By the time you read this, 5 million illegal immigrants will have entered our country since Joe Biden took over the presidency. That’s a stunning number, a number that destroys all previous records. You might think that with an all-out assault like that on our immigration laws, Biden would be begging the Congress for tens of billions of dollars to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents to better get a handle on the surge of illegal immigration.
If you thought that, you’d be wrong. Instead, Biden asked Congress for funding for 87,000 new IRS employees, so he could double the number of audits targeted at middle-class taxpayers.
Clearly, Biden doesn’t mind that many illegal border crossers. That’s a fair deduction, given his decision to stop enforcing our immigration laws.
That Biden actually made a decision to stop enforcing our immigration laws is evident – not just on our southwestern border, where the number of encounters with illegal aliens is at an all-time high, but throughout the rest of the country, where more than a million so-called “asylum seekers” are allowed to live while awaiting their immigration court dates (for which a huge percentage will never show up).
This month, the government released the July figures for encounters at the southwest border. Last month, 199,976 illegal aliens crossed that border. (That number does not count “got aways.”) That’s down from 207,416 in June. But it’s up more than 300 percent compared to the average number of July apprehensions during the Trump presidency.
To put the number of illegal border crossers in context, look at it this way: More illegal immigrants have come into the United States since Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office than the populations of Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming – combined.
If they had all moved into one, new state – let’s call it, for the sake of argument, the state of “Pandemonium” – it would have a larger population than half the states in the country. It would rank as the 25th largest, right behind Alabama, and right ahead of Louisiana. It would have six U.S. Representatives, and eight votes in the Electoral College.
That we have an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration on our southwest border should be no surprise to anyone. It was entirely predictable, given the Biden Administration’s decision to terminate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, reverse Trump’s decision to use Title 42 as a means to prevent many migrants from entering the U.S., and overturn Trump’s determination to build a strong wall along the southern border, even if it meant abandoning to rust$100 million worth of material that had already been purchased.
Democrats know this is a problem. If they were intellectually honest, they’d admit it. Instead, the Biden Administration silently plans to close gaps in the border wall in Arizona, even as the mayors of New York City and the District of Columbia pretend not to notice their own hypocrisy as they scream bloody murder about thousands of illegal immigrants being bused to their self-described “sanctuary cities” and beg for help from the federal government.
Yet it’s not this surge of illegal immigration that’s got Biden’s attention. Instead, when it came time to ask Congress for funding for additional federal employees, rather than ask for more border security agents, he asked for more money to hire more IRS employees – enough to virtually double the size of the agency, and double the number of audits targeted at middle-class taxpayers.
That $80 billion is so much that even former IRS commissioner John Koskinen – a long-time proponent of increased funding for the IRS – said he doubted it could be spent wisely. “I’m not sure you’d be able to efficiently use that much money,”he told The New York Times last summer. “That’s a lot of money."
Reported The Times, “Mr. Koskinen said he thought an extra $25 billion over a decade” would be appropriate. So Biden asks for, and gets, more than three times as much for additional IRS employees as its former commissioner thinks it can spend wisely. That’s shocking.
That new money is going to be used to go after middle-income taxpayers, not the uber-rich, because that’s where the money is. U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, the Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee, citing the Joint Committee on Taxation, says 78-90 percent of the revenue collected from what is now under-reported income – that is, the money that would be paid to the IRS after it audits taxpayers – will come from taxpayers earning less than $200,000 per year.
During debate over the reconciliation bill that contained the $80 billion in new funding for the IRS, Senate Democrats were given an opportunity to ensure that none of the new funding could be used for audits of taxpayers with taxable incomes below $400,000.Every single Democrat voted against that amendment.
So much for Biden’s famous promise to protect taxpayers making less than $400,000 per year.
To govern, it is said, is to choose. Biden’s choice – new IRS employees over border security and controlling illegal immigration – shows his contempt for his constituents. In ten weeks, the American people will have the chance to render their judgment on his choice. No wonder Democrats are fearful.