I recently had the opportunity to have a discussion and debate with David Bier, who is the Director of Immigration Studies at the CATO Institute, about President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation policies.
Bier has been a heavy critic of President Donald Trump’s goals and tactics for mass deportations. He has been constantly called by Congressional Democrats to testify as witness as to why he believes such a goal is wrong legally and morally.
During my debate with Bier, I brought up how illegal aliens have been getting preferential treatment by district attorneys and judges when charged with a local crime because of their immigration status, like in Fairfax County, Bier said, “For every one of those policies, there’s about 100 that are discriminatory against the illegal immigrant criminals…”
At the end of the day, Bier believes restricting immigration in the name of public safety is a nonstarter.
“Does it make the country safer if we don’t have any [immigrants] just to avoid that one crime? No, it doesn’t because you measure your likelihood of being a victim of a crime by the crime rate, not by the absolute number of crimes. No one decides what city to live in by the absolute number of crimes,” he explained.
I pushed back on his assessment because, in a perfect world, the number of crimes committed by illegal and legal immigrants would be zero. No one has the right to come to our country and commit crimes during their time here. Obviously, we don’t live in a perfect world, so the goal should be to have that number as low as possible.
The Biden-Harris administration worked to ensure the number of crimes committed by illegal aliens was as high as possible because their open border policies resulted in millions of people entering the United States.
Even though those open border policies ended on Trump’s first day back in office, we are still seeing stories of illegal border crossers, who entered during the Biden era, victimizing Americans and immigrants. We will see those stories for years due to the sheer number of people who took advantage of the open border.
As long as the United States is better off than most of the world, people will still attempt to come, legally or illegally. It is up to the federal government to discourage coming illegally. Democrats have made it clear they do not want to do that.
