Our immigration system needs to be updated and more strict

November 3, 2026

There is an old saying among the pro-immigration faction that says something like, “Immigrants built this country.” That statement is true, to a point. 

In the earliest of days before the nation was formed, for some time essentially everyone was an immigrant, except for the Native Americans, or the Indigenous peoples of North America (the Indian tribes). 

And, as time passed and things evolved, the nation formed. By then there were many more people who were born here. And, at some point, the number of those born here outnumbered the immigrants, making a country of citizens with immigrants joining them. 

Which is not to say that immigrants have not had very positive influences on the United States of America. But their influence ebbed with each new generation of citizens who were born here as their percentage of the productive population waned.

As a side note, former President Barack Obama has been heavily criticized for having said that "Muslims built the very fabric of our nation." But while many would argue about whether Muslims have helped at all, that quote is an exaggeration of his comment. What he actually said was that Muslims had contributed to building the fabric of the nation. How true that is we don’t really know.

The United States still admits immigrants from other countries. And they are in the news. Especially the illegal ones, which are primarily the millions allowed into the country by the Biden administration. These people are supported and defended by many Americans on the political left, while the political right wants those who have broken our immigration laws and other laws to be deported to their home country.

Some of those people have come here illegally from countries that are poverty stricken and dangerous, and have been given much financial support by the Biden administration. And more than a few of them have killed Americans, robbed or assaulted them, sold drugs to them, and so on.

Even if these people had come here legally, following our immigration procedure, their philosophy in many, many cases is not that of someone who would assimilate into the American way of living, working and thinking. And some of them criticize our country. 

Some of the immigrants, legal and illegal, encourage us to change things to make them much like the home country they abandoned. If they like those ways so much, why didn’t they just stay there?

And some of them are determined to wreck the country, and are working toward that goal. 

A sensible immigration procedure might look like this: The number of immigrants who can enter the country should be limited each year. Those that are granted immigrant status should be chosen from those applying for entry. 

They should desire and be able to assimilate into the culture of the country. They should speak English, and be able to earn a living, and contribute something positive to the country. They must become not just a citizen, but an American. Not an American in name only, but an American in their beliefs and love of the country. 

After a period of time, they should be judged on the level of assimilation they have achieved, and if that is at a satisfactory level, they will be granted citizenship. If they are admitted and fail to assimilate, they should be sent home.

Immigrants who come to America this way will not be a financial drain on the country, as the millions of illegal aliens who were allowed in by the Biden Administration have been.

Some Americans believe that only those born and raised in the USA should be able to hold public offices that control how we live and what we do, such as the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Having grown up here, they likely have a better understanding of how the country is designed than someone from Cuba, Venezuela, China, Iran, etc. Assuming that their education was delivered by honest teachers, not indoctrinators.

Currently, there several members of Congress that were not born and raised here. And by looking at their performance in that role, that is plainly obvious.

The most well-known of those recently is Somalian-born Ilhan Omar, the U.S. Representative for Minnesota's 5th Congressional District since 2019. Her family came to America in 1995.

Omar’s situation calls attention to likely problems with not following the existing immigration procedure, or immigrants providing false information to authorities.

There are serious questions about her father being tied to radical Muslim organizations; about her real name and her exact birth year, relative to whether she was an eligible age to become a naturalized citizen; her comments about loving Somalia and wanting to return there; about one of her marriages being with her brother, who now claims to be gay among other items.

If the questions about her father’s connections and about her being an improperly naturalized citizen are true, it paints a bright red warning about the immigration process, or about how it has been mis-handled.

Our country is not starved for living breathing residents. We have lots of them. Therefore, anyone granted citizenship should be someone who can and will contribute positively to the country.

Illegal border crossings are down, but immigration issues remain

 

Immigration is the movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives, or where they do not possess citizenship, in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

Immigrating to the US is not a right; it is a privilege.

Most folks do not leave their home open to anyone with the desire to enter and live in them. They want to be sure that those they allow into their home do not want to harm them, or damage or steal their belongings.

Likewise, we must not leave the national borders open so that just anyone can come in. We have to make a determined effort to be sure that those who are allowed to legally enter America share our values, or agree to adopt them. They need to get a job and support themselves and their families, and to become true Americans.

The sloppy enforcement of our immigration laws and philosophy in recent years has produced a body of illegal aliens totaling around 11 million, according to some reports. The term “undocumented immigrants” is not appropriate for these people: Immigrants enter the country legally; these people entered the country illegally, or came in legally and over-stayed their visas.

As a result, the good people who come here for the best reasons, but are not here legally, have been overshadowed by the wicked deeds the many bad ones have committed. It’s time for that to change.

Seeing this problem clearly, unlike the previous resident of the White House, President Donald Trump campaigned on tougher enforcement of our borders and other measures to reduce or eliminate illegal entry into the U.S.

Since Trump was sworn in, good things have already started happening relative to illegal border crossings.

As reported in the Washington Examiner, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Thomas D. Homan, said that since Trump entered office, “illegal border crossings have crashed by almost 70 percent, ‘an historic low,’ arrests inside the country have jumped 40 percent and that demands for illegal criminals in local jails has skyrocketed 80 percent.”

"You can like President Trump, not like him, like his policies, not like his policies, but one thing no one can argue with is the effect they've had," Homan said. He is a 30-year immigration agency veteran, and the former chief of ICE enforcement.

Echoing that sentiment, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said on C-SPAN that the reduction in the number of illegal border crossers between the U.S. and Mexico is “nothing short of miraculous,” putting the reduction at 53 percent of the same period last year, all before construction of Trump’s vaunted border wall has even begun.

