Round-ups are good; stopping the flow should be top priority

Robert Pratt

Almost one million illegal aliens living in the U.S. who have received due process and been ordered deported remain free, and here. So much for the idea that the Feds are suddenly rounding up and deporting significant numbers of people.

The Washington Examiner reports that the result of the ICE raids last week was 680 illegal aliens detained. That’s a miniscule part of the 950,062 who are not just here illegally but have already been adjudicated and received deportation orders. How miniscule? Point zero seven one five seven percent – not even a tenth of one percent.

If the media is going to portray the nation to be in convulsion, and local protest break out, when a statistically non-significant group of illegal aliens, each of whom has received due process by the way, is arrested, can you imagine how they’d react to arrests and deportations of even one or two percent of just those already ordered deported by immigration courts?

The lesson to learn is that the wise route is to seriously clamp down illegal entry into the country. The Trump administration and Congressional Republicans should, on the immigration issue, focus upon quickly closing off methods through which people get into the country and remain illegally. This includes physical border security but it also includes our visa programs which are so easily cheated by people remaining after their visa expires.

Stop the illegal inflow and use internal resources to prevent visa overstays. Whatever political push-back or cost there is to pay for real border security, it will be minimal compared to the political cost of rounding up large numbers of human beings in raids.