Perhaps the most pointed and heated argument of the early part of Donald Trump’s political career had to do with the southern border, as the GOP firebrand made it very clear that his presidency would be focused on “building the wall”.
The left somehow declared this “racist”, ignoring the fact that securing the southern border would funnel would-be Americans through the safer, legal naturalization process at approved points of entry. This would also have the complementary effect of taking a rather sizable dent out of illegal traffickers of human beings, guns, and drugs.
In fact, the difference between Trump’s border policies and those of current US President Joe Biden has now been quantified, at least in terms of how the Mexican cartels are doing…and the numbers are not good for Sleepy Joe.
The cartels and coyotes are earning $13 billion a year by delivering economic migrants to U.S. workplaces via President Joe Biden’s welcoming border agencies, the New York Times reported Monday.
This is an enormous difference from just a few years ago.
The current revenue is 26 times larger than the $500 million the cartels earned under President Donald Trump’s low-migration policies, according to the July 25 report.
The key news was buried in the fourteenth paragraph, long after the lede’s focus on a 2014 smuggling crime:
For years, independent coyotes paid cartels a tax to move migrants through territory they controlled along the border, and the criminal syndicates stuck to their traditional line of business, drug smuggling, which was far more profitable. That began to change around 2019, Patrick Lechleitner, the acting deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Congress last year. The sheer number of people seeking to cross made migrant smuggling an irresistible moneymaker for some cartels, he said.
The enterprises have teams specializing in logistics, transportation, surveillance, stash houses and accounting — all supporting an industry whose revenues have soared to an estimated $13 billion today from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations, the federal agency that investigates such cases.
Sadly, it’s not all that surprising, given that VP Kamala Harris took 90 days to even visit the border after being appointed “border czar” by Joe Biden.
If the Biden administration aren’t going to make border security a priority, we can only expect the influence of Mexican cartels to grow here in the United States.
