After more than three years in effect, Title 42 restrictions were lifted on Thursday at 11:59pm EDT. Title 42 refers to the 1944 public health law that allows curbs on migration in the name of protecting public health. The Trump administration invoked it in March 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to give United States officials the authority to turn away migrants at the southern border in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
President Joe Biden initially kept Title 42 in place after he took office. When he tried to end its use in 2022, Republicans successfully sued to keep the rules in place. Once the Biden administration announced the end of the COVID-19 national emergency, however, the border restrictions could no longer be enforced.
Even with Title 42 in place, there has been a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border for much of Biden’s presidency. ‘Border czar’ Kamala Harris has thus far not figured out a way to address with what she calls the “root causes” of illegal immigration that led to a record-breaking 2.3 million apprehensions at the southern border in fiscal year 2022 and upwards of 10,000 migrants illegally crossing into the U.S. per day in the lead up to the end of Title 42 this week.
On Friday’s show, Megyn and Stephen Miller, founder of America First Legal and former senior advisor to President Donald Trump, discussed the end of Title 42 and what the immigration crisis means politically, economically, and culturally for the future of the U.S.
The Dangers of Mass Migration
It is accepted by virtually everyone that the U.S. borders were more secure under former President Trump, and yet the majority of the policies his administration enacted have been scrapped by President Biden. The result has been record-setting numbers of migrants illegally entering the country in search of asylum and the over-running of border towns and sanctuary cities (think: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City) alike.
While the left might try to paint aiding asylum seekers as a humanitarian mission, the reality is much darker. Miller said he cannot understand how “an administration could be so willingly complicit in a policy that’s yielding so much human misery.” Even reporting from The New York Times has found evidence of human trafficking, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking – particularly among children – that we’ve never seen before. “Hundreds of thousands of minors have been trafficked into the country,” he noted.
The porous border has also played a part in the growing fentanyl crisis the U.S. is simultaneously dealing with as the drug cartels and gangs continue to get stronger. “You have the fentanyl deaths setting records year after year,” Miller explained. “And then you have gangs that have operational control of our territory that are abusing people and murdering people on both sides of the border.”
The Goal of Mass Migration
The influx of illegal migrants contributes to the destruction of the labor market and puts increased strain on the already taxed education and health care systems. “When you completely destabilize the labor market and the social safety net, then people begin demanding more government services because the jobs aren’t paying enough,” Miller shared. “So you need more earned income tax credits, you need to have more food stamps, you need to have more public housing.”
Additionally, “the education system can’t keep up, so you’ve got to keep funneling more and more money into that,” he added. “And nobody has health insurance… The vast majority of people in this country who do not have health insurance are not citizens of this country.”
With that in mind, you might be wondering what it’s all for. “Is the goal just to create more Democratic voters,” Megyn asked. “Why would they be allowing this kind of crisis to emerge from our south and now be bussed up to the north such that virtually all these major cities are going to feel the pain?”
The answer, according to Miller, is about control. “An open border both imports the voters who will vote for one party and one ideology, and it also changes the political landscape of an entire community,” he explained. “You end up with the Manhattan-ization of America, where you have these very large cities where nothing works, nothing is functional, nothing is safe, nothing is efficient, and the solution is always going to be you have to tax more and spend more.”
Biden’s New Immigration Policies
On Wednesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, in partnership with the Department of Justice, laid out a new policy that is meant to “incentivize use of lawful immigration pathways.” The idea is that it will bar most people from applying for asylum if they cross the border illegally or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country. “So, they’re kind of saying, ‘You now need to apply for asylum in another country,’” Megyn said.
As she noted, it’s an obvious order – if asylum was actually the goal. “If you’re truly fleeing prosecution, you’re fine with Mexico. You just need to get away from the prosecution,” Megyn explained. “That’s not what it’s about. They want to be in the United States.”
While the mainstream media is debating whether these new policies are even tougher than those enacted under the Trump administration, Miller said the logic is flawed because of the actions previously taken by the Biden White House. “This version of events requires us to believe that he canceled every single policy that was working incredibly well and then put up a whole series of policies designed to make it as easy to enter the country illegally as possible, but it was really just secretly a head fake to come up with some new and different better plan,” he joked.
In Miller’s view, the ideologues who are behind our current immigration policy “believe that borders are racist, the borders are wrong, and that we don’t have any right – morally or otherwise – to deny people entry into this country.” While this isn’t necessarily what President Biden believes, he has surrounded himself with people who do. “He’s a party man, so he’s doing what his party is telling him to do,” Miller concluded. “For the ideologues that are driving this policy, that is absolutely what they believe and that is why they are incapable of saying the sentence ‘illegal immigration is wrong.’”
You can check out the full interview with Miller by tuning in to episode 549 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.