A New York Times headline on Monday said that there’s “An Immigrant Influx That a Wall Won’t Deter.” So, yes, even during an impeachment, the national media are still trying to convince the public that every commonsense thing we know about immigration is wrong.
The story told of the thousands of people each year who overstay their travel visas, thus making them “illegal immigrants,” even though they had initial permission to enter the United States and didn’t sneak across the southern border.
Earlier this year, NPR similarly ran a story about visa overstays outnumbering illegal border crossings.
The point, presumably, is to complicate the immigration debate and convince readers that there is no crisis at the southern border. The real fix isn’t a border wall at all! It’s simply a matter of more internal enforcement and fixing some paperwork.
This is a ruse.
First, any foreign citizen who mistakenly overstays their visa for even just one day is considered an “illegal” resident. If a traveler from India has no intention of staying in the U.S. but remains here for an extra week, his status is illegal. That’s not the type of person we’re worried about. We’re worried about the hundreds of thousands who are coming every month with the purpose of staying, and those people are making their way in by illegally crossing into the country from Mexico and then claim they are seeking asylum.
The New York Times even acknowledged this in its report. “The government reported that nearly 670,000 travelers who arrived by air or sea and were supposed to depart in the 2018 fiscal year had not left by Sept. 30, 2018,” it said. “That number had dropped to nearly 415,700 by March 2019, because many people overstay by just a few months.”
In contrast, the people coming in from Mexico aren’t tripping into the U.S. by mistake and then hopping back once they realize the error. In nearly every case, they’re flooding in and hoping it’s a one-way journey.
No, walls won’t stop everyone from coming into the country illegally. But every border agent I’ve talked to or heard from says that walls help, particularly when it comes to foreign citizens with criminal backgrounds who aren’t claiming asylum but are simply trying to sneak by.
Although Democrats and the national media get angry at the suggestion that even just one illegal immigrant may be a rapist or a violent gang member, border agents at the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas said last week that in just six days, they apprehended a Salvadoran who had a prior conviction in Indiana for sexual misconduct with a minor; a Salvadoran gang member with a previous conviction in his own country for extortion; and a Salvadoran who had a previous conviction in Los Angeles for “annoying or molesting a child under 18,” which essentially means the man behaved in a sexually inappropriate way with a minor.
Sure, let’s fix the problem with foreign citizens overstaying their visas. But the southern border, it seems, is a slightly more pressing issue at the moment.
