We’ve heard the excuses so many times over the years, we can repeat them by heart. 

“It’s a broken immigration system,” “We can’t close the border without fundamental immigration reform,” “It was already broken when we arrived,” and “If you don’t reform it first, you just don’t have compassion.” 

Well, President Trump arrived to serve his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, and within days, he had secured the borders.  After four years of millions of illegal aliens pouring in annually, the combination of fences, walls, rivers, planes, and federal law enforcement on the ground has brought illegal crossings to effectively zero for these past six months. 

We didn’t change the laws; we didn’t make DACA permanent or do any of the things that the Democrats said we had to do.  We just started enforcing the law.  President Trump gave the executive branch the O.K. to do what they wanted to do all along: their job. 

The most important lesson to take from this is that the Democrats have been lying about the problem of illegal aliens; they said they couldn’t possibly keep them out, and President Trump has proven they could’ve, all along.  

This makes the Democrats liars, on this issue as on so many others.  

There can no longer be any question about it; if the Democrats didn’t enforce the border before, it’s because they just didn’t want to. 

We can therefore begin by facing the facts that everyone knows, but the national Democrats obscured, by claiming they couldn’t enforce the border anyway, even if they’d wanted to.  Now that’s it’s clear they could’ve - so this was always a conscious choice – we can look at the situation honestly, as we must: 

Wherever Democrats have had power – whether in Congress or the White House, whether in state legislatures or city councils, county boards or federal judgeships – they have used their power to actively encourage mass illegal immigration. 

Declaring cities, counties, and states as “sanctuaries” - illegally announcing to the world that they would not enforce federal law, making their jurisdictions magnets for illegal aliens. 

Intentionally misinterpreting the 14th Amendment to disregard the critical clause regarding U.S. citizenship -- “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof“ – to create generations of countless anchor babies by illegally conveying U.S. citizenship upon the undeserving children of illegal aliens.  

Impeding all forms of crime control, by giving illegal aliens protected status -- refusing to prosecute robbers, rapists, drug dealers and killers as vociferously as citizens. 

Designing porous border practices and disregarding visa expirations in a manner that ensures records would disappear into the vapor, filling the country with a growing number of everything from false refugee claimants to former tourists, from former students to one-time guest workers, not to mention the aforementioned violent criminal element. 

Providing the illegal alien population with not just regular social services like welfare, food stamps, free schooling, housing and healthcare that ought to be limited to down-on-their-luck citizens, but even more -– giving hundreds of thousands of them free hotels, free transportation, free custom meals, and free legal advice to help them break the system. 

The usual question is Why, but we know the answer to this one, too.  It’s no secret, though there are aspects that aren’t as obvious: 

The Democrats benefit, of course, from using this population as activist storm troops in encampments, rallies, and protests.  They benefit from the anchor babies growing up to vote Democrat.  They benefit from the ones they employ as cheap labor – from groundskeepers at their mansions to subminimum wage labor at politically-connected factories and farms. 

But the obvious story isn’t the full story. 

Democrats are master parliamentarians.  They’ve learned to game the system in other ways, too.   

Locate the refugee and illegal population in the right places, and you change the state’s congressional (and electoral college) allocations. Give them drivers’ licenses or addresses, and their names can appear on voter registrations, providing names to be voted on election day – yes, by others, or by computers -- even if the individuals themselves don’t know that ballots are being cast in their name.  

And they use the presence of these millions of needy indigents as make-work projects, creating a demand for government-and-NGO-funded bureaucrats, from social workers to clinics to other safety-net apparatchiks. 

When the city funds hotel rooms for aliens, it uses our tax dollars to enrich politically connected hoteliers.  When the city funds those free lunches by the thousands, it uses our tax dollars to enrich the contracted caterers.  When a city filled with half-empty public schools is flooded with the children of illegal aliens, those schools’ enrollment skyrockets, saving the taxpayer-funded jobs of teachers and administrators alike. 

When we complain about these schemes – now numbering in the tens of millions, especially since every single illegal alien is used as the vehicle for many if not all of these schemes – we are told that we lack compassion. 

Compassion? 

Those of us – the majority of Americans, in fact – who oppose the illegal alien invasion, are accused of being uncaring, as we cry out for the deportation of these millions. 

But we do not lack compassion.  In fact, compassion is at the root of our policy. 

It’s just a matter of whom we feel compassion for. 

There is always a choice. To care more for the criminal or for his victim. To care more for the pusher or for the addict he entraps.  To care more for the shopkeeper and cashier or for the shoplifter or flashmob who robs him. 

Do we care enough about the sanctity of our citizens’ precious right to vote, or do we dilute their votes by flooding the Census with the presence of illegal aliens? Do we care enough about our own indigents who depend on our safety net, or do we happily squander our welfare on the undeserving so there’s nothing left for our own needy? 

Shouldn’t we have more respect for our taxpayers than to throw away their tax dollars funding undeserving foreigners?  

Shouldn’t we care enough for our teachers and students to avoid putting a dozen different languages in every schoolroom, making education absolutely impossible for any of them?  And shouldn’t we care enough for our hardworking blue collar workers, farm workers, shipping workers, and every other class of employee whose wages are depressed by this competition from illegal aliens? 

And perhaps most important of all, shouldn’t we have enough respect for the millions of would-be immigrants, the people all over the world who are already waiting patiently to immigrate legally, whose long wait is made longer by our massive illegal population, postponing the possibility of assimilation for years, and even decades? 

Do we have compassion?  Of course we do. 

The dividing line is all about whom we have compassion for.   

It’s the Right that has its heart in the right place.   

And it’s the Left – the cold, calculating, criminal Left – that proves daily that it has no heart at all. 

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. 

Image: CalTrans, via Wikipedia // public domain