By John J. Duncan Jr.
During each of my 30 years in Congress, I had the privilege of attending the annual State of the Union address. On January 24, 1995, I heard President Bill Clinton say the following:
“We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”
He also said that “All Americans…are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”
He received a standing ovation from almost every member of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, at the end of this one minute and 24 second part of his speech. You can easily see this online today. Over the last 32 years, the number of illegal immigrants has exploded.
All records were broken during the Biden administration as he and his top officials encouraged it because the Democratic Party has become heavily dependent on foreign-born voters.
President Trump was elected with a very large number of his votes coming from fed-up former Democrats who wanted him to stop the flood of illegal immigrants coming here and the loss of so many good jobs to other countries.
I became one of Trump’s earliest endorsers primarily because of the anti-war, America First views he had expressed. But when he called the next morning to thank me, I told him we needed to be tougher on trade and immigration. When I handed the phone to my late wife, he told her, “Your husband sounds just like me.”
Now, not only has the flood of people coming here illegally been almost stopped, but the Department of Homeland Security reported that 622,000 were formally deported in 2025 and that another 1.9 million self-deported due to stronger enforcement of our laws, including laws against illegal hiring.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has been targeting felons, and many thousands who have been deported had committed very serious crimes. Of course, all of the adults had violated our immigration laws by coming here illegally in the first place.
Most in the national media have not been reporting about the thousands of murderers, rapists and child sex offenders who have been removed. Instead, because of their hatred for President Trump, they have leaped onto the minuscule number of mistakes made by ICE officers, especially those that have tearjerker elements.
It is very unfortunate that two people have been killed by ICE officers, and detailed investigations are ongoing. If the officers shot without just cause, I am sure that they will be severely disciplined, and lawsuits are probably already in the works.
I am glad that our immigration laws are finally being enforced, and I commend the officers who are trying to do this work. Their jobs have been made much more difficult by very hateful leftist organizations.
Rep. Tom Emmer, who is from Minnesota and is one of the Republican leaders in the U.S. House, said most of the people he represents support law enforcement and that many of the protests have been led by paid left-wing outside agitators.
The American people have always been the most generous and sympathetic people in the world. No other country has even come close to doing as much for people from other countries as we have.
As I mentioned in last week’s column, every country has natural resources and/or natural beauty – and usually both – that could make any country wealthy if it allowed capitalism, private ownership of property and enforced law and order.
However, the economy in most countries has been wrecked by socialism so that now probably five billion people around the world live in what we would consider to be bitter poverty. Most would think they had died and gone to heaven if they could come here to live.
But our entire infrastructure — our schools