The Real Cost of an Open Border: How Americans are Paying the Price
United States House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security
By Todd Bensman on July 26, 2023
Messr. Chairman Higgins, Ranking Member Correa, Chairman Phluger, and Ranking Member Magaziner and Members of the Subcommittees, thank you for inviting me here today to discuss the important issue of impacts from the worst mass migration crisis ever to have occurred at the American southern border. And what is happening at that border is, by every possible metric on government record, the worst such mass migration in the American experience, now well into its third year with at least four million foreign nationals allowed to enter and stay in the United States for their illegal crossing efforts.
I have studied, analyzed and reported border issues for more than 17 years. First, during my 23-year career as a journalist for major media outlets through 2009. Then for nine years as an intelligence analyst for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division, and since 2018 as a senior national security fellow for CIS.
In the official capacity of my current role, I have spent a great deal of the past two-and-a-half years on the ground, both sides of the border, usually with the immigrants before and after they cross. And from thousands of their testimonials, I have written the only comprehensive first draft of this historic event’s causes and effects, in my book OVERRUN.
In it, I document the genesis of this incredible continuous event to specific policies that went into effect on President Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, which immigrants unanimously tell me are the main reasons they decided to journey across the southern border.
The administration put a freeze on required border enforcement measures and fast-tracked release of the majority of illegal crossers into the country where they and most experts know they will stay forever.
And on their cell phones, which every immigrant has, they sent word of this incredible bonanza down trail, to home villages and all along the migration trails. And in this way, those first tens of thousands who began crossing on inauguration day quickly became hundreds of thousands a month, and then millions a year. Counting an estimated 1.7 million never apprehended, probably more than 4 million have entered the country from the border in a mere 30-month span. Perhaps as many as six million largely uneducated and needy people will be in the country before the Biden policies might first be reversed in the 2024 national elections and the floodgates closed.
https://cis.org/Testimony/Real-Cost-Open-Border-How-Americans-are-Paying-Price
