In the 2024 elections, the United States dodged not a bullet, but the output of the entire world's munitions factories for the last ten years. The re-election of Donald Trump alone, his return to the Oval Office, and the team he has put together have bought the United States time, time to rebuild, time to reform, and hopefully time to select a worthy successor who will keep up the work.
Had Kamala Harris won that election, things would be much different today. One of the major differences, of course, would be that the border floodgates would have remained open, and millions of people would have continued to flood into the United States: Mostly unscreened, unvetted, unknown. Instead, illegal immigrants are self-deporting, ICE is rounding up the worst of the worst, and we're getting them out of our country.
To see what could have happened, we need only look at the nation that was once America, Original Recipe, and is now collapsing under the weight of decades of stupid leftist policies - the United Kingdom. The Telegraph's Michael Simmons has some details.
Thousands of migrants who came here legally on work or student visas overstay and purposefully slip into illegality. The state’s ability to track them seems non-existent. They could be anywhere, doing anything – and Whitehall wouldn’t know.
Just a month ago, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee found the Home Office had accidentally opened Britain’s doors to record levels of migration. Officials “made changes to the Skilled Worker visa route without a full assessment of the risks or potential impacts, including the risks of non-compliance with visa rules and exploitation of migrant workers.”
Those “risks of non-compliance” are no longer hypothetical – they are happening. The Committee’s report urged civil servants to do more to monitor compliance when visas expire.
Too little, too late. It's not just people who came to Britain legally, either. Like the United States under the befuddled, incompetent "leadership" of Joe Biden, millions of "refugees" and "asylum seekers," the great majority of whom are young, healthy, military-aged men, have entered illegally, and the British government doesn't seem inclined to stop them.
Also like the United States under the Biden administration, the Brits have no idea how many people are in their country, legally or illegally - or who they are, where they are coming from, and what they may be intending to do.
Shocking as this is, it’s hardly surprising. The British state has only the vaguest idea of how many people live in the UK – legally or otherwise. The evidence is everywhere. There are 63.8 million patients registered with GP practices in England, but according to the ONS the entire population is 58.6 million. During Covid, some local health areas even managed the mathematically miraculous feat of vaccinating more than 100 per cent of their population.
We saw the same blind spot during Brexit: the campaign group “the3million” was so named because it was thought there were three million EU citizens in Britain. The real number? Closer to six million.
EU citizens, I wouldn't be so worried about. "Refugees" from the Muslim world, now, I would be worried about. The Brits have ample reason to worry about these people, even if their government seems helpless to do anything about it.
Here's the thing: The United Kingdom has a rather major built-in advantage, where immigration is concerned. It's an island - or, rather, a group of islands. That gives them one big leg-up on enforcing their borders, as travelers have to arrive by air or ship, unless they are Olympic-level swimmers. So, this begs the question: Britain has demonstrated an inability to track immigrants, legal and illegal, or even to know how many there are. Is this incompetence or deliberate malfeasance?
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Mr. Simmons concludes:
This is not just about missing migrants – it’s about a state that cannot reliably measure, monitor or manage one of the most basic facts it should know: who is in the country, and in what numbers. Without that, immigration policy is guesswork, economic planning is fiction, and public trust collapses. This isn’t just carelessness, it’s an acceptance that all too often Britain is flying blind.
It almost happened here. It would have happened here. It was happening here. This is where the Biden administration was taking the United States. This is where a Harris administration would have made matters much worse. It's still a matter of concern. The Trump administration has been cleaning up after the Biden/Obama immigration debacles, but there's too much work to do here; it's the work of decades, not just one four-year presidential term. There are still millions of people in the United States illegally, and we still have little or no idea where a lot of them are or what they are up to. But we're moving in the right direction, and if you want to see how bad things could have gotten, just look across the Atlantic at our cousins. Look at the UK, look at Europe, because that's where the American left wants to take us.
