The Point of No Return
The southern border has been dissolved as a functional barrier and tens of millions of migrants from all corners of the globe are pouring into the United States
This essay was first published by Negative Population Growth, Inc., a Virginia-based think tank, in June 2023.
By Mark Cromer
[Abstract: Following President Joe Biden’s election and the Commander-in-Chief’s subsequent executive orders that not only effectively eliminated immigration enforcement measures along the southern border but also halted them completely in the interior of the United States, an unprecedented wave of sustained mass migration has rolled unimpeded across the American frontier. As the migratory waves make Category 5 landfalls on the Saffir-Simpson scale they are funneled into a national network operated by an amalgamation of NGOs, religious organizations and other groups that facilitate their dispersal and settlement across the country. While even government data demonstrates the historic proportions of what is occurring, additional factors and previous studies suggest the actual number of migrants entering the country is likely to be even more staggering than what’s being officially reported. A system ostensibly created to competently control immigration has been reconfigured—or corrupted—into one that facilitates a flood of humanity.]
Total collapse.
Total collapse is the only accurate assessment one can arrive at when objectively evaluating what has happened to the United States’ immigration system. It’s an implosion preceded by bureaucratic corrosion that spread untreated for decades, a calculated malfeasance that has accelerated over the past two years to the point of no return. Even if the federal government suddenly took drastic and decisive steps to staunch the Biblical-scale migration into the United States, the damage has been done. The president could order several hundred thousand soldiers to the border to achieve immediate operational control and Congress could pass sweeping immigration legislation akin to what it did a century ago. But to what end for the many millions that are now in country?
The die is cast.
From the masses of humanity emerging from the unforgivably brutal jungle of the Darien Gap[1] where Colombia meets Panama to the vast caravans snaking across the entirety of the former nation-state of Mexico, where the narco-cartels are now estimated to control more than a quarter of the crumbling country[2], all the way up to the Rio Grande where a relentless stampede of immigrants forge the river—the now daily images of the chaos capture snapshots, but only snapshots, of the magnitude of the mass migration into the United States.
As Americans and the rest of the world watch millions of people traverse at will a now largely imaginary line across the southern frontier of the United States, what happens once they are ensconced inside the fictional gates of Ronald Reagan’s mythical ‘shining city on the hill’ has garnered less attention from Capitol Hill.
Yet Washington would have us not believe our eyes nor trust our common sense.
The word from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can be summed up in the assertion that it’s actually not as bad as it looks.
It’s a cynical assessment that has long been echoed by the leadership of both parties in Congress to varying degrees, with the GOP generally matching its calls for improved border security with pleas for expanding the avenues for mass legal immigration. The Democratic leadership has remained generally consistent in its support of eliminating the border altogether.
It’s exceedingly telling that while the GOP could have held up the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill of December 2022 unless and until decisive efforts were undertaken to secure operational control of the border, the Republican leadership took a pass with nary a backward glance. It’s equally revealing that while the Democratic leadership insists it seeks ‘improved border security,’ they have declined to support even the most feeble enforcement measures put forth by the GOP leadership.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre recently declared with a straight face that illegal immigration had been reduced “by 90-percent.” Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has chanted a mantra that the border is secure, calmly insisting that the wildly disturbing optics to the contrary, U.S. Customs and Border Protection along with other ancillary agencies have the situation firmly in hand. They want you to believe that while migrants may be misled by networks of human traffickers, citizens should rest easy in the knowledge that immigration into the U.S. is under control.
It is the government refusing to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater that’s being engulfed in flames.
And it’s actually far worse than it looks.
Despite the heavy media coverage of the migrant caravans, the casual brutality of human-trafficking and the cries for help from increasingly besieged American communities that has been broadcast across multiple platforms and outlets, the true impact of what is happening remains at least somewhat concealed as a result of the sheer scope and velocity of the crisis itself.
