Many of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted to elect Donald Trump president of the United States in 2016 did so because he said he would put a stop to the flood of illegal immigrants who had streamed into the country through its Southern border relatively unprovoked over the last few decades.
Nearly two years later, not only has the flood not subsided, but a wave of some 7,200 to 14,000 illegal immigrants is currently rolling through Mexico from Central America with designs on entering the U.S.
Trump has been frustrated in his efforts not only by Democrats, who desire open borders in the hopes that someday-legal illegal immigrants can be brought into their fold of government-as-guarantor-of-goodies and become lifetime voters for their party, but also by the country's broken immigration laws.
Among other problems, unaccompanied Central American minors cannot be sent back home because of a loophole in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. In addition, the initial U.S. threshold for claiming asylum is so loose that 80 percent pass their first interview with a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer, according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
Despite what you may hear from the left and its national media allies, Americans want laws followed on illegal immigration. To wit, according to a Harvard-Harris poll, even in the midst of the president's zero tolerance policy for families crossing the border earlier this year, 84 percent opposed sanctuary cities, 70 percent wanted stricter enforcement of immigration laws and 69 percent opposed abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The migrant caravan - in addition to the record number of apprehensions of Central American adults with children crossing the border in September - should be a front-and-center election issue in next month's mid-terms, as was illegal immigration in 2016, but it ought to count for more than rhetoric from the rhetoric-loving president.
Trump, instead of blaming the coming masses on Democrats (who do deserve some responsibility), should cast the story as an economic one. How can a country $21.6 trillion in debt and with rising deficits continue to support more and more people who don't want to play by the rules, have all the rights but none of the responsibilities of citizens (51 percent of all immigrants rely on one or more welfare programs, according to 2012 Census data), and take the jobs of Americans who have done nothing to be upended.
He should cast it in terms of the cost to the country - the cost of support of the illegal immigrants, the cost for border protection, the cost in lost tax revenues. At the same time, he should continue to push the country's long tradition of welcoming the legal immigrant.
Trump, this week, also said some individuals in the coming caravan could be criminals or Middle Easterners. Open borders advocates were quick to point out he had no evidence of that. However, it's not about what we don't know, it's about what we do know.
We do know the caravan's Central American countries of origin and Mexico have done nothing to stop the flow. We do know that Middle Easterners have attempted to come into the U.S across the Mexican border in the past. We do know deadly El Salvadoran gangs like MS-13 have come across the border. And we do know that drugs - specifically killers like fentanyl and carfentanil, both China-made - are largely brought into the U.S. across the Southern border.
And, for goodness sake, we do know that some 72,000 people in the U.S. perished from drug overdose deaths in 2017. How much more evidence do we need that we must control our borders? Isn't our safety and that of our families and our neighbors worth protecting?
Trump, if he's not, also should be telling that story on the mid-term campaign trail. Democrats aren't touching it, eight of them in key Senate races this week refusing to say how members of the caravan should be handled once it reaches the U.S., according to the Washington Times.
The president also should be clear that the more illegal immigrants that come into the U.S., the less lenient he can be in any type of future comprehensive immigration bill. Last winter, he offered Democrats what they've wanted for years - legalization of Dreamers (young illegal immigrants of a certain age brought into the country by illegal immigrant parents) - in exchange for limiting ways of bringing in other immigrants. They wouldn't make the deal, though.
Those voters who voted for Trump in 2016 to quell illegal immigration are not satisfied yet, but they have only a Hobson's choice - what is available or nothing at all - to make. Democrats are of no help. So they really have no choice but the same choice they made in 2016, keeping both houses of Congress in Republican hands.