Five Not-So-Easy Pieces
Ending the migrant crisis will require disruptive but decisive actions by the president and widespread support from American citizens. The following is a five-point plan offered to illustrate both the scale of what is required and as a pathway to be considered. One thing is certain, either the era of empty gestures and half-measures will end, or the United States of America will.
By Mark Cromer
In the preface of my new book, California Twilight: Essays and Memories of The End of The Golden State, I note that one can’t really discuss any pressing issue in the United States today—be it the economy, the environment, the public education system, the stock of affordable housing, quality-of-life concerns, and crime, to name but a few—without also having a serious conversation about mass migration.
Mass migration globally and the mass immigration it fuels into America is deeply embedded in all of those issues and more, and perhaps particularly no more so than population growth.
While the United States is limited in what it can do globally to curtail mass migration, restrained by the sovereignty of nations, cultural traditions and the finite resources at its disposal, what it can achieve domestically remains entirely within its prerogative and its considerable prowess. Population growth in the U.S. can still be brought to heel and then, over time, reduced to an ethically sustainable baseline.
If there is a will, there is still a way.
But first things first.
Virtually every cognizant adult in the United States today understands that the nation is being literally overrun with unprecedented numbers of migrants converging on America from all corners of the globe. Those that downplay or deny this reality are either being deceptive or are experiencing a dissociative fugue state.
Regardless, the factual impacts of the matter are clear, as are the consequences of what awaits if the nation’s bipartisan leadership maintains the same course it has since the fall of 1986, when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act that President Ronald Reagan signed into law. Better known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, so named after its sponsors, the bill was sold to the American people four decades ago as a one-time-only mass amnesty that would also secure the border from illegal immigration and secure the American workplace from illegal workers produced the opposite result, exploding illicit migration and wiping American citizens out of huge swaths of job markets from construction to hospitality.
The American people have borne witness to this ongoing, mass stampede through the daily programming of it across every broadcast, cable and live-streaming platform as well as encountering the results of it throughout their own communities, as its impacts manifest in jobs, schools, hospitals, shelters and affordable housing stocks.
They understand that arguments and insults hurled over whether migrants have eaten domestic pets are a pathetic, carnival sideshow-like deflection from the indisputable issues confronting their communities today as mass migration continues to buffet the nation.
The president that is sworn into office on January 20, 2025, will confront an existential question: Is the president prepared to take the necessarily harsh steps—however undignified and unseemly they may appear to some—in order to achieve the only result that will save the American construct in a coherently recognizable form and protect working American citizens and their collective future from being trampled underfoot and crowded out?
Forty years of bipartisan malfeasance, subterfuge, cowardice and rank betrayal in Washington D.C. has led America to where it now stands. It will take an American president that’s determined to harness the will of the American people and employ it with an iron resolve to end the overrunning of the American frontier once and for all.
There is precious little time remaining on the clock.
America is past the point where mild legislative fixes sweetened with ideological-sugaring and political horse-trading will adequately address an issue that long ago turned into a crisis and is now cresting into a national calamity. Only direct and decisive executive action will be sufficient to turn the tide at this late date, though Congress must backfill the actions of the president with legislation that codifies the key initiatives undertaken to confront mass immigration.
Considering the stakes, it might be helpful to recall ‘the October crisis’ that confronted Canada more than a half-century ago as the Quebec separatist group FLQ sought to violently pull the province out of the country.
On October 13, 1970, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was asked how far he was willing to go to quash the violence unleashed by Quebec separatists and the crisis it sparked. Trudeau left little doubt as to his resolve when he offered, on camera, his now famed response:
“Yeah, well, there’s a lot of bleeding hearts around that just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed. But it’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people.”
A reporter interrupts him, demanding to know how far the prime minister was willing to go.
Trudeau didn’t blink: “Just watch me.”
Days later he invoked Canada’s War Measures Act which afforded the government sweeping powers with which to deal with the national crisis and the terrorists that sparked it.
The next American president is facing an unprecedented crisis of a different sort but just as existential; mass migration and the illegal immigration it fuels may well prove to be a volatile precursor to violent separatist movements domestically. Grim tidings to be sure, but not the sort of news that can be wished away amid fancy flights of optimism.
The nation will only endure if its president can summon the fortitude of Trudeau and deliver a genuine “just watch me” moment that leads to actions decisive enough and sustained enough to stem the human tide and provide America with some breathing room.