While the collapse of the immigration system as a functioning enforcement mechanism that can successfully perform the duties with which it is charged has reached critical mass, it has been a work-in-progress that spans decades. The political theater staged by southern governors of busing migrants to various self-declared ‘sanctuary cities’ in the north may bring momentary attention to migrants being dropped off on Martha’s Vineyard, but the depth of the migrant surge is becoming evident all over the nation in places that the cameras rarely capture.
More than three years ago, at the cusp of the pandemic in January 2020, The New York Times published an unintentionally searing account of how mass migration was transforming Amarillo, Texas, an old panhandle outpost on I-40 that was being remade by waves of new arrivals from distant foreign shores[3]. The Old Gray Lady’s reportage highlighted the dramatic change that was unfolding across the town’s dusty streets: “Inevitably, culture clashes between longtime white and Hispanic residents and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia are almost a daily occurrence. City Hall staff members have fielded angry phone calls from residents [reporting] that refugees were barbecuing dogs in their front yards. Newcomers unfamiliar with local laws have hunted ranchers’ cattle for food[4].”
The holistic makeover of the town by the influx of migrants left many native residents feeling dispossessed in their own country and ignored by their civic leaders. Sonia Rios, a 45-year-old Amarillo resident said she and her wife were fleeing the city as a result of the crime wave they had witnessed brought on by the influx of refugees, including vandalism and break-ins and what she described as refugees running wild in the streets. “We’re done,” Rios told The Times.[5]
But voicing support for the mass migration that is reshaping Amarillo and much of the Lone Star State as well as the nation itself, was real estate broker Daniel L. Rogers, the 57-year-old Chairman of the Potter County Republican Party, who blanched at the American citizens who described their community, neighborhoods and quality of life being rendered unrecognizable more each day by the flow of refugees. “Bring us 10 million of those a year, if they want to be productive members and make America great and be American, not a hyphenated American,” Rogers told The Times. “Nobody cares what color somebody is or where they came from. Nobody cares[6].”
Rogers sentiment, stated in such an unflinchingly candid manner, is hardly unique to a real estate agent and GOP county chairman from Amarillo, Texas, but in fact has been heard over the years from farmers in California’s Central Valley to builder in New York’s Long Island and so many other communities in-between.
Three years later, it appears as if much of the world read Rogers’ plea for 10-million more people annually to pour into the United States and are more than happy to oblige his desire.
That’s certainly how it must feel to the nearly 17,000 Border Patrol agents that are deployed along the southern border, a force that constitutes more than 85-percent of all of agency’s field force, as well as the token forces of National Guard and other supplemental military and law enforcement agencies that have been dispatched to the border in what amounts to little more than window dressing[7]. By September 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had launched Operation Lone Star and deployed upwards of 10,000 Texas National Guard troops to the border, but it drew stinging criticism from the troops that described it as a poorly planned, slapdash effort that appeared to have little of the impact that was intended[8].
Likewise, the 1,500 soldiers President Biden sent to the border managed to garner the headlines his order was surely meant to produce. The unfortunate reality is that the soldiers were restricted to passive roles such as assisting with data-entry and warehousing duties. The details seemed largely glossed over and the additional troops have little to no influence on the migratory flow of illegal immigrants.
By March 2023 in New York City, more than 100 hotels, motels and other available commercial space had been requisitioned into ‘temporary housing’ for the more than 50,000 migrants that had been bused and flown into Gotham from the southern frontier, a micro-surge of sorts that prompted the city to begin leasing entire properties for months on end in an effort to keep the migrants sheltered[9]. In NYC alone the effort is expected to cost approximately $4 billion as City Hall snaps up whole Midtown Manhattan lodgings such as Row NYC, a 1,300-room tower, spending $40 million to book migrants into the hotel-turned-shelter since last fall. But even converting hotels and motels into migrant centers was not sufficient enough to meet the incoming tide and thus public school gyms across New York City were also slated to be repurposed as migrant shelters[10] as the surge showed no signs of abating.
