Immigration, perhaps more than any other issue, is what propelled Donald Trump to the White House in both 2016 and 2024. This policy included two major prongs: the first, building a robust, impenetrable wall on the nearly 2,000-mile-long US-Mexico border; the second, mass deportations. While the rhetoric eight years focused primarily on the former, all throughout this year, the rhetorical emphasis shifted to mass deportation. This is partly attributed to the influx of recent illegal migrants under Joe Biden: an estimated 10-25 million illegals, many of which include violent criminals, have crossed over the US-Mexico border and infiltrated the country in the past four years alone, presenting an unmanageable crisis of immediate urgency.

The reasons for this catastrophe are twofold: the political class in Washington, DC, colloquially termed “the Uniparty” prefers mass migration. Importing the third world allows them to safeguard their power indefinitely. While the trends shifted slightly this year, with President Trump making inroads among several traditionally Democrat-leading constituencies, including Hispanic Americans and, to a lesser extent, Asian Americans, the general rule still holds: migrants, the children of migrants, and even the grandchildren of migrants overwhelmingly – by margins of two-thirds or more – vote for the Democrat Party. Thus, open borders are an easy way for Democrats to reliably expand their coalition. For this reason, states like Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico, once Republican strongholds, now, as a result of recent mass migration, consistently and reliably vote Democrat.

The gargantuan efforts taken by Republicans in recent years to preserve battleground states like Florida and Pennsylvania, which required registering hundreds of thousands of new voters to keep those states red, merely proves the rule. No such efforts would have been needed had the border always been closed. Moreover, the electoral college distribution reflects all domiciled residents – legal and illegal. So, Democrats unfairly get the upper hand in the electoral college vote, which allocates more votes to blue states like California and New York, which are teeming with illegal aliens. Finally, the political establishment of both parties is funded by donors like Alex Karp of Palantir, who thrive on cheap labor. While these types often lie about their true motives, saying publicly that they only want merit-based immigration, the practical reality is that the status quo has unleashed hordes of low-skilled migrants into the country. Continuing the status quo — or some minor tweaking thereof — will only result in more of these disastrous consequences.

Ideally, there would be some moratorium, scheduled for ten or twenty years (at least), to put a cap on all migration, both legal and illegal, until every illegal alien is deported and every legal immigrant is sufficiently assimilated into American society. At this stage, those who argue for more migration have the onus to prove why such migration is necessary. America’s domestic labor force is severely underutilized. Young Americans, particularly young American males, are increasingly opting out of college and the labor force altogether – partly due to the generational competitive pressures they have for placement in highly selective college seats across the country.

However, American students and workers remain just as skilled – if not more so in most cases – than their foreign counterparts. The reason college admissions are so competitive, particularly for highly selective universities like the Ivy League, which thrive on a number of visa programs that select against American students for their foreign counterparts. These programs are backed by massive federal incentives for the colleges to select against American students. In addition, they are incentivized by our racist affirmative action programs, which discriminate against homegrown Americans – and white males, above all – for foreign counterparts, even if the foreigner offers measurably fewer skills – and is generally of lesser merit, everything else being equal – than his American peer.

President Trump’s administration has a duty to make good on its campaign promises to Americans – and chief among those promises is mass deportations. ICE should be equipped with every resource available, and then some, to commence such deportations with all deliberate speed. Every tool at our disposal should be used to carry out the greatest deportation campaign in American history. The twenty million-plus illegals imported by Joe Biden are overwhelmingly low-skilled laborers. Many have brought with them lethal drugs like fentanyl, sex trafficking, and other unspeakable crimes.

Even the skilled ones, in many cases – particularly in computer science and engineering (and even in law) struggle with proficiency in basic English. They lack knowledge of even the most rudimentary lessons of American history, such as who signed the Declaration of Independence and in what years was the Civil War fought. If you ask even the most skilled migrant to name a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, a novel by Mark Twain, a stage play by Tennessee Williams, or a tune by Cole Porter — seminal aspects of our culture and history — you will be reciprocated with blank stares. So too will they be unable to name what team Babe Ruth played for, or what feat Secretariat accomplished.

These are not trivialities but speak to celebrated parts of American culture that all migrants should be acquainted with to meaningfully assimilate. National sovereignty is about more than just GDP output or even language or religion. It’s about creating a unifying culture from disparate and diverse people across fifty states of countless backgrounds, histories, and customs. That is a mighty feat that America has accomplished with remarkable effectiveness in the past, though the assimilation process takes time – often decades, to fully establish the conditions that furnish high levels of trust among people and veneration for the rule of law.

Illegal aliens do not enjoy the same fundamental rights that Americans do under the Constitution. This should not be a controversial point. By definition, they are non-citizens and thus are only entitled to the barest minimum of human rights that all nations of the world have a duty to uphold. Beyond that threshold, however, non-citizens are not to be given the robust due process and equal protection guarantees that ordinary citizens have. They committed a crime, after all, by crossing the border illegally, and thus have no right to anything more than a swift hearing followed by deportation back to their home countries. There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about using government funds to build detention centers, which is okay – but it should not detract from the fact that due process rights are much more circumscribed and limited for illegal aliens. They should not be given lengthy hearings: the idea behind the detention camps would almost seem to imply more comprehensive due process rights (hence the need to house them for longer periods of time), which do not exist under the Constitution – and is neither supported by the original meaning of the text, nor the subsequent precedent established by the Supreme Court.

Mass migration is being used to drive wedges and fault lines in American society – and across the West – in ways that have absolutely no parallel in the history of the world. The fact that we are treading on such novel territory should be enough of an alarm bell to put the breaks on this madness once and for all, for history presents no other society that has allowed itself to take in so many foreigners – and survive to tell the tale.

American nationhood is not an amorphous concept, nor are we supposed to be a mere economic zone for endless GDP production. We are a flesh and blood people, rooted in a real history, culture, and set of values – rooted in the Constitution and the American Revolution – that distinguish us as a separate and unique people from anyone else in the world. We must have an immigration policy that reflects and vigorously guards these sacred components of our national character, lest we wish to go the way of other great empires that allowed a foreign scourge to hobble them to submission. For this reason, it’s not enough for migrants, even highly skilled ones, to satisfy the demands of an H1-B visa. We need to strengthen all our laws for processing legal migration to ensure — at the barest of minimums — not just skillset, but a robust knowledge of America’s history, traditions, and mastery of the English language is a top priority – and supplemental factor – as a part of a demanding application process that can and will turn away any migrant who doesn’t meet those exceptional standards.

The cost to our national sovereignty, cultural identity, and very freedoms are simply too high to make concessions for political correctness or to appease an out-of-touch donor class.

Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.