With that in mind, I suggest the following five actions as a template that can produce the key baseline components of what it will take to halt the violently chaotic overrunning of our national borders, to re-establish and then expand functioning civic safeguards for American citizens and to restore not just order, but indeed sanity, to the legal immigration process that must be reconfigured to the benefit of the nation’s citizens first and foremost.
There’s no mistaking they are sweeping in scope and jarring in substance, but only to the extent necessary to adequately address the crisis.
Address The Nation
The President of the United States must provide a primetime national address from the Oval Office that is heralded much in the same manner that President John F. Kennedy’s was in the fall of 1962: one of urgent importance on a matter of national security. With the nation watching, the president must carefully explain the dire nature of the situation that has been wrought upon America through the collapse of its borders and impress upon all Americans the absolute imperative of taking swift and decisive action to right the ship of state.
It is absolutely critical that the president explicitly make the point that more than 50 years of neglect and malfeasance, either intentional or otherwise, has placed America in the utterly untenable situation that it now confronts and that wishing it weren’t so doesn’t make it any less true. The president needs to make it abundantly clear that the time of worthless platitudes about the joys and benefits of mass immigration has long passed, as has watery-eyed bromides about huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and the time of making a sober assessment of the consequences of mass migration has arrived and along with it a new era of taking the urgently necessary steps of overcoming the crisis.
The president must declare a state of national emergency and invoke all the powers afforded to the chief executive.
The president should also use the address to speak directly to the world and all foreign nationals now living in America, candidly asserting that immigration into the United States is within the purview and prerogative of America and its citizens alone. No other nation and no other people have any relevant buy-in or any say in the matter.
They are not part of the discussion and they will not be invited to participate in it. This is a family matter for the American people to discuss and deal with and its governing leadership will no longer pay any lip-service to foreign governments or foreign ethnonationalists living in the United States who demand ever greater accommodation of their own interests.
Countries that attempt to hinder or halt the United States from securing its borders or crafting and enforcing migration policies and laws will face the full economic and diplomatic fury of America in response.
The president must be absolutely clear that going forward with this great national initiative, the primary metric by which immigration policy will be shaped and judged is how it benefits American citizens, whose interests will be prioritized.
The president must then layout in broad strokes with detailed highlights the emergency actions that have to take place and make a persuasive appeal for Americans to support finally getting their house back in order.
Establish Complete Operational Control of the Borders
Functional federal control of all of America’s borders needs to be established within weeks of the new administration, not months or years, and this can only be accomplished by a deployment of the nation’s defense assets that are currently available. While the southern border has understandably been the focus of the mass migration crisis—more than 300,000 migrants have marched across it undeterred during some months—all of the American frontier needs to be universally secured.
This will require the mobilization and rapid deployment of American troops on a scale usually reserved for the numerous foreign conflicts that The Pentagon has poured American soldiers into over the past 70 years while the American homeland has remained denuded of an armed presence adequate to the task of protecting and preserving its sovereign integrity.
Accordingly, the president must summon the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the White House and issue their orders: Deployment of fully equipped troops on a scale that would rival Operation Desert Storm or Operation Enduring Freedom and at a speed that would far surpass those mobilizations as American soldiers stand a post along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border with Mexico. These troops will act as a comprehensive overlay to the 16,000 Border Patrol agents currently assigned to the southern border, not replacing them but supplementing them.
The Border Patrol will work in conjunction with the troops and under the military command that will now be charged with establishing total operational control of the borders. The president must also order the Pentagon to provide the necessary air support and naval assets to the troops in the southern theater of interdiction as needed.
As of this writing, the United States maintains more than 700 permanent military installations around the globe in a force-projection network, yet virtually nothing of material consequence has been done to establish operational control of America’s own borders.
Accordingly, the sole military objective of the troops deployed and the federal agencies now working with them at the border is to stop all inbound migration that is not legally scheduled through a national port of entry operated by the United States. Migrants who are not in a legally recognized line waiting for review by American immigration agents are not coming in at all and will be turned away by whatever means necessary at all other points along the border.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (she assumed office on October 1, 2024, ahead of the next American president) must be put on polite notice that the massive American troop deployment to the southern border was required by the facts on the ground but clearly does not pose any threat to Mexican sovereignty or the bilateral trade relations between the two countries—unless Mexico’s actions change that equation.
