The southern border of the United States is broken. In fact, one could argue that we do not have a southern border. And in the words of late President Ronald Reagan, “a nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.”
For the 12 months ending September 30, 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stopped illegal “migrants more than 2,766,582 times, compared to 1.72 million times for fiscal 2021,” according to NBCNews.com. In addition, there were at least 599,000 illegal migrants who crossed the southern border illegally and evaded authorities in fiscal year 2022, up from nearly 390,000 in fiscal year 2021. This means that in the past two fiscal years, more than 5.4 million illegals have entered the United States. Those are just the ones that we have “seen” or stopped. The annual net cost of illegal immigration to the United States is estimated to be at least $150.7 billion, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This does not include the depression of wages caused by illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage or the cost of unemployment when and illegal takes a job away from a citizen.
Beyond the financial burden of supporting illegal immigrants, there are at least two additional costs (and tragedies) to Biden’s broken border: the cost of human trafficking and the deaths caused by fentanyl.
Illegal immigration drives two different types of human trafficking and abuse — abuse en-route to the United States and then forced slavery upon arrival to pay the cost of being brought to the country.
According to an Amnesty International report, “about 60% of the women and girls who make the trek to the U.S.-Mexico border are raped.” Often, the rapist will then take an article of clothing from his victim and tie it to a so-called rape tree as both a trophy and a warning.
The nightmare does not end once these women and children arrive in the U.S. Many are forced into prostitution, pornography, or other aspects of the sex trade to pay off their debt to the cartels who smuggled them into the country. The U.S. Department of State reports that “between 14,500 and 17,500 people are victims of trafficking in the country every year – 72% of which are estimated to be migrants. Due to the increase in illegal migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, more people, especially children, are at risk of becoming victims of trafficking.”
Beyond the horror of the trafficking of migrants is the horror of the deaths from fentanyl that is illegally smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The fentanyl supply chain, for the most part, is simple. Until 2019, China provided Mexican drug cartels with the machines used to press fentanyl into pill form. China continues to ship drug cartels the fentanyl precursor chemicals. Immigrants bring the drugs across the border, or act as a diversion that allows other so-called mules (both Mexican and American) to cross the border with the drugs. A large portion of fentanyl also comes across at legal ports of entry.
In 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl, enough to kill every American citizen. There is no way to know exactly how much fentanyl makes it across the border and into the interior of the country.
Fentanyl-involved overdose deaths were the highest “among drug-related deaths the CDC analyzed and included more deaths than methamphetamine, cocaine, oxycodone and heroin,” from 2016-2021, The Hill reported. In 2021, 90% of some 80,000 “opioid-related deaths involved fentanyl,” according to CBS News. Other reports claim that fentanyl was responsible for at least 100,000 overdose deaths in both 2021 and 2022.
Biden’s border crisis is a modern human tragedy. It has allowed human trafficking to explode as a source of income for Mexican cartels, has led to the sexual abuse of countless immigrant women and children, and has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans due to fentanyl.
Enforcing a secure border and stopping illegal immigration is not only the legal action that is needed, it is the moral action that must be taken to save lives.
Jim Nelles is a Navy veteran and supply chain consultant based in Chicago. His articles have appeared in The Washington Examiner, Newsweek, Foxnews.com, and The Daily Wire. He has served as a chief procurement officer, chief supply chain officer, and chief operations officer for multiple companies.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.