That proved to be a bridge too far for enough New Yorkers and it drew such a withering rebuke that the city, at least temporarily, scrapped the plan within 48-hours after announcing it.[11]
In Chicago, by January 2023 more than 5,000 refugees had been sent into the Windy City, which like other metropolitan areas was already reeling from the successive shockwaves of shutdowns, spiraling crime rates and a growing sense of despair among many of its residents[12]. As in New York, the influx sent city and state leaders scrambling to house and support the thousands of migrants arriving with the state pumping $20 million into the immediate effort to feed, shelter and provide other support for the migrants.
By May 2023, outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a state of emergency[13], asserting the city had reached “a breaking point” under the strain of more than 8,000 migrants that had been bused into the city. With thousands of more migrants expected to land in Chicago in the coming weeks and months, local media outlets reported that shelters had already maxed out and migrant families could be found sleeping on the floors of police stations even as City Hall tapped another $51 million for migrant services—a sum not expected to ease the strain and that would be fully spent by mid-June.
The summer of 2022 saw more than 6,000 migrants being bused into Washington, D.C. from Texas alone, a number that was cresting toward 10,000 by the dawn of 2023, prompting yet another outcry from the civic leadership of the nation’s capital that the city was unable to provide for them.[14][15] According to a report aired and published by National Public Radio, chartered buses filled with migrants had been arriving at Union Station for months but had not discovered a welcome wagon waiting for them at the fabled rail station. “When they disembark, they find neither the local nor federal government there to meet them,” NPR reported. As in other cities, the continuous influx of migrants possessing little more than the clothing on their backs caused Mayor Muriel Bowser to declare a state of emergency in September 2022 and seek funding from FEMA to help handle the crisis.
As social and emergency services in three of the largest cities in the nation buckle under the weight of less than 100,000 migrants arriving in waves over the past two years, their high-profile mayors have declared emergencies and demanded resources. Yet the migrants arriving in Washington D.C., New York and Chicago represent little more than 1% of the more than 7 million that have arrived in the United States since the dawn of 2021.
If America’s Great Cities cannot bear the burden, then what of its smaller cities, towns and rural areas that millions of migrants are making their way too as well?
The immigrant tidal wave may be breaking mostly on U.S. soil, but it is so massive and also has such great momentum some of it continues to roll north and seep into Canada.
By early 2023, migrants from Central and South America, Nigeria and Haiti were illegally crossing the American-Canadian border into Canada in record numbers (for Canada), ticking up to nearly 5,000 asylum-seekers in January 2023 alone, which was more than double the figure of migrants walking into Canada in January 2022[16]. Much like the United States, Canada’s immigration system allows asylum-seekers to quite literally walk illegally across the border to be immediately arrested, processed and released into Canada where they will ostensibly wait out their appeal process for legal entry. Migrants making their way into the Great White North from states such as Vermont have told reporters that they suspect not only their chances for a successful refugee claim will be better in Canada, but that they anticipate their quality of life will be superior as well. It’s a perspective that certainly says something about what even migrants fleeing collapsed states like Venezuela think about the prevailing conditions in the United States.
Still, the migratory waves heading into Canada pale in comparison with the United States, with nearly 4,000 arrests for unlawful entry recorded for the province of Quebec in all of 2022, or less than half of what Border Patrol agents encounter every day now on America’s southern border. While there has been a dramatic spike in illegal immigration from Canada into the U.S.—mostly by Mexican nationals who fly into Canada and then hike across the border in an effort to avoid the violent chaos of the southern routes—the numbers remain miniscule in comparison. According to the Border Patrol in the Swanton, Vermont sector, agents encountered 367 migrants this January, up from the 24 migrants the agents took into custody in January 2022.
A View From The Frontlines: Thomas Homan
Thomas D. Homan knows a thing or two about migrants illicitly crossing the border and refugees presenting themselves at the border with an asylum claim. He also knows about those millions of people who are illegally present in the United States and yet working in every imaginable job sector and professional field without breaking a sweat of being discovered and deported. As the former Acting Director of ICE from January 2017 to June 2018, Homan had a three-decade career in immigration enforcement that included serving as an associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) unit. He is now a Visiting Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a Senior Fellow of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit organization that lobbies and litigates for immigration policies that serve the interests of the American people and with a focus on ending mass migration.
