Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to Syrian migrants a decade ago. And the central European country has been paying the price since. Last month, a deadly knife attack in Solingen killed three people. The perpetrator was a Syrian asylum-seeker who claimed to be inspired by the Islamic State group. In June, a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four other people wounded.
As a result, the German government is beefing up its border control at all nine of its border crossings next week to crack down on Islamic terrorists.
Ira Mehlman is the media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
“If you have an open border, you're just inviting anybody to come in, and our adversaries understand what the vulnerabilities of Western nations are and that once people are in the country, they get all kinds of rights,” Mehlman says.
Many immigrants are not unfortunate souls with good intentions seeking a better life.
Our adversaries “will exploit any weakness that we give them. The world is becoming increasingly dangerous, and one of the best ways to prevent something from happening is preventing them from getting here in the first place,” Mehlman says.
A lot has changed since most recent data
The most recent numbers from the Pew Research Center estimate the illegal immigrant population at 11 million.
But those numbers are from 2022, and a lot has changed.
“Encounters with migrants at U.S. borders reached record levels throughout 2022-2023, and the number of applicants waiting for decisions on asylum claims increased by about 1 million by the end of 2023,” Pew reported.
By the numbers, illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
But the numbers often have different factors in play.
The DOJ report studied data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012-2018.
In 2018 then-U.S. Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions cited a report based on conviction data from the Crime Prevention Research Center that showed the crime rate of illegal immigrants in Arizona to be twice that of other residents.
The report showed that illegals between the ages of 15 and 35 made up less than 3% of the state’s population but made up nearly 8% of its prison population.
Mehlman says Biden-Harris should follow Germany's lead.
“They’ve had ample time to weigh the dangers and to make those changes. Every country that has opened its borders is going to have to reckon with the consequences of those decisions."
