Pregnant moms at the border
President Biden’s welcomethe-world border policy presents graver challenges than just admitting an estimated 10 million worldwide migrants by the time the Biden term ends in January 2025. Among the migrants are convicted criminals and terrorists on the FBI’s watch list.
And needing specialized attention are pregnant women.
A Time story, “Pregnant Asylum-Seekers Needed Help at the Border,” shared Mexican migrant Xiomara’s journey north. When Xiomara arrived at the border with her three young children, ages 10, 6 and 4, she was nine months pregnant. Xiomara told border patrol officials that she was feeling contractions, but she refused an offer of transportation to a nearby hospital. Instead, with Migrant Protection Protocols still in place at the time, officials returned Xiomara to Mexico where she gave birth. Likely, she’ll attempt to migrate again.
Knowing the exact number of pregnant women who have surrendered to border patrol officials is impossible, but within the millions who have crossed, a safe guess is that several thousand either were expectant or would soon grow their current families.
Stories similar to Xiomara’s abound. A 16-year-old pregnant migrant entered the San Ysidro border station with her 16-month-old daughter and her husband. Because she and her daughter are both under 18, they were then sent to a San Benito facility for unaccompanied minors. One incident on the Southwest border occurred when a pregnant migrant went into labor on the Rio Grande River bank. Another asylum-seeking migrant, after giving birth in a Staten Island hospital bathroom, dumped her newborn son in a trash can. The boy survived, and police charged the mother with reckless endangerment of a child’s welfare.
Because the government automatically grants American citizenship to foreign nationals born on U.S. soil (known as the birthright citizenship policy), the boy is automatically an American citizen. Along with other children born on American soil to foreign-born asylum-seekers, he eventually will be allowed to petition for his nuclear and nonnuclear family members, a never-ending population time bomb, to come to America.
As the illegal alien families move from the border into the U.S. interior, migrants represent burdensome costs to fiscally stretched communities. At the start of 2023, illegal immigration’s aggregate net cost to United States taxpayers — at federal, state and local levels — was at least $150.7 billion. For instance, in Illinois, more than 1,500 miles from El Paso, Texas, a major point of entry for illegal aliens, the cost was $4.59 billion in 2022, or $930 per household, an expense that will repeat itself year after year. For communities on the border, the costs are staggering. The border crisis costs California $21.76 billion and Texas $8.88 billion annually in education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice system costs, and welfare expenditures.
And remember — the invasion is still in its early stages. More than two-thirds of the world’s population has smart phones; the word is out that America has not only opened its borders, but is welcoming the new arrivals with, among other rewards, cell phones! When everything is free, which is how the migrants perceive their U.S. lives, word travels fast.
Nearly all the migrants will need access to the entire social services buffet — public education, health care, housing and SNAP benefits. Others have noted that Biden has made every state a border state, but that commonly made observation can be confirmed by the staggering costs to taxpayers to fund illegal immigration. Despite what the migrants tell immigration officials — that they are fleeing persecution and have credible fear for their lives — they’re economic refugees and don’t qualify for asylum.
Department of Justice statistics show that between FY 2008 and late FY 2019 — a period during which the Department of Homeland Security routinely used expedited removal — 83 percent of migrants stopped at the border who claimed a fear of harm were cleared to make asylum claims in court. Fewer than 17 percent of them received asylum. By contrast, more than 45 percent never applied for asylum, and 32.5 percent were ordered removed in absentia when they failed to appear in court.
Twenty-five years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman rebuked the Wall Street Journal for its open borders enthusiasm. Warned Friedman: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” Friedman continued to observe that welfare benefits to illegal immigrants represent an enormous wealth transfer scheme.
The scheme in progress has the Biden administration’s wholehearted endorsement. After all, the White House conjured the open border plan, so, naturally, the administration would look at the invasion with satisfaction that the new world order is working out exactly as designed.