Southern border

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

New Hampshire votes tomorrow in the 2024 presidential primaries — and it seems no one is expecting an upset. The Spectator team dispatched to Manchester and has observed a significantly quieter scene than that of the 2020 Democratic primary contest. News coverage is scanter than expected, the bars and restaurants are empty and there is plenty of parking, even as temperatures creeped above freezing today.The only quasi-surprise so far is that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has suspended his campaign already, although that seemed more a question of when not if, considering his poor showing in Iowa after spending more than $100 million campaigning.

Watchers of the news might be forgiven for thinking the Biden administration is worried about the election-year optics of more migrants at our southern border. The International Committee of the Red Cross is predicting high waves of migration through Mexico and Central America. The Department of Homeland Security last week requested help from the Pentagon. Also last week, the administration announced that asylum officers, rather than just immigration court judges, will be permitted to adjudicate the claims of immigrants seeking asylum at the border. In addition to these initiatives, I’d suggest another policy: do away with birthright citizenship and dual citizenship.