Mexican nationals with the credentials to pass in and out of the United States on daily or intermittent business trips will remain free to do so. Remittances from Mexicans living in the United States, which totaled $63 billion in 2023 alone and is one of the largest legal revenue streams available to Mexico along with petroleum and tourism, will be allowed to continue to be transferred untaxed for now.
However, American security is not a negotiation with Mexico and the next president must make it clear that the failure of Mexico City to cooperate fully with the United States in completely securing the U.S. border with Mexico will inevitably result in devastating economic consequences for Mexico. Additionally, the federal government in Mexico must also be put on notice that attacks by the narco-cartels and human trafficking networks, criminal organizations that have prospered and bloomed into autonomous fiefdoms within Mexico even as they have penetrated, infected and corrupted much of the legitimate Mexican government and its agencies, will be met with whatever military countermeasures America’s leadership deems necessary.
The means deployed and a willingness to use them have to convey an unmistakable message that America is serious—and deadly serious if need be—about stopping all unauthorized traffic into its homeland.
The American border with Canada, which spans more than 5,500 miles and has also become a beckoning frontier for those seeking to cross illegally into the United States, must also be temporarily militarized in order to establish operational control, but the distances involved and the smaller number of migrants crossing necessitates a more mobile force deployment of troops operating out of bases that can be salted along the border from the Straight of Georgia and Northern Washington to the Bay of Fundy and Northern Maine.
Deployments of troops to maintain static positions in known or developing hot spots can be supplemented by teams tasked with hunting, locating and deterring all would be migrant crossers and the Northern Theater of operations would also be provided with the necessary air and naval assets to accomplish the mission.
The same message impressed upon Mexico City would also be diplomatically conveyed to the government in Ottawa.
The United States Navy, a Blue Water force which has deployed many of the nearly 500 ships that comprise its various fleets for decades protecting trade routes all over the globe, must now be ordered to prioritize the interdiction of migrant and narcotic smugglers that are pouring chaos, despair and death into the homeland across the breadth of America’s shorelines in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Coast Guard must also be deployed in force to support the relatively limited number of littoral combat ships and other smaller vessels the navy will be ordered to muster for the task.
If the United States military, which now consumes a budget of more than $1 trillion annually, is incapable of securing the American homeland or if its medal and ribbon-bedecked generals and admirals prove themselves reluctant or unwilling to do so, then the president must draw the correct conclusions and debride such a grievous wound to national security by cashiering every member of the brass necessary to restore The Pentagon’s mission effectiveness in defense of the nation.
Migrant Assessment and Tracking Infrastructure
As the military establishes a sustainable operational control over the nation’s frontiers, it is vital that the president take the necessary steps to finally undertake a comprehensive assessment of the actual population of foreign nationals living in the United States both legally and illegally.
The need for this massive accounting endeavor is pressing.
Most Americans have long been aware of the nebulous figure of 9 million to 11 million illegal immigrants living and working in the United States if only for the reason it has been a static figure that has stood stoically in news reports and government press releases for nearly two decades, only recently giving way to higher estimated figures. In 2005, an exhaustive Bear Stearns study projected the actual number could well be more than double that figure and that was nearly 20 years ago. The bipartisan power structure has had no appetite to make a serious effort to get a much clearer and more accurate picture of the illegal immigrant population in America for a single, simple reason: fear.
Fear of what the reaction by American citizens might well be if it were revealed that 40 million people living and working in the United States had no legal right to be in the country, let alone in the workplace.
The president must end that willing ignorance once and for all.
In October 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies determined that nearly 50 million people in the United States were foreign-born, with approximately 2.6 million of them children under the age of 16. These figures have surely surged higher in the months that have followed since then. The foreign-born population in 2022 had reached approximately 15-percent of the entire U.S. population.
For perspective, in 1970 only 4.7-percent of the population was foreign born.
The tripling of this figure represents the largest foreign-born population present in the United States than at any other time in American history, with nearly one out of every seven people in America being at least born in another country and many if not most of them raised overseas. While the foreign-born designation does not directly translate into whether one remains a foreign national—in 2023 alone more than 878,000 obtained naturalized citizenship—a plurality of that population are almost certainly foreign nationals and a very large number of those are illegal immigrants.