As Title 42 came to an end, Homan was observing the accelerating stampede across the border in real-time from El Paso, Texas, a perch that left even a seasoned border veteran like him reeling from its magnitude. During a phone interview with this writer on May 10, Homan observed that even with the policy in place the deluge of migrants had overwhelmed the system much, much earlier. “We currently have 29,000 migrants in BP custody and that’s way over capacity,” Homan said. “We’ve never taken 10,000 migrants into custody in a single day, that’s never happened before, and over the past three days we’ve hit 10,000 migrants taken into custody per day.”
In February 2021, approximately 889 parolees were released under the DHS Secretary’s authority, which the secretary has the discretion to do on a case-by-case basis. In September 2022, more than 95,000 migrants were ‘paroled’ into the United States, a figure that crested to more than 130,000 migrant parolees in December 2022[17].
Homan described street scenes from El Paso that most Americans are now eerily familiar with all over the country; of sidewalks teeming with mostly economic migrants from foreign shores who have yet to be processed through the centers that are stretched well beyond capacity. In terms of tracking the migrants that are processed and released, a misperception that’s still somewhat common among much of the American public is that migrants ‘paroled’ into the country with a notice to appear date at an immigration court can be subsequently monitored in real time by DHS through a GPS device affixed to one of their ankles.
Far from it, Homan said, noting that migrants in the past had been provided with cell phones that had a GPS feature but that since has been removed and now the phones provided to the migrants merely create a line of communication through which government agencies can ostensibly maintain contact with the migrant.
Once released from CBP custody, which can happen in a matter of days if not hours, however, any continued government contact with the migrant is purely the prerogative of the parolee. Notice to appear dates that have recently been issued appear to in 2027 or later and since 2021 the tens of thousands of migrants have been released with no date to appear whatsoever.[18]
The number of migrants who actually turn up at their immigration court hearings is wildly disputed between the various sides of the mass migration issue, but competing claims applying various formulas don’t take into account the proclivity for many migrants to use multiple identities—something this writer encountered countless times as a crime reporter in Los Angeles County—and an immigration system that has imploded under the sheer volume of the migrants passing through it.[19]
Homan estimates that 80-percent of migrants currently crossing are single, working-age males and said that figure was likely to be higher among the ‘got-aways’ that are forging even more unforgivable terrain. The term ‘got-aways’ is CBP vernacular for what it sounds like: migrants crossing the border that successfully avoid encountering the border patrol.
He also ominously noted that considering the ‘come as you are’ nature of the southern border’s traditional regions of mass migration—where legions are now showing up and surrendering to be released in the El Paso, Rio Grande Valley, Del Rio and Yuma sectors—the motivation for the thousands or tens of thousands of got-aways crossing each month who are actively seeking to avoid detection should send a shiver down Americans’ spines.[20]
“There’s a reason they don’t want to be encountered, there’s a reason they don’t want to be photographed and fingerprinted,” Homan said, adding that CBP has tallied migrants from more than 170 countries (out of 193 nation-states) around the globe pouring into the United States, which demonstrates the global scope of the migration.
Since the dawn of the Biden Administration there have been 1.8 million known got-aways, Homan said, noting that statistic is compiled by readings from drones, fixed cameras, and sensors. He hastened, however, like so many other malleable metrics surrounding migration into the U.S., it is a misleading figure, especially when cycled through a media that often presents it as comprehensive ‘got-aways’ statistic. Roughly a third of the entire southern border is essentially unmonitored, literally open, albeit treacherous, terrain. Homan pointed out it’s a fact that means the sheer volume of humanity crossing in those sectors was anybody’s guess.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Homan said. He added, however, that he is rather certain that the Biden Administration and its bipartisan birds-of-a-feather on mass migration in Congress are quite comfortable to remain in the dark about the actual volume of got-aways. “The less got-aways they have to count, the better it is for them,” he said, adding that the Biden Administration has been actively removing aerostats (blimps outfitted with surveillance equipment) that had been effective in recording got-aways.
“This isn’t by accident or incompetence,” he said. “This is by design.”
