Biden Dismantled Basic Immigration Law. Now, Americans Are Suffering.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Immigration is not just back in the news, it’s in the news every single day.

Almost every single day we see someone here illegally like Mohamed Soliman committing an act of terror when he tried to burn Jewish activists. Burn them. Burn Jews.

We saw Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was an MS-13 member and became a cause celebre when he was deported. He was a spousal abuser. He was a gang member. He was a human trafficker.

I don’t even want to get into the sad, tragic tale of all of these young, beautiful, vibrant women who have been killed by illegal aliens. I don’t want to get into the issue that here in Fresno County about a half of the traffic accidents, the people involved that were culpable have left the scene of the accident.

So, it’s a real problem.

And let’s put in some historical perspective. Former President Joe Biden’s legacy will be very—he has a legacy and it’s gonna be very hard to deal with. For the next 20 years, we’re gonna be dealing with the fact that he and former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deliberately, deliberately, intentionally destroyed immigration law as we know it. They opened the border and they let in 12 million people.

Keep in mind some data. The administration—the Trump administration is doing a heroic job to close the border, but that’s not the problem now. They solved that existential problem. The problem is that you have 12 million people here that are completely unaudited. And this is in addition to somewhere between 10 and 20 million that were here already, prior to Biden.

And on a good day, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan and ICE and the Border Patrol can maybe deport, they find, 800. But Joe Biden let in 10 times that number per day. So, they would have to step up their efforts by a magnitude just to get back to where Joe Biden started.

If you let in 12 million people in the space of four years, you’re talking about 3 million a year. You’re talking 250,000 per month. So, you can see it’s 8,000 a day and there’s no way that that seems even feasible, even when the Left tries to obstruct that effort with sanctuary cities and district judges who entertain these lawsuits to stop it.

The other thing to remember is what was really tragic about what Joe Biden did is he privileged illegal aliens over U.S. citizens. Now, what do I mean by that? His Defense Department—it started under other Trump-era defense secretaries—but they drummed out 8,500 of some of our best soldiers because they did not trust the experimental mRNA vaccine. Many of them have had COVID-19 and had natural immunity. Think about that.

At the same time they did that, they were letting about 7,000 to 10,000 people a day come through with no worry about whether they were vaccinated or not.

So, they were telling some of our bravest soldiers: “We’re going to go after you and drum you out of the military if you don’t get this vaccine. But over here, we’re gonna let in 10,000 people, 8,000 people. We don’t know who they are. But they don’t have to have a vaccine.”

Take another example. We were supposed to all get something called the Real ID in 2020. It was delayed because of COVID-19. And it was enacted, I think, on May 7, 2025. But here’s the point. For the last two years, people have had to get ready to get that ID or they can’t fly. They have to have a passport or a birth certificate. They have to have proof of residency in their state, you know, bills or a lease or something. It’s a difficult process. You’ve got to go in person to the DMV.

So, what’s my point?

We were flying people in from Southern Mexico—to take one example—into particular airports in the United States, mostly in the Southwest but not exclusively. And we were doing it in the dead of night. And sometimes when you went to an airport, it would say “immigrants” but they were not checking anybody’s ID.

In other words, a person in Chiapas or Yucatan or Oaxaca or Michoacan could say that they were a refugee, get on an app—you know, hit the app—get on a plane, and fly to an airport at 2 in the morning without passport control. Think of that.

That happened while most Americans, as I speak, cannot get on a flight unless they have a real super ID that has been certified and adjudicated by forms of ID, in addition to your driver’s license.

Again, we are treating people who are breaking the law by coming here and residing here better than we are U.S. citizens.

And the wall is a wonderful thing that’s continuing. President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border have been widely successful but the problem right now is an existential one. What do you do with 12 million people when you can only deport 800 or a thousand a day? And you need to deport, if you want to solve the problem and get back to square one on Jan. 20, 2021, you’ve got to increase that by 10.

Final query: Why did Joe Biden do this? Or the people around him? What was the purpose? Was it to expand the DEI agenda? Was it to bring poor people that didn’t speak English, without skills or high school diplomas, so they would grow the entitlement industry? Have to raise taxes? Redistribution? Was it nihilism? He just got angry at Trump people and he thought, “This is one thing they won’t like, we’re just gonna open the borders”? Was it to change the demography so with mail-in and early voting these people could be instant constituents? Or was it just that he was mean? Mean. He was ?nihilist. He just said, “I’m going to blank blank this up.” Or was he incompetent? Good old Joe from Scranton.

I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that we’re gonna have to find it in the next 20 years because this is the most grievous thing of all the terrible things that happened under the Biden administration. This one will be his legacy and we’re gonna have to live with it.

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