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Todd Bensman is Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies and author of: “Transgression: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Biggest Border Crisis in American History.” Prior to that, he was a senior intelligence analyst for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division for nine years.
All it took was the arrival of 50 migrants on Martha’s Vineyard to awaken Democrats and the mainstream media to the reality of America’s historic and transformational immigration crisis.
Who knows?
All it took was 19 months, dating back to the beginning of the Biden administration, to be ripped out of their partisan fog to recognize the magnitude of this humanitarian disaster.
It’s sickening, but here we are.
On Monday, The New York Times reluctantly ran a story which used the “H” word to describe the “historical pace of undocumented immigrants entering the country.”
It’s a pace that generations of Democrats would have found totally unacceptable until recently.
This week, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) finally released August statistics showing the stark numbers: more than 2.15 million immigrant encounters on the southern border, between October 2021 and August 2022.
The full reporting period, which runs through September, is likely to end with 2.35 million encounters.
Biden’s presidency could easily end with seven million or more new migrants in America — a population larger than the size of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
By definition, an encounter occurs whenever a Border Patrol agent physically lays hands on a person attempting to enter the country illegally, so a migrant can be countered multiple times.
These numbers are literally off the charts.
2.15 million encounters is the highest number since the Eisenhower administration began tracking records in 1960.
It’s also significantly higher than 1.7 million encounters during Biden’s first term — and even that was a record at the time.
By comparison, border patrol handled less than 500,000 encounters between 2010 and 2016, never reaching more than 400,000 in 2011, 2012 and 2015.
All told, Border Patrol’s 17,000 agents have had to process immigrants about 4 million times since Biden became president.
And as millions were arrested at the border, millions more entered America — and they will continue to do so.
The Biden administration itself has legally released about 1.4 million family members and unaccompanied minors in America, bound only by the promise that they will one day report to immigration authorities.
Add to that at least 900,000 “escapes,” a slang term once used only by Border Patrol agents to describe individuals they suspect could evade arrest.
The problem of “escapees” has become so pronounced that it is now part of the official lexicon.
Adding these two groups together, a total of more than 2.3 million illegal immigrants have entered America since Biden took office.
2.15 million encounters is the highest number since the Eisenhower administration began tracking records in 1960.
On Monday, The New York Times begrudgingly published a story that used the “H” word to describe the “historic pace of undocumented immigrants entering the country.” (Top) Migrants at the border in downtown El Paso, Texas, US, September 21, 2022
In this trend, and there is no indication that it won’t, a second half of the Biden term could push that number to some five million or more.
If the administration lives up to its promise to lift the Trump-era pandemic-related “Title 42,” which accelerated evictions of migrants in the interest of public health, as many as 540,000 migrants could pour in every month, according to intelligence. community estimates.
In that case, Biden’s presidency could easily end with seven million or more new migrants in America — a population larger than the size of Los Angeles and Chicago combined.
To put this unprecedented migration into an even sharper perspective, consider that in nearly six decades, 12 million legal immigrants were admitted to the US through Ellis Island in New York City’s Hudson Harbor.
At their peak, those numbers reached 1,004,756 in 1907, an average of 84,000 legal immigrants per month.
Under Biden, the average is 139,000 illegal immigrants per month.
It’s clear that America has grown since the waves of migrants stopped through Ellis Island, but the current period clearly rivals that transformational era in American history.
Ordinary Americans are already paying a high price for this.
Mark Krikorianexecutive director of the immigration policy think tank, Center for Immigration Studies, estimates the lifetime tax cost of the illegal aliens Biden has let in to date at more than $100 billion.
That’s on top of the $140 billion a year taxpayers already pay for long-term benefits and services to the illegal alien population.
But those are not the only costs.
To put this unprecedented migration into an even sharper perspective, consider that in nearly six decades, 12 million legal immigrants were admitted to the US through Ellis Island in New York City’s Hudson Harbor. (Above) Migrants climb through a fence in the desert at the foot of the Baboquivari Mountains after being apprehended near Sasabe, Arizona, on Thursday, September 8, 2022, by U.S. Border Patrol agents
Likely, the area of civilian life where most Americans will first and most viscerally experience the impact of the Biden border crisis will be in the schools.
A 1982 Supreme Court ruling required the enrollment of minors in public schools regardless of immigration status, regardless of cost or hardship.
In Austin Independent School District, teachers held protests in April 2022 to draw attention to an influx of 400 immigrant teenage students from Central American countries at the International High School and Eastside Early College High School campus. Teachers complained that they were left to teach in hallways and conference rooms.
In and around New York City, a significant wave of 5,000 immigrant children poured into four counties in an 11-month period through August 2021, an additional $139 million burden on New York taxpayers to educate them.
This is the story across the country. Health and Human Services reported that 107,742 unaccompanied minors were released to sponsors in the US from October 2021 to July 2022.
Los Angeles County took in 4,579 children, Miami-Dade County in Florida accepted 2,306 and Texas Harris County took in 7,170.
It is impossible to determine exactly how many immigrant children are enrolled in the country’s public schools from available public records.
But taking into account the wave of migrants under both the Biden and Trump administrations, it is likely that nearly two million have been added to the country’s 49.5 million students in public schools, a four percent increase in four years, my estimate. .
Long before frustrated Republican governors tried to force Northern Democrats to “please, just watch what’s happening to all of us,” no one said a word about the roaring conveyor belt that has already sent hundreds of thousands of border crossers to cities across America.
That machine is running at full throttle even now, pouring a biblical Noah’s flood of foreigners into schools, homeless shelters, jobs and welfare lines across America.
If liberal America would listen for a moment to what Republican governors are trying to say, they would know millions more are on the way, making an already serious crisis that much more dire.
Perhaps, if they opened their ears and their eyes, they’d be having a normal social debate with Republicans about whether this permanent new condition is what everyone really wants.
And whether it is sustainable.