If the elimination of the border is by design, then it is a controlled demolition that was preceded by the suspension of virtually all immigration enforcement measures in the interior of the United States, as such actions as workplace enforcement ‘raids’ have evaporated.
Homan offers a rueful chuckle when asked about the state of interior enforcement, remarking that the era of worksite operations carried out to ensure employers were complying with legal requirements to work have evaporated. Gone too, for the most part anyway, are detentions and deportations of immigrants who have been ordered out either as a matter of immigration court ruling or following another criminal issue, according to Homan.
“They have taken that whole population off the table,” Homan said, noting that during fiscal year 2012, during President Barack Obama’s administration, more than 409,000 immigrants were arrested for removal and deported. During the Biden administration, that number has fallen to just 59,000. “Mayorkas has ended it,” Homan said.
While Mayorkas may have indeed overseen the end of interior immigration enforcement at the behest of the administration, it was a dismantling that has been another bipartisan work-in-progress for years and one undertaken by a divergent array of immigrant activist groups operating with an ethnocentric agenda and chamber of commerce cutouts devoted to the business class’s bottom line.
Working Class American Culture
Bill Kristol, speaking to the American Enterprise Institute in May of 2021, stumbled his way through comments that effectively framed mass immigration as something of a demographic wildfire that ultimately reinvigorates the very landscape it first immolates. “Honest, if you say things are so bad for the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans…I think John Adams said this at the beginning: basically if you are in a free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever. And then luckily you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia and now Mexico who really want to work hard and really to want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoilt kids…so in that respect I don’t know why this moment is that different than from the early 20th Century.”[21]
Just a year earlier Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX 2nd District) voiced comments that were quite similar to Kristol’s assessment of the American working-class during comments he made to the Leadership Institute on May 13, 2020, during which he made the case for continued mass immigration—even as 40 million Americans were heading into sustained unemployment lines courtesy of mandated shutdowns in response to the pandemic—as he insisted it comported with the legitimate needs of business.
“We need to balance [security] with business, they are not lying to us, they can’t hire Americans. They just can’t. These construction companies, these farmers, they have tried. There have been studies where, I think in Alabama, this happened, where if you get rid of all the immigrants no one will work there,” Crenshaw said. “And that’s an American cultural problem I wish we could fix. I wish our teenagers would go to work. But they don’t, so I have to be sympathetic to some of these business owners who are creating jobs, creating wealth in America and creating growth, building things, they can’t do it without anyone working there. And for some reason, people who speak English just won’t work there.”[22]
One wonders whether Congressman Crenshaw continues to hold that belief in light of the sustained and accelerating mass migration into the U.S.
Mexico and the Human-Trafficking Cartels
Yet for all the chaos along the southern frontier and the acrimonious uncertainty throughout the interior of the U.S., the millions of migrants who are pouring into the country are emerging from a Mexico that is in a state of even steeper collapse. In the fall of 2020, The Washington Post reported on one of the most fundamentally important ‘push factors’ that has not only had a stunningly corrosive effect on the civic genetics of Mexico—to the point that it threatens the continued viability of the central government as a going concern—but also in reshaping traditional migratory patterns by acting as an accelerant spreading the flames of organized human smuggling scaled-up to an Amazon-grade operation. [23]
According to a classified analysis conducted by the CIA in 2018, narco-cartels had secured control of huge swaths of Mexico and more than 80,000 Mexicans ‘disappeared’ in the process, a grim vanishing act that rivals what Gen. Augusto Pinochet managed in Chile and surpasses the Nazi’s ‘Night and Fog’ terror in occupied France.
Journalist Mary Beth Sheridan of The Post reported on the rampant, cancer-like mutation of the cartels in Mexico into something akin to the blizzard of heavily-armed militias that filled the vacuum in Libya following the West’s decision to take out dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.[24]
“Organized crime here once meant a handful of cartels shipping narcotics up the highways to the United States. In a fundamental shift, the criminals of today are reaching ever deeper into the country, infiltrating communities, police forces and town halls,” Sheridan wrote. “A dizzying range of armed groups—perhaps more than 200—have diversified into a broadening array of activities. They’re not only moving drugs but kidnapping Mexicans, trafficking migrants and shaking down businesses from lime growers to mining companies.”[25]
Sheridan’s dispatch anonymously quoted one terrified schoolteacher who reflected on the Sinaloa Cartel’s machine-gun assault on a regional police headquarters that killed one prominent commander and prompted much of the rest of the police force to simply disappear.
