In the last couple of decades, one thing in American politics has become abundantly clear. Political parties aside, there are essentially two kinds of American politicians: Those who place the interests of America and the American people first, and those who put the interests of everyone else in the world above the United States. That last kind is found in almost every member of the political left and, let's be honest, among too many on the supposed right. That's in large part why President Trump's "Make America Great Again" message resounded in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
Elected officials should be expected to place their constituents' interests first and foremost. That's how things generally work in the rest of the world; Israeli politicians are concerned with Israel's interests, Chinese leaders are concerned with China's interests, and so on. It seems to be mostly the United States and much of Western Europe where the leftist view that here, we might call "America Last" prevails.
These are the people who are howling in outrage when President Trump shuts down the flow of "climate refugees" into the United States.
As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.
Of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry to the US, 22 are ranked within the most vulnerable quarter of nations in the world to climate impacts, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which assesses how prone jurisdictions are to the climate crisis.
This is, of course, utter horse squeeze, on several levels. Why? Well, here's why, and I'm going to tell you.
First: The United States cannot continue to absorb an unlimited, largely unchecked flow of immigration, mostly from the Third World. The late, unlamented Biden Administration allowed in millions of illegal aliens, unchecked, unverified, unvetted, and a shocking number of those were unaccompanied young men, not families; a person fleeing a climate apocalypse doesn't leave his family behind. A young man up to no good, though? But even in the case of actual ecological problems, America simply can't continue to welcome in "refugees' from every natural disaster on the planet, much less people claiming climate refugee status because of bad weather.
Second: Bad weather in the Third World is nothing new. There have always been droughts in Africa. There have always been floods in Asia. There have always been hurricanes in the Caribbean and Central America. That never has and never should mean that the United States, of all the nations on the planet, must throw open its doors to these people. Look, the United States has, historically, been first on the scene in the event of a natural disaster, like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. We sent in an aircraft carrier task group, which includes not only airlift capacity but medical facilities and a fresh-water plant. We will and should always be there to help, but our efforts should be intended to help the people in affected nations to recover and rebuild, not to seek succor in the United States.
But that's what some people expect:
“Nearly all of the most vulnerable countries are on a ban or visa pause,” said Danielle Wood, an associate professor at Notre Dame. Immigrants from Chad and Niger, the two most climate-vulnerable countries in the world according to the index, are now fully barred from the US, as are people from Sudan, Somalia and Sierra Leone, also among the 10 countries most exposed to climate impacts.
These people aren't banned from the United States because of anything to do with climate change. Sudan and Somalia in particular are barred because of the prevalence of fraudsters and outright terrorists in those unstable nations.
Read More: Coast Guard Stops 240 Illegal Immigrants on Overcrowded Vessel
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But the left continues to insist that we should bring in "climate refugees" from everywhere.
Some Democratic lawmakers have in recent years attempted to introduce a climate-related visa that would cover people fleeing extreme weather disasters. However, with the political mood swinging strongly against migrants, advocates’ hopes of reform have dwindled, even as the number of displaced has ballooned.
No. Not only no, but hell no. For one thing, the predictions of the global climate doom-cryers have been roundly debunked; the weather in these places has always been a hot, steaming pile of suck. But people have lived in these places for hundreds or thousands of years, and their societies have somehow gone on in spite of the lousy climate. For that matter, the United States hasn't always maintained a universally salubrious climate; in the 19th century, foreign ambassadors considered the United States an undesirable post in the pre-air-conditioned world because of the heat and humidity in summer, not to mention the mosquitoes.
The United States has to look to the interests of the United States first. That doesn't include what the left would surely put in place, namely throwing the doors open to every Third World "migrant" who doesn't like the weather where they are. We can not, and should not, keep importing the Third World. To his everlasting credit, President Trump gets this.
