support the Darién Gap camp in Panama, a transit point for people whose ultimate destination is the United States. The U.N. agency that supports the camp is the International Organization for Migration, which facilitates emigration from communist China and third-world countries to the United States and other Western countries.
“The Chinese are coming through here [the Darién Gap camp] in large numbers, about 200 per day and increasing, heading to the U.S.,” according to independent journalist Michael Yon.
Haitian migrants cross the jungle of the Darien Gap, near Acandi, Choco department, Colombia, heading to Panama, on Sept. 26, 2021. Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images
Most of these Chinese are reported to be military-age men. According to a Twitter post by Kyle Bass, founder of Conservation Equity Management, a Texas-based private equity firm, the Texas Department of Public Safety is “now apprehending as many as 530 Chinese nationals (almost entirely military-aged males) EACH WEEK. Over 2,000 per month at today’s catch rates. These are the illegal entries [who are caught] (clearly there are many more).”
How many of these people are spies or future saboteurs? No one knows, but the number is certainly not zero.
Various nonprofit organizations are involved in assisting the Biden administration in supporting illegal aliens (“asylum-seekers” and “migrants” in the left’s softer vernacular) and dispersing them throughout the United States. For example, the American Red Cross openly advertises on its website: “The American Red Cross is providing relief supplies—such as cots, blankets, hygiene items, first aid kits, and towels—for use by local nonprofits caring for migrants.”
As reported by the New York Post, “FEMA’s Emergency Food and Services Program board includes Catholic Charities and United Way, which pass the money to local nonprofits serving illegal immigrants” as a way to hide the use of taxpayer funds being used to support the administration’s illegal immigration policies.
Even more deadly to Americans has been the unchecked flow of illegal narcotics into the United States from Mexico, particularly Chinese-manufactured fentanyl and other opioid chemical precursors. The result has been an average of 100,000 dead Americans annually with no end in sight. It should be noted that 58,220 Americans were killed during the Vietnam War.
On April 29, the UK Daily Mail reported a match made in hell between Chinese triad gangs and Mexican cartels. The triads are helping the cartels “launder millions in illicit drug money made by flooding the US with the killer drug fentanyl.” The article further quotes Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services, who stated that “the State Department estimates that $154 billion in illicit [money-laundered] funds pass through China each and every year.”
Thus, the Chinese regime is making money off the death and destruction from the fentanyl crisis in the United States, in which they are directly complicit!
Particularly troubling is the impending end of Title 42 restrictions on May 11, which “could bring close to 400,000 border crossers and illegal aliens to the border every month,” according to Breitbart. Title 42 is a clause of the 1944 Public Health Services Law that the Trump administration used to quickly expel illegal aliens from the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the high probability of them introducing communicable diseases into the country.
The flood of illegals into the United States that will ensue in a few short days will create a major crisis on the border and divert scarce resources needed elsewhere.
“Federally-activated National Guard troops are expected to continue to deploy along the U.S. southern border through summer 2023, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed,” the Military Times reported in October 2022. Almost certainly, more troops will be needed to stop the flow when Title 42 ends.
Concluding Thoughts
The Biden administration’s immigration policies diminish U.S. national security and benefit communist China directly by exacerbating political tensions between pro-immigration Democrats and pro-border security Republicans, destabilizing the United States through the dispersion of millions of illegal aliens throughout the country, diverting public resources from other important priorities, and killing Americans through fentanyl and opioid abuse.The Chinese also make money from those fentanyl deaths, as noted above.
According to a new study from the FAIR, illegal immigration costs U.S. taxpayers at least $151 billion each year, including education, welfare, medical costs, and law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels. That’s money we can ill afford to spend when federal deficit spending is out of control.
Whatever weakens the United States directly benefits the Chinese regime as it seeks to replace America as the world’s superpower. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) generals in Beijing must be smiling as they watch the United States willingly diminish its own national security and erode deterrence against future PLA aggression.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
