The reckoning on immigration is here

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The easy part is over.

Americans wanted the borders closed.

For decades, the legacy media and politicians in both parties ignored that wish, claiming the United States had to accept and support an endless flood of illegal migrants. The disconnect between average people and elite opinion was so obvious that academics wrote papers about it.

President Trump broke with the elite consensus from the first day of his 2016 presidential campaign, when he announced “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” No issue proved more politically potent for him.

In his second term, Trump has kept his promise. The wall may not be literally complete, but it might as well be. Customs and Border Patrol reports monthly “encounters” with illegal migrants on the southern border have fallen about 95 percent from the Biden Administration average, and 97 percent from their 2023 peak.

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Just how many people are inside the United States illegally? We do not really know. In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security put the figure at roughly 11 million in 2022 — and said the number had not changed for almost 20 years.

That estimate is nonsensical, given that close to 10 million people arrived in the first three years of the Biden Administration alone.

In 2018, in a paper that should have received more attention than it did, three researchers from Yale and MIT estimated about 22 million people — double the official figure — were living illegally in the United States.

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And migrants realized they could use asylum claims to gain entry into the United States and become quickly eligible for Medicaid and other public benefits programs, which previously had not been available to them. The number of people claiming asylum rose from 44,000 in 2011 to 209,000 in 2017, according to a State Department report to Congress.

When the Biden Administration took over in 2021, these trends exploded.

Covid lockdowns and plunging tourism devastated Latin American economies, making the United States more attractive. The official 2020 Democratic Party platform essentially called for an end to border enforcement. And requests for asylum surged even further, with almost 480,000 people asking for asylum in 2023 — even as the Biden Administration created other new pathways to admission, like the “Humanitarian Parole Program.”

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o be clear, the left — not the right — destabilized this bargain.

Opening taxpayer-financed programs to millions of asylees, refugees, and other immigrants with quasi-legal status infuriated many native-born Americans. In combination with the sheer number of new arrivals, the welfare expansion understandably led to an angry backlash.

Now the Trump Administration has made clear that in its view closing the border was the first step, not the last, in immigration enforcement, and that the United States should view the presence of tens of millions of illegal migrants as a mass violation of its laws and sovereignty, even if they are committing no other crimes.

We are about to find out whether most Americans agree.

The easy part — closing the borders — is over.

The hard part — deciding what to do about the people who are already here — comes now.

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