Judd told Fox News, “There’s a vibe, there’s an energy in the Border Patrol that’s never been there before in 20 years that I’ve been in the patrol.”

Complicating the illegal alien problem is the movement by more than 300 cities and counties to protect illegals in “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Homan said that ICE will hire 10,000 new agents and crack down on these sanctuaries. “In the America I grew up in, cities didn’t shield people who violated the law,” he noted.

While denying that ICE is being pressured to meet quotas, Homan said that ICE will focus on targeting fugitives, criminals, threats to national security, and illegals who had previously been deported and came back into the United States.

In a move that runs counter to Trump’s “America First” initiative and efforts to provide jobs for Americans, the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month increased by 15,000 the number of H-2B visas for low-wage, seasonal workers for the remainder of this fiscal year on the basis that many businesses will not be able to find enough American workers this summer.

Defenders of such policies contend that Americans will not work these jobs because they are unpleasant or because they don’t pay enough; therefore foreign workers are the best solution. However, the Center for Immigration Studies found that the average hourly pay for an H-2B visa holder last year was $12.31, roughly 70 percent above the federal minimum wage.

You would think a lot of minimum wage American workers would take that increase in pay, as well as a lot of unemployed Americans who could get back into the labor force, even if temporarily. A Maine resort town, faced with a shortage of H-2B workers, solved their problem by hiring … Americans!

Our immigration problem would not have grown to its current crisis level had past administrations strictly enforced national immigration laws. As a result, millions of people are here illegally. The bad ones are now targets of government, but what do we do with those who are generally good people, except for their method of coming to America?

Some truly just want a better life and are living a generally good, clean life. What is the best way to deal with these “Dreamers?” There is a great sentiment for providing a strict and complex path to citizenship, and deporting millions of them is virtually impossible.

Perhaps a suitable compromise can be found.

Trigger warning: Immigration problems are being discussed here

Immigration ought to be one of a nation’s primary concerns, and after the last eight years of lax enforcement of immigration law and the horrible consequences to some individual Americans at the hands of some illegal aliens, President-Elect Donald Trump faces the screaming need to make changes to the immigration process once he is sworn in, and he has stated the desire to do so.

President Barack Obama touts his record on deportations, which some say is nearly 3,000,000 illegal aliens. That certainly is a good thing, but like Paul Harvey famously provided his listeners for so many years, here’s the rest of the story.

The Obama administration did not go around the country rounding up and deporting illegal aliens, some of whom are criminals with varying degrees of violent behavior, including murder. Instead, the Border Patrol caught these nearly three million illegals near the Mexican border as they were entering the country, and turned them around to head back south. Better than nothing, certainly, but far less laudable than that for which Obama takes credit.

In the meantime, the many millions of illegals that have found their way into the country remain, many of them in self-proclaimed “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where local officials brag that they will protect the illegals – criminals and non-criminals alike – from being discovered and deported, or otherwise dealt with as federal law provides.

Like his failure to identify and correctly label radical Muslims who commit terrorism in America and elsewhere, Obama’s failure to properly address illegal immigration will forever be near the top of his lengthy failure list.

It is said, and in proper context it is true, that America is a nation of immigrants. In the earliest days everyone who came to the colonies was an immigrant, and after the colonies gained independence and formed the new nation many other immigrants came to America over the decades and did their part to build and strengthen the nation. But the idea that America still needs immigrants to make it successful and desirable is ridiculous.

American culture was established long ago, so we no longer have a burning need for immigrants for that purpose, or for any purpose. These days, with the foolish suspension of border and immigration control, largely during the term of Barack Obama, the millions of illegal aliens in the country today often weaken our country and pose threats to Americans.

Our country belongs to Americans, those of us whose families have been here for more than a few years, families that have been here for generations. Our Founders created a nation with a unique set of principles from which deep traditions were formed that have survived more than two centuries since the United States came into existence.

We have our ways of doing things – our culture – and a body of laws that evolved from that culture. Americans decide how things are done here, and those who want to come here from places near and far, and places often much different, and many far worse than America, are expected to adapt to our way of doing things.

What sense does it make to do what is required to get to America legally from countries hundreds or thousands of miles away, become a US citizen, and then maintain an allegiance to the land you wanted to get away from instead having an allegiance to America? Or to try to institute the culture of the home you left to come here? If you don’t want to adapt to our way of life – to become an American – why did you come here?

Our policy ought to be: If you want to come here, and you agree to embrace our culture and to assimilate into the American way of believing, living and behaving, and you are a good and honest person with something positive to contribute to America, you will be considered acceptable to apply for citizenship.

What we don’t need, don’t want, and must not abide is people coming here illegally, even if they do so because they truly want a better life in the US. And we also can’t allow those to immigrate here whose national allegiance lies with a country other than the United States. Be an American; accept the country as it is, not as you want it to be. Do not be, for example, a Nicaraguan that lives in America.

Every American needs to understand that there is no divine right held by citizens of other countries to come to America, either as
visitors, immigrants, or as refugees. And further understand that America has no obligation to accept people who want to come here. We can accept them, or not, as we choose.

However, America does have the right, and the obligation, to control who it allows into the country, to be sure they are fit to be here, and have something beneficial to offer us.

America became the great and wonderful country that it is through decades of honoring and sustaining its founding principles, and not by kowtowing to the demands of every dissatisfied minority group that believes its desires are more important than our heritage.