Photo courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Liberals and Democrats believe they are being compassionate when they support open borders. However, by doing so, they are not only encouraging the crimes of illegal immigration, illegal residence, and illegal working along with the associated tax evasion, they are encouraging the exploitation of migrants.
Reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the International Rescue Committee, and multiple investigative journalists show that illegal aliens are exploited during their journey to the United States and again once inside the country.
By 2024, human smuggling had become a multibillion-dollar business, a larger source of revenue for the cartels than drug smuggling. Much of this profit was generated through activity carried out openly and with direct cooperation from American border-security officials under the direction of the Biden administration.
In May 2021, journalist Todd Bensman witnessed cartels systematically ferrying illegal immigrants into Texas before openly handing them off to cooperative U.S. border agents. Bensman is now a senior advisor to border czar Tom Homan. A House Judiciary report found that more than 99 percent of illegal aliens remained inside the United States after being released by the Biden administration.
Migrants often pay smugglers, or coyotes, thousands of dollars for passage from Central America or farther afield, including China, Russia, and the Middle East, only to face violence, extortion, and life-threatening risks. Smugglers treat them as cargo, abandoning them in deserts, raping or beating them for non-payment, or holding them hostage. Migrants endure what the UNODC calls “extreme human rights abuses.”
Women and girls fleeing violence in Central America face rampant sexual assault from smugglers, who demand “tolls” in the form of sex, leaving survivors traumatized and indebted. Over 34,000 Venezuelans crossed Panama’s deadly Darién jungle in September 2022 alone, each paying smugglers more than $1,000. Many were left to die from starvation, drowning, or animal attacks, and smugglers beat or robbed anyone who fell behind.
In Mexico, smugglers routinely hand migrants over to groups like Los Zetas for ransom. Families are forced to send $500 to $5,000 via wire transfer under threats of torture or murder, and ICE has reported numerous cases where migrants were beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed when payments were delayed.
Migrants from South America often pay up to $10,000 to cross multiple borders, frequently through loans taken from smugglers at exorbitant interest. Non-payment results in beatings or forced labor, trapping entire families in cycles of blackmail, as noted by the UNODC. A UN agency designated America’s southern border the world’s deadliest land route for migrants in a 2023 report.
Policies meant to keep families together created a powerful incentive to traffic children. Some illegal immigrants cooperated with smugglers to rent out their own children to help unrelated adults pose as families, making it easier to enter through the catch-and-release system of non-enforcement. Several parents later reported that they could not locate their children after the fraud was complete.
Once across the border, undocumented status and fear of deportation silence victims, enabling wage theft, forced labor, and abuse. On average, they are paid 35 percent below market wages. This undercuts American wages and burdens taxpayers as low-road employers evade taxes.
In 2024, ICE charged 24 people with trafficking Mexican and Central American migrants into “modern-day slavery” on onion farms in Operation Blooming Onion. Workers dug with their bare hands for 20 cents per bucket, lived in fenced camps without water or plumbing, and were threatened at gunpoint.
Six contractors were sentenced in 2023 for trafficking H-2A migrants, many of whom had first entered illegally. Contractors seized passports, docked wages for fabricated “debts,” and used threats of rape or kidnapping to maintain control. More than 3,200 cases reported between 2015 and 2020 involved debt bondage in agriculture.
Along with illegal immigration is the widespread use of false asylum claims to buy time and remain in the United States for years through multiple appeals. On a human level, these fraudulent claims divert resources away from the adjudication of valid and truthful cases. American asylum law is meant to protect those facing real persecution, not economic migrants who misuse the system to exploit the goodwill of Americans. When the system is overwhelmed by fraud, genuine refugees suffer. Enforcement is what protects those with legitimate claims.
America’s most recent attempt at comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship occurred in 1986 under President Reagan. The law granted citizenship to nearly three million illegal residents and was meant to be a one-time amnesty in exchange for definitive border security. But the final version lacked the enforcement provisions that would have deterred future illegal immigration and the employers who hired illegal labor.
Rather than alleviating the crisis, it led to decades of abuse and an expansion of illegal immigration. The 1986 amnesty signaled that lawbreaking would be rewarded, creating the incentive structure that fuels today’s crisis.
Liberals claim that deporting illegals is disruptive to families. However, in this regard, there is no essential difference between a prison sentence for other offenses and the deportation of illegal immigrants. If legitimate law enforcement is disruptive to family life, the responsibility lies with the family members who broke the law. Every law-enforcement action has the potential to separate families. Even though a murderer, a thief, or a rapist may have a family, they are still sent to prison.
A policy of refusing to deport illegal immigrants with American-born children would have grave unintended consequences. Such an approach would, in effect, turn children into a permanent-residence visa, a massive loophole that would be readily exploited and would severely undermine the rule of law.
Border czar Tom Homan argues that “a secure border saves lives.” He stated, “A secure border saves lives. We’re going to enforce the law and by doing that we save a lot of lives,” adding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is sending a message to the whole world.”
Responding to a recent call by U.S. bishops to respect the rights of illegals, Homan, a professed lifelong Catholic, lampooned the bishops’ position, saying, “So, according to them, the message we should send to the whole world is that if you cross the border illegally, which is a crime, don’t worry about it. If you get ordered removed by a federal judge after due process, don’t worry about us, because there should not be mass deportations. Is that the message you send to the whole world?”
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