Accordingly, the president must task the Department of Homeland Security with erecting a central migrant registry and tracking infrastructure that will serve as a clearing house responsible for the disposition of all migrants in the United States, from legal guest workers to self-declared refugees to illegal immigrants of every varietal.
In order to achieve a much more accurate migrant population assessment, a nationwide canvass must be undertaken and one that compels the vast majority of migrants to participate and disclose their particulars. To accomplish this, all migrants must be informed that they are being given four months—120 days should be a sufficient window of time to accomplish almost anything—to appear at one of the many federally-operated migrant tally centers.
The national election infrastructure will provide a solid foundation to quickly build out a temporary national registration network where foreign nationals must provide all of the information requested of them. Among the data collected will be fingerprints, biometric screening and photographs, but also current address and job status as well as disclosing any public benefits they are presently receiving.
While much of the data will be redundant, replicating some of the information Uncle Sam and the states has already obtained from immigrants through previous half-hearted efforts and happenstance data collection, it has become indisputably clear that many legal migrants and most illegal immigrants disappear into America with little or no trace, only popping back onto the radar in the aftermath of some horrific outrage or infuriating mishap.
The incentive for all migrants to comply with this mandatory national headcount will be made simple for all participants to understand: Once the window for registration is closed, migrants not registered by then will never be eligible for legal admission to the United States ever again, let alone afforded any prospect of citizenship.
Further, non-registered migrants will face immediate deportation as soon as they are encountered by federal and state authorities.
Simply put, it’s register or else.
All migrants will have approximately 120-days to report and disclose themselves or face certain deportation eventually as well as the prospect of a grim federal prison sentence if they ever attempt to cross into the United States again or, heaven forbid, are found slinking around the country once more.
For all the legal migrants that have to navigate the further bureaucratic hassle of re-registering with updated information, they can be comforted by knowing America appreciates their following official instructions and that their cooperation will be duly considered as the nation sorts out who is allowed to stay and who will be required to return to their home countries.
Migrants who entered the nation legally, have played by the rules and have been in America for ten years or more will almost certainly be allowed to stay and hopefully become citizens.
Illegal immigrants that also comply with the American national mandate—as migrant registration is a requirement, not a request—they can console themselves with the knowledge that by revealing their illicit presence they have inoculated themselves from facing a lifetime ban on residency and work in America.
While this mass registration and headcount will pose logistical challenges and will fall short of providing an exact count of migrants present in the United States and how many of them are in America illegally, it will deliver the most accurate size assessment of these populations ever conducted and will reveal, at long last, just how deep of a hole the country’s leadership has dug for the nation.
The president will at last be able to honestly present to the American people for their consideration numbers that are real and a very close approximation of the foreign population that is currently present in the United States, including how many of them have no legal right to be present at all. This will fully inform the legitimate American electorate of all political persuasions and arm them with vital data as they move forward in the policy debates and throughout the campaigns and elections to come.
It will also put the illegal immigrants who refused to register on notice that they now face a choice of self-deporting or waiting until the day comes—and it will come—when the boom drops and they are caught, hooked, booked, processed for all necessary identification details and immediately deported with the reminder that if they attempt to come back to the United States, Uncle Sam will greet them with a complimentary orange jumpsuit for their decade-long sleepover, but no free cell phones.
Execute Nationwide Interior Enforcement Actions
As the military establishes operational control of the borders and migrants begin their national registration, the president must order Immigration and Customs Enforcement to launch a series of nationwide high-profile enforcement actions that target industries that deny American citizens work even as they exploit illegal immigrant labor.
Past presidents have staged occasional large-scale raids at worksites employing large numbers of an illegal workforce, but always as a made-for-the-news cycle production that coincided with efforts to push a mass amnesty through Congress. It was invariably faux enforcement at its worst that resulted in no lasting impact on the practices of most nefarious employers who profit handsomely through fielding an illegal workforce.
But there are solid indications that such sweeping interior enforcement actions would be warmly greeted by American workers.
In August 2008, immigration agents raided Howard Industries in Laurel, Mississippi, after union workers complained of being forced out of their jobs and replaced by illegal immigrants. The rare enforcement action carried out in the waning days of George W. Bush’s administration netted nearly 600 illegal immigrants—many using Social Security numbers stolen from Americans—working at the global technologies company that produced medical and lighting products.
