What The Border Invasion is Doing to America’s Cities

Written by Daniel Horowitz

As you watch hundreds of thousands of military-age men storming the southern U.S. border, your eyes should be trained more on our cities than on the border itself. That is where all these criminal and belligerent elements are settling — and where they are changing our culture, society, and security for the worse.

What we are witnessing is the counterintuitive immorality of the open-border left on display in real time, as we allow our cities to become the very hellholes from which leftists supposedly want to save migrants.

The Daily Mail last week reported that among the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans entering the United States, ex-communist security forces, gang leaders, and state-run militias from Venezuela have saturated neighborhoods in Miami, Dallas, and Chicago.

The cultural ills associated with Latin American socialist juntas have been imported in large numbers thanks to Biden administration policies. “The same people so many migrants left Venezuela to escape from are now here,” Miami-based attorney Rolando Vazquez told the Daily Mail. Government forces — the military and the police — would force Venezuelan businesses to pay a protection fee to President Nicholas Maduro. Now they are walking around Venezuelan communities in south Florida doing the same thing.

Where in the U.S. media — apart from Blaze Media, obviously — have you heard about any of that?

The truth is that what comes to the border doesn’t stay there. It migrates to our cities. Dallas is the second-largest city in Texas. The “Villa Dallas” section sounds like a Paris banlieue:

“Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the situation is out of control,” said a renter at the Oaks at North Dallas who didn’t want to be identified.”These men hang around the complex drinking and doing drugs. Next thing you know, it’s bullets flying and people fighting. When I first arrived, it was calm, but things have changed in the last few months.” In July, the Dallas Police designated the Oaks as a habitual crime property and confirmed officers have increased their presence there.

In other words, we are not letting in their best.

The Washington Post in 2018 reported on an “overwhelmingly Hispanic school” in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where MS-13 would “sell drugs, draw gang graffiti, and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents, and students.” It was so bad that “most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.”

The Post also reported on an illegal immigrant woman from Guatemala who paid ransom to MS-13 not to be killed. She ended up living among the very same criminal elements she fled. She had been living in the United States for 10 years, but things changed around the DACA surge when “MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

Venezuela is a much bigger problem, however. More than 10 percent of the entire population has fled the country. The security threat is so bad that even the Biden administration is placing Venezuelans on planes headed directly to Caracas.

Even if we sealed the border today, the sheer amount of riffraff we have allowed in over the past few years would be enough to kill our civilization. And that doesn’t even begin to factor in the security threats posed by Hezbollah, which has diplomatic, cultural, and demographic ties to the highest levels of Venezuelan government and society. There is no way to dig out from under the flood of invaders with our current enforcement system.

The only solution is to allow states to begin deporting illegal aliens, beginning with transnational gang members. ICE has been neutralized as an enforcement force and has been marshalled into the catch-and-release process by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

State and local law enforcement, unshackled by federal restrictions, would know where the trouble spots are in their communities. They can focus their efforts on foreign nationals who pose a threat, and unlike with domestic criminals who cycle in and out of county jails, these folks can be removed from the country after the first sign of trouble. It’s time to give states the authority to complete the full cycle of law enforcement against foreign nationals, not only to apprehend them but to remove them from the country.

If Republicans need an example of how to get this done, they should look no farther than how Pakistan swiftly removed 1.7 million Afghan migrants in a short period. If Pakistan believes its neighboring Afghans pose a threat, then how much more do transnational gangs and criminals from all over the world pose an existential threat to our survival?

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) and U.S. Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) have introduced legislation that would allow states to enforce federal immigration law, prosecute all immigration crimes, and remove scofflaws from the country. Additionally, the bills would authorize border states to construct their own barriers.

Anything short of state enforcement will not get the job done. This should be the top demand of Republicans during the upcoming budget fight, with appropriations expiring midnight November 18.

The reality is that the only way illegal immigration will end is if America becomes like the immigrants’ home countries and there is no longer any reason to come here. Sadly, we are well on our way to that outcome.

Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of TheBlaze and host of the Conservative Review podcast. He writes on the most decisive battleground issues of our times, including the theft of American sovereignty through illegal immigration, the theft of American liberty through tyranny, and the theft of American law and order through criminal justice “reform.”