Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’s deliberate abandonment of every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe. People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.
Last week, we were in San Diego County, California. On the first day, we started about 60 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean at Jacumba Hot Springs, visiting spots along the border wall:
The next day, we went to a San Diego bus station to see busloads of illegal aliens being released after cursory processing by the Department of Homeland Security:
On our last day, we visited Otay Mesa and later walked a couple of miles down the sand from Imperial Beach to the spot where the border wall comes down alongside Tijuana, Mexico, into the ocean:
Nothing makes the value of physical barriers more obvious than the spot near Otay Mesa, where Biden stopped construction cold on the border wall when he took office, leaving a giant gap right across from the outskirts of Tijuana.
The local landowners in Otay Mesa obligingly allowed the U.S. government under the Trump administration access to their land to build a wall, only to be left with a gap that creates a giant unlawful “pathway” into the United States that is used daily by illegal crossers under the Biden administration.
On a visit to the gap last week, we watched one man walk into America through it unimpeded. A small group had already crossed and was sitting in the shade of the wall, waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up. Not only do they have zero fear of U.S. authority, but illegal crossers now are impatient to be apprehended so they can get released and head to their desired destination—usually a “sanctuary city”........