“Zacatecas is in the hands of criminals,” she said. “The state government isn’t in control.”
NGOs and Mass Migration
If facilitating mass immigration is big business for clandestine networks of human traffickers—and it is—business is also a’ booming for the legitimate domestic organizations in the United States that operate legally in the sunlight of transparency—if not exactly always the spotlight. There is a tremendous amount of cash circulating through the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that play a critical role in providing the support networks that disperse migrants all over the nation and settling them, we’re supposed to believe, with no endgame political calculus in mind.
Among the constellation of NGOs that operate major operations in support of mass immigration into the United States are groups as divergent as the century-old Catholic Charities and FWD.us, Inc., which is the non-profit launched in 2013 by Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his longtime collaborator Joe Green.
While Catholic Charities USA is headquartered in Virginia, it has more than 160 affiliates all over the nation and migrant aid appears to be a central function for most of the satellite operations, with much of it underwritten by federal and state tax dollars.
Catholic Charities’ New Mexico affiliate reported relatively modest annual gross receipts in 2019, the most recent year available, at $5.6 million. Yet of that figure, $3.4 million was reported as government grants. Additionally, Catholic Charities New Mexico reported that ‘Immigrant/Refugee Support’ was its largest revenue stream for its program services, reported at more than $417,000. Affordable housing services, by contrast, accounted for just over $9,000 in revenue. No other program revenue amounted to even half of what ‘Immigrant/Refugee Support’ put on their books, according to the group’s federal ‘990’ filings. [26]
Unsurprisingly, New York’s Catholic Charities affiliate reported gross receipts for 2019 dwarfed New Mexico’s operation, clocking in at more that $69 million, with immigration services amounting to its single largest program expense of more than $22 million spent on newly arrived refugees, English instruction, legal services and rights presentations, youth employment and ‘drop out services’ and so on. In 2019, Catholic Charities New York reported more than $37 million in government grants—its single largest source of revenue by more than $15 million.[27]
In Newark, Catholic Charities reported a nearly $30 million haul for 2019, with $1.3 million of that reported as government grants and Newark reported more than $787,000 in immigrant/refugee specific outlays among its $11.7 million for program service expenditures in 2019, though immigrant/refugee spending was likely significantly higher given their access to other programs not distinctly labeled as refugee specific.[28]
In New Orleans, Catholic Charities reported more than $26 million in gross receipts for 2019, of which $13.2 million was provided through government grants, a figure that is three times larger than any other source of revenue reported by the affiliate that year. New Orleans reported approximately $3.5 million in program service expenses, of which migrant specific programs were not identified. However, the group reported it assisted more than 2,000 migrants/refugees with legal services, visas and more.[29]
As Catholic Charities and a host of other NGOs across the nation are focused on providing ‘on-the-ground’ support for migrants, FWD.us, Inc., has invested tremendous resources into building a national network that advocates relentlessly for continued and expanded mass migration into the country.
According to federal filings by FWD.us, Inc., the 501(c)4 group described its mission as one that “organizes constituencies around the country to support policy changes that create opportunity and unlock America’s potential through comprehensive immigration reform” as well as advocating for criminal justice reform.[30]
In 2018, the group reported more than $24 million in gross receipts and reported spending more than $13 million to build “a grassroots mobilization that connects hundreds of thousands of Americans through a technology-based campaign in support of immigration reform…” According to its 2018 disclosures, Facebook had provided the group with “online services related to grassroots mobilization,” an assist from Zuckerberg during a period when allegations of ‘shadow-banning’ (the process of programming social media algorithms to promote certain viewpoints while submerging others) advocates of immigration and population reduction were accelerating across virtually all of the top-shelf social media networks, including Facebook.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing annually into the deeply connected networks that serve as an arterial system for mass migration into the United States. Groups shuttle and shelter millions of migrants in communities all over the nation as the economic refugees either reconnect with family members already here or begin sending for loved ones who have not yet arrived.
