By Dan Stein – March 1, 2022
President Biden will be giving the State of the Union (SOTU) address to Congress in the midst of a potential humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions brought on by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Vladmir Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons if any NATO nation tries to intervene – taking the Western world into unchartered waters of unimaginable danger and risk.
This undisclosed risk lurks behind our every assumption about the future of our civilization; it stands at the mercy of the inevitable day when a madman gains control of an arsenal of sufficient size and scope.
America’s resources can only keep up with the scope of our humanitarian impulses if they are not squandered on trying to admit more people annually than we can practically afford.
Sadly, at a time of extraordinary human suffering, those impulses must be tempered because of the profligate and untampered irresponsibility of a president who has thoughtlessly allowed nearly three million aliens to violate our borders, overstay visas or otherwise obtain illegal “parole” through a failure to properly carry out the terms of our immigration laws.
There are (or should be) lessons to be learned here: If our public resources have been wasted providing benefits to illegal aliens and non-refugee parolees, the till will be empty when help is truly needed. Promiscuous use of space and resources – whether in housing, education, health care or simple cash assistance – diminishes the leverage of the nation to do our best when it is really needed.
FAIR’s message is more important now than ever. Rather than allow our elected officials to reflexively make commitments to make more open-ended commitments to take in more and more people, we need to hear something different from President Biden in his address.
We need to hear a willingness to make tradeoffs and to bring an end to previous grants of “temporary protections” where they are no longer appropriate. We need an end to mass illegal border crossings and an end to unlimited legal immigration. We need renewed enforcement of the immigration laws and a realistic cap on asylum claims.
In short, we want to hear real leadership at this pivotal moment in American and world history.
Dan Stein is President of Federation for American Immigration Reform (Fairus)
