President Joe Biden is on target, with policies at once vapid and cynical, to allow more than 2 million illegal migrants across the southern border into the United States this year — the worst influx since records began 97 years ago.

In October, Customs and Border Protection officials intercepted 164,303 people crossing the Mexican frontier. They come from 150 different countries, increasingly from the Eastern Hemisphere, and most are simply economic migrants. People head here primarily for the understandable reason that they’d prefer to live in comfort in a rich country than in penury in the backward ones from which they come. They are now dispersed around the country.