Until President(ish) Joe Biden assumed office, the Democrat Presidential policy on illegal immigration was the same as the policy of all earlier Presidents of the United States. Their policy as leaders of the Executive Branch was to enforce the law. The law was to prevent people from entering the country illegally.

This non-partisan national policy was founded on the idea that what we have in America is special, and we don’t intend to just give it away to anyone willing to swim illegally across the Rio Grande. Or the Volga, Rhine, Congo or Danube.

Moreover, allowing immigration that was illegal, as opposed to legal, would give us the worst of the pool of immigrants – the ones willing to violate the sanctity of our laws, often because they’d already violated the sanctity of the laws of the place they came from. Lawbreakers break the law.

In other words, illegal immigration by definition is mass immigration by criminals. Despite what the liberal media tells you, it’s a crime to enter the country illegally. (It’s not a crime to overstay a visa but illegal immigrants are not usually mere visa-overstayers.)

We knew that if criminal immigration reached the millions, it would disrupt our social fabric by burdening schools, emergency rooms, highways and welfare systems.

And if the criminal immigration were by criminals unable (or unwilling) to speak our language, we risked becoming a different society altogether. There’s a reason that immigrants who achieve the privileged status of U.S. citizens are required to pass a test – in English. It’s not racist to believe America should be an English-speaking country of non-criminals where everyone can speak with everyone, preferably without pressing “2” for Spanish or talking through the translation app on your phone.

This was the policy of even the most-recent Democrats to precede Biden, namely Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They stated that people cannot enter the country illegally or stay in the country illegally, and their policies mostly were in accord with those statements.

So, what happened under Biden? Why did he fling the border wide open, even as he denied doing so?

In fairness to Biden, he knew not what he’d done. He was a very old man with very metastasized cancer. Even in his younger days, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and in his later days he was nothing but a tooth-capped scalp-plugged cutout taking instructions from others.  

The shots were being called by whoever was the boldest shot-caller. All of them in the Biden White House were very hard-left, including – or perhaps particularly – his wife, “doctor” Jill.

The question remains, why did somebody or somebodies who were calling the shots under the Biden administration open the border, and why did the other Democrats allow it? There must be a strong reason, because it arguably cost them the 2024 election.

This is an interesting question because the answer tells a lot about the modern Democratic Party.

The most generous reason is that they wanted to do the humanitarian thing. People in Haiti and Guatemala and even Mexico have suffered horribly. Enough is enough. I have some sympathy for that sentiment.

But that sympathy goes only so far. Are we supposed to allow all of Haiti and Guatemala and Mexico to immigrate to the United States?

Moreover, such a sentiment disregards our system of government. If we want to allow more immigration from troubled parts of the world, then the way to achieve it is to pass legislation to allow it and regulate it, not to wantonly violate the legislation that is already on the books.

The Biden administration didn’t pass new legislation. They didn’t even try very hard (at that or anything else). Instead, they said in effect, “We don’t like the law, so we’ll simply violate it.”

That’s anarchy. Or, to use the phrase du jour, it’s a threat to democracy. In the context of the Executive Branch collaborating with an illegal invasion of our country by millions of criminals, it’s arguably a high crime or misdemeanor.

The Democrats indeed seem not to like the laws of our country, at least when it comes to immigration, but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that. They don’t like the country itself.

This is factual. Polls consistently show that Democrats are much less likely than Republicans to express a love for America. They’re a bit embarrassed by America. They want a very different America, one that is more socialistic. Merit is bad, because the people who have it tend not to be the “right” people.

“Fundamentally transforming America” is the phrase Obama repeatedly used as a euphemism for correcting this perceived defect. Obama may indeed have enforced the immigration laws, as I mentioned, but he was hell-bent on making the nation different in values and composition. Maybe he didn’t intend to make America into Haiti (and maybe he did) but “fundamentally transforming America” became a cool thing to advocate.

Obama’s followers in the Democratic Party took that phrase and ran with it. And they ran by any means necessary, including willful evasion of the immigration laws.

That leads to yet a deeper question. What’s so bad about America? This country has given the most prosperity to the most people in the history of the world. Our poor people are rich by the standards of nearly all of history. Our foreign aid to other countries far surpasses anyone else in history.

I laugh at youngsters who display their ignorance by complaining that the price of their iPhone is too high. I grew up in a family of six in a 1200-square-foot house. We had no air conditioning, no color TV, no microwave, and no second car until my father bought an old junker for $110. I started working when I was 15, and washed pots and pans through college. And we were considered upper middle class.

I’ll reserve for another column this question as to why young Americans seem not to love this country that loves them. But here’s a hint. It’s not despite America’s prosperity, but because of it. It’s not because things are too hard, but because things are too easy.