Remind me never to get on the bad side of the National Border Patrol Council, if only because their Twitter game is on point.
On Tuesday, during a visit to north Phoenix to “highlight Arizona’s high-tech manufacturing industry,” President Joe Biden was asked why he hadn’t visited the U.S.-Mexico border since he was within a couple hundred miles of it.
“There’s more important things going on,” Biden replied, according to KNXV-TV. “They’re going to invest billions of dollars into new enterprise.”
Biden was eviscerated for that response all over social media, but perhaps nowhere more pointedly than on the account of the union representing the men and women who work day and night to secure that border and defend American interests, territorial integrity and even lives.
Visiting an ice cream shop: Very important
Visiting our border, where illegal immigration, deaths, escapes and fentanyl smuggling set new records non-stop with thousands dying as a result: Not important
— Border Patrol Union – NBPC (@BPUnion) December 6, 2022
That would seem to sum it up pretty well.
According to The Hill, over 2.76 million illegals were encountered at the border over the last year, the largest number of annual illegal border encounters in the history of the United States.
Along with illegal immigration comes a number of crises. Take the fentanyl crisis, for instance. An Aug. 11 report from Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon confirmed roughly 60 percent of all fentanyl seized around the entire country is being seized at the border.
The drug is flowing from Mexico to the U.S. at a breakneck pace.
“A decade ago, we didn’t even know about fentanyl, and now it’s a national crisis,” U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said in the report. “The amount of fentanyl we are seizing at the border is staggering. The number of fentanyl seizures and fentanyl-related deaths in our district are unprecedented.”
Human and sex trafficking is also rampant at the border.
One former White House adviser, Stephen Miller, has argued that the U.S. is currently facing “the largest child smuggling epidemic in human history.”
This statement is backed up by the findings of Teresa Ulloa Ziaurriz, director of the Latin American branch of the Coalition Against Trafficking International. She told the New York Post that an estimated 60 percent of Latin American children crossing the border unaccompanied “have [been] caught by the cartels and are being abused in child pornography or for drug trafficking.”
And even those illegals who manage to make it into the country unharmed and who aren’t involved in trafficking illegal substances still bring harm to the American economy.
According to a 2007 analysis from The Heritage Foundation, low-skilled immigrant families received roughly $30,000 per year in benefits at that time, while only paying about $10,000 in taxes — meaning that Americans were left with a tab of $20,000 per immigrant family. Who knows how much more costly providing for those families is today?
Don’t ask the sitting U.S. president. He doesn’t seem to know. Or care.
I bet he knows how many flavors Baskin-Robbins is serving today, though.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.