It’s rare nowadays to walk through a high end housing development without seeing an “In this house we believe…” sign on at least one home’s front lawn. The problem is, when a person places such a sign out on their front lawn, they better believe what it says. Unfortunately, in regards to immigration policy, it doesn’t seem that such individuals have any interest in practicing the beliefs they espouse on their yard signs.
In the wake of Donald Trump winning the 2016 Presidential Election, Kristin Garvey, a Wisconsin librarian, was particularly distraught that Trump had won the election. In awe of the result, Garvey decided to list key values of hers and other Americans that she believed would be threatened by the Trump administration on a white poster board. Shortly after images of her sign made their way to the internet, an activist noticed the sign and recruited an artist to rework it into a colorful yard sign along with the help of Garvey. After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, sales for the sign spiked.
All across rural Vermont, my home state, such signs stood in the front yards of most homes immediately following the BLM protests. Many of my white classmates with such signs standing on their front lawns decided to post a black square on their Instagram pages, believing that such action would significantly benefit the African American community rather than directly engaging with African American individuals.
The very individuals decrying white privilege were the same people who failed to immerse themselves in communities with high percentages of non-whites. Perhaps this is because my friends live in rural Vermont, the state with the second highest percentage of whites of all U.S. states, at 94.2%, according to the World Population Review. The wealthiest members of our society living in bubbles secluded from reality often feel that they are the most qualified to offer critiques of the general population. This is elitism at its finest. Unfortunately, such elitism has transferred to other social issues too, the most recent example being elitist Democrats’ reaction to Republican governors sending migrants to liberal parts of the country.
A key line from Kristin Garvey’s “In This House We Believe…” sign is “No Human is Illegal.” As of late, it doesn’t seem as if the people with such signs on their front lawns have been obeying this key tenet of their belief system. As Democratic politicians bringing home salaries well into the six-figures decry the actions of Republican politicians sending migrants to Leftist havens of Washington, DC, Martha’s Vineyard, and in one case Vice President Harris’ home, they evade the necessary facts of the Biden administration’s current shortcomings in dealing with the out of hand crisis at our southern border with Mexico. Since President Biden took office on January 20, 2021 up until August 17, 2022, just about one month ago, nearly 4.9 million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders, according to Cision PR Newswire. According to agency reports, the crossings of approximately 900,000 illegal immigrants went undetected by American Border Protection Agencies. Of course, Biden has failed to take responsibility for such an uptick in illegal immigration flowing into the United States, constantly blaming the Trump administration for handing him the reigns to an incapable border response.
In response to calls that he tighten his policy regarding the border between the United States and Mexico, President Biden responded, “I make no apologies for ending programs that did not exist before Trump became president that have an incredibly negative impact on the law, international law, as well as on human dignity.” In essence, Biden, when given the opportunity to take responsibility for his failure in dealing with an influx of migrants, instead deemed Trump’s actions to contain the threat as negatively impacting the global order. In fact, Biden’s actions, not Trump’s, appear to be a major threat to the global order because they have caused instability within the United States, typically thought of as the epitome of strength to the world.
The inactions of the Biden administration threaten the prospect for political stability within Central America through failing to address the ways in which some Mexican government officials have coached citizens in how to immigrate illegally to the United States as well as the shortcomings of Central American countries such as Honduras and El Salvador in failing to address transnational crime as laid out by a United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Minority Report. Additionally, a recent Department of Homeland Security report revealed that Venezuela was sending caravans of violent criminals to the U.S.-Mexico border as recently as July, in the hopes of migrating to the United States. This report further discloses that there have been nearly 130,000 encounters with Venezuelan migrants from October of 2021 up until July of 2022. These issues are very much at the root of our border crisis, as Central American political corruption and pervasive crime leads to cartels being at ease to take advantage of their governments.
As journalist Adam Isaacson wrote after many trips to the border in both the U.S. and Mexico, “It would be hard to devise a migration system that benefits…‘cartels’ more than the current one does” as of April 2022 under the Biden administration. These cartels are responsible for human trafficking and other human rights violations and crimes, often unchecked by the incompetent Biden administration. For instance, in June of 2022, Reuters reported that at least 51 migrants died “after being trapped inside a sweltering tractor-trailer truck found abandoned in Texas…” Two Mexican nationals ended up being charged in U.S. federal court in connection to this devastating incident, each “charged with possessing firearms while residing in the United States illegally” according to court documents and U.S. authorities. According to Craig Larabee, a special agent tasked with running the investigative arm of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, referred to this particular event as marking “the greatest amount of loss of life on record from a human trafficking attempt in the U.S.” according to a Reuters news report. All this, blood on the hands of the Biden administration. It gets to the point where constantly blaming all of your administration’s incompetency wears off and the American people demand accountability rather than constant scapegoating. 21 months into a presidency is more than enough time to start accepting any shortcomings as your own.
What’s more disturbing than elected officials not taking responsibility for their actions in the current border crisis with Mexico is that they don’t have to feel the brunt of their foreign policy incompetency. Instead, everyday Americans living on our southern border and the governors of those states are tasked with either learning how to live with the constant threat of danger or formulating policies and taking action to counteract the incompetence of the federal government in regards to the latter. Recently, we’ve in fact seen governors take matters into their own hands through deciding to send migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, New York City, Washington DC, and Vice President Harris’ home in one instance. The White House has deemed the actions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in sending migrants from his state to Martha’s Vineyard as “disrespectful to humanity.” These words come from an administration that according to a June NBC news story, under the Department of Homeland Security planned to “transport migrants awaiting immigration proceedings from U.S. cities along the southern border farther into the interior of the country beginning with Los Angeles.” President Biden, just months earlier, planned to do the same thing that he chides Republican governors for currently doing. What’s more frustrating is that the only brunt of failed immigration policy that Biden has to deal with is that of public opinion. Republican governors, on the other hand, directly feel the effects of the Biden administration’s failures through being forced to determine what to do with an influx of migrants and how to incorporate them into their thriving society with jobs filled, among other difficulties that until now, Democratic leaders, especially President Biden, hadn’t really been forced to handle.
A second contradiction of the Left is that it openly encourages mass migration, calling for Americans everywhere to recognize the dignity of all immigrants regardless of legal documentation status, while referring to such migrants in a derogatory fashion when these migrants are at their front doorstep, in some cases, literally. Max Lefield, who helped found the Casa Venezuela Dallas foundation, which seeks to help migrants adjust to living in America, recently responded to DeSantis’ actions regarding sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on charter planes. In his tweet, which was recently deleted by NBC News, Lefield said, “Florida Gov. DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard is like me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.” Lefield benefits from providing shelter and support to illegal immigrants, yet compares such migrants to “trash.” This is emblematic of other actions of the Left, which has actively encouraged illegal immigration up to the point where Republican governors take action to deal with the implications of such policy, placing migrants on the doorstep of Democratic elites. Then, all of the sudden, these previously wonderful immigrants have to be sent to a Cape Cod military base because these Democrats can’t possibly be forced to deal with the problems they’ve created.
Conclusively, the Left’s response is emblematic of their tendency to employ “rules for thee, but not for me” approach. Until Americans recognize the massive hypocrisy and shortcomings of the Left’s response to immigration, specifically illegal immigration, our national security is in peril.