According to illegal workers caught in the raid, American workers began applauding as agents led them out of the plant. In the days and weeks that followed the bust, the company was forced to begin hiring Americans who lined up for jobs there at Howard Industries at elevated wages.
The new president must order ICE to unleash a dizzying succession of worksite investigations and enforcement raids that, where appropriate, result in the corporate owners being led away on camera in handcuffs alongside the illegal immigrants as they are led to buses that will transport them to deportation centers for processing and immediate removal from the country. The owners and C-Suite executive management of these companies should find themselves posting bail and retaining criminal defense attorneys as they prepare for criminal trials that could land them in federal penitentiaries.
Bringing the hammer down on a divergent array of employers that span a spectrum of industries far greater than agribusiness and meat/poultry processing plants—but those too—and holding the owners and management to account with vigorous criminal prosecutions and, where appropriate, personal asset seizures and property liquidations with proceeds used to compensate American workers, will go a long way in quickly establishing corporate compliance with the law.
Launch Nationwide Business Accountability Campaign
Complimenting the flurry of ICE worksite raids and the high-profile arrests of executives helming companies that thrive on employing illegal immigrants, the president should also immediately launch a series of initiatives to help businesses large and small with their no longer optional efforts to comply with federal immigration law and create secure workplaces for the American citizen.
Central to this effort will be demanding Congress pass legislation mandating every employer in the United States with a workforce of more than two employees must screen all applicants through E-Verify, the federal database which determines whether an individual is providing authentic documentation that establishes his or her legal right to work in the United States.
Additionally, the president must use the executive platform to call out, name check and publicly shame owners, executives and their lobbying groups—such as the so-called U.S. Chamber of Commerce—that have long opposed even the most modest efforts to ensure American citizens are given priority in the hiring process. The employment pecking order and hiring hierarchy must is rather simple and must be made abundantly clear: American citizens are first in line, followed by legal immigrants. That’s where the line ends, with no room for illegal workers anywhere.
In particular, Big Tech companies and their flamboyant founders that revel in almost unimaginable wealth a la Mark Zuckerberg at Meta or Jeff Bezos at Amazon must be aggressively confronted by the president on behalf of the American worker, especially those individuals and companies that relentlessly advocate for pouring millions of more migrants into the country to replace Americans in jobs that haven’t yet been offshored.
The president must make it clear that these so-called ‘titans’ who have hoarded hundreds of billions of dollars amongst themselves will face the full fury of the American worker, as channeled and dispensed by the federal government, if they continue to insist American citizens must compete with foreigners in their own country. The president must make it clear that the old tropes about ‘jobs Americans don’t want and won’t do’ and the brazen lies that American STEM graduates are not as intellectually agile as their H-1B visa replacements will be dealt with as mercilessly as companies like Amazon and Facebook have treated American workers.
Disney CEO Bob Iger and its Board of Directors should be too terrified of the consequences for Magic Kingdom’s share price and brand profile if Disney were to ever again decide to cull American citizens from its workforce but forcing them to first provide ‘knowledge transfers’ to their foreign worker replacements—as was the case in 2015, when more than 250 Disney workers were fired after being made to train their replacements who had arrived on temporary work visas.
The next president must make it clear that such egregious abuse of the American worker will no longer be tolerated and will be met with an administration prepared to exact a price from such offenders that will prove to be extremely prohibitive.
While this proposal, these five-not-so-easy-pieces, will certainly resonate with many as needlessly draconian and damaging to the image of America as well as its continued cohesion as ‘a nation of immigrants,’ I would argue that I am simply the bearer of the bad and perhaps even tragic news that if the American nation is to survive as the American nation, with the mosaic of its citizenry of every racial, ethnic and religious background, then nothing less than swift, certain and unrelenting actions such as these are the only hope of saving it now.
For nearly a half-century the American people have been lectured that the immigration system of the United States is broken and must be fixed, but fixed inevitably means dilated even further to accelerate global masses into the country and accommodate the needs and desires of the migrants at the expense of American citizens.
The only thing that is broken is the American leadership.
If the next president or perhaps the one that follows, whoever he or she is, does not act decisively to end mass migration into the United States, then the promise America once truly held for all its people will indeed dim further and flicker out, extinguished by a human tide that historians will note could have been averted.
There was still a way, but there clearly was no longer a will.