One may ponder where this breathtaking endeavor will end?
The answer was perhaps glimpsed in a study[31] published more than 18-years-ago by financial analysts Robert Justich and Betty Ng. They undertook an exhaustive examination of data sources far beyond census projections that included school enrollments, foreign remittances, border crossing and housing permits among many others. In the end they concluded the population of illegal immigrants in the United States was likely more than 20 million people that held between 12 to 15 million jobs—approaching one-out-of-every ten workers employed.
This was in stark contrast with Washington’s official projections, which in 2005 held that roughly 9 million people had migrated into the U.S. sans official sanction, or less than half of what Justich and Ng concluded was likely to already be in the country.
Yet the staggering conclusions of the analysis provided by Justich and Ng nearly a generation ago shrivel in comparison to what Americans are witnessing today, as the vast favelas of the Southern Hemisphere overflow and pour northward.
What was 20 million migrants in 2005 may now be fast approaching 50 million or significantly more, a population nearly the size of France or Italy.
As Justich and Ng declared in 2005: “The implications of these massive inflows of workers are enormous.”
In 2023, the implications of this monumental inflow of migrants are virtually certain to be devastating to the American construct and landscape in ways already expected and still again in ways not yet fully grasped.
[1] ‘400,000 Migrants May Cross Darien Gap in 2023,’ Associated Press, April 13, 2023
[2] ‘Mexico’s Government Threatened By Criminal Groups,’ Washington Post, October 29, 2020
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/us/refugees-states-texas-abbott.html
[4] Ibid 3.
[5] Ibid 3.
[6] Ibid 3.
[7] ‘Border Facts,’ Southern Border Communities Coalition, 2022
[8] ‘Deplorable Conditions, Unclear Mission,’ The Texas Tribune/Military Times, February 1, 2022
[9] ‘How Manhattan Hotels Became Refuges for Thousands of Migrants,’ The New York Times, March 23, 2023
[10] ‘New York City Moving Migrants Into School Gyms: Mayor Adams,’ ABC News, May 16, 2023
[11] ‘NYC Backs Off Plan to Place Migrants in School Gyms After Protests,’ Fox News Channel, May 18, 2023
[12] ‘Death in Shelter for Immigrants Highlights Mental Health Challenges,’ Chicago Sun-Times, January 27, 2023
[13] ‘Mayor Lori Lightfoot Declares State of Emergency,’ Chicago Tribune, May 10, 2023
[14] ‘GOP Governors Sent Busses of Migrants to D.C.,’ NPR, August 6, 2022
[15] ‘The Migrant Buses Sent to DC are a Cruel, Political Stunt, The Washington Post, July 14, 2022
[16] ‘Why the U.S. Northern Border is Experiencing Record Migration,’ CNN, March 13, 2023
[17] ‘Parole With Benefits,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 13, 2013
[18] ’50,000 Migrants Released; Few Report To ICE,’ Axios, July 27, 2021
[19] ‘Factchecking Claims About Asylum Grants & Immigration Court Attendance,’ FactCheck.org, April 1, 2021
[20] ‘Record Breaking Migrant Encounters,’ Migration Policy Institute, October 2022
[21] https://twitter.com/chrisbergpov/status/1396651774572998662
[22] Leadership Institute, May 13, 2020
[23] ‘Mexico’s Government Control Threatened By Criminal Groups,’ The Washington Post, October 29, 2020
[24] Ibid 23.
[25] Ibid 23.
[26] Tax-Exempt Organization Filings, Internal Revenue Service
[27] Ibid 26.
[28] Ibid 26.
[29] Ibid 26.
[30] Ibid 26.
[31] ‘The Underground Labor Force Is Rising To The Surface,’ Bear Stearns, January 3, 2005
