Why in the world is our government unwilling to actually secure our borders?

Border Security

Border security is possibly the most important debate in our lifetime and has been playing itself out over the last 20 years. The question of how we, as a nation, can secure our borders and at the same time address tens of millions of illegal entrants is a question that seems to mystify our representatives in Washington, DC.

Secure Fence Act (2006)

Most of the polls indicate that as many as 80% of Americans do not support open borders. While under Joe Biden, the Democrats continue to say that our "borders are secure," insinuating that no real action needs to be taken. Republicans, on the other hand, give a lot of lip service to a border crisis but never really do anything about it. The biggest example of this was the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (SFA), which was passed by both houses of Congress and then signed by President George W. Bush. It was touted as a bipartisan solution for what even then was an open-border immigration crisis. In fact, this was the very law that Donald J. Trump was using when, in 2016, he set out to build a wall along our southern border. The SFA actually placed the government of the United States under legal obligation to build a border barrier.

Never Funded

The Trump administration quickly discovered, as it set out to fulfill this obligation, that the Congress of the United States never funded the effort. In the years since the 2006 signing of the SFA, both Republicans and Democrats had been, at one time or another, in full control of both Houses of Congress, yet have never made an effort to address its funding. With Trump's victory in 2016, the Republicans also took control of both houses of Congress. But even then, the House and the Senate refused to fund the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This prevented the Trump administration from successfully building a border barrier. Even today, all Democrats and at least 70% of Republicans refuse to commit to funding the building of a border barrier the full length of our southern border, while at the same time giving billions of dollars to Ukraine to protect the full length of their northern border. Understandably, we hear frustrated Americans asking the question; "Why in the world is our government unwilling to actually secure our borders?" Why is our representative democracy failing on this issue?

Why Open Borders

Have you ever wondered why some people advocate for open borders? Some speculate that it's a ploy by the Democrats to gain votes. Others believe that it's an attempt to change the complexion of our nation. While these are all valid concerns, the root cause may actually be more straightforward. Our government is facing a significant risk of failure in the next two decades due to a shrinking workforce. This is the real reason our government is unwilling to secure our borders.

Our government has been spending money like drunken sailors for over 50 years. Our legislative branch has constructed a bureaucracy that is so complex, so entrenched, and so expensive that the sheer weight of maintaining the current level of growth has set the stage to bankrupt our society in as little as 20 years. It all hinges on the retirement of the baby boomers. The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) reported that just to keep up with the demands of the Social Security and Medicare systems, over the next 20 years, "... we will have to either cut boomers' benefits in half or double payroll and income tax rates." Not only that, COVID and Ukraine have only made things worse.

Social Security and Medicare are only two government programs, and the NCPA reports that the US government has made $5 trillion in promises that they cannot keep. There are literally hundreds of programs with built-in annual increases that will have to be paid for by an ever-decreasing workforce. The Social Security Administration stated in 2020 that over the next 10 years, 83 million baby boomers will have left the US workforce, and our current population growth will only be able to replace one-tenth of them. Think about that. Left unchanged, by 2030, the number of wage-earning, tax-paying workers will decrease by as much as 90%. This, my friend, will put the very existence of the United States in question.

Faced with unstoppable growth in spending and increasingly costly programs and bureaucracies, the Legislative and Executive branches of our government have stopped listening to the citizens of the nation. In the long run, we don't matter anymore. All that really matters is growing our workforce and obtaining more taxpayers, even if the United States, as we know it, ceases to exist.

More Than We Can Afford

In May of 2006, Meg Richards, in an article published by the Associated Press, reported that between 2004 and 2014, there would be 4.7 million new jobs in healthcare alone, and since 2016 there have been 2.4 million more added to that number. Reports are that 60,000 healthcare jobs a month are currently being added in the United States. From an overall workforce standpoint, this number doesn't even include the 83 million jobs being vacated by baby boomers in all sectors. These numbers are also absent from the millions of new jobs that will be created by technological advances across the board. Some estimate that as many as 30 million jobs will remain vacant if something drastic is not done before 2030.

In the last seven years alone, estimates by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that as many as three million jobs have gone unfilled because of a lack of available workers. These are not the so-called "jobs that no American wants..."; these are real career-level jobs. It has been reported that the US Temporary Workers Program can easily allow temporary workers to stay in the country for at least 13 years. By doing this, our government hopes it can pull 20 million workers into the workforce and get them paying taxes. The remaining 10 million can be pulled in through a massive increase in the current legal immigration numbers over the next two decades.

The reality is that our security needs and our impending need for a massive influx of workers are at odds with each other. Our government doesn't have the fiscal ability to adequately vet legal migration that would be needed to both fill these workforce needs and preserve our nation's security. Being that the government never admits it has made mistakes and, with the complicity of our elected representatives, it never will. The fact that we currently carry a national debt of $34 trillion and a deficit of $1.7 trillion shows that the government has clearly overextended itself to almost unrecoverable levels.

Summary

The majority of our elected officials continue to gloss over the fact that our government has not done due diligence and has now exposed our nation to threats from within and threats from the outside. These threats can easily trigger, if not addressed, a worldwide financial collapse. This is why the government is unwilling to actually secure our borders; they need more people to give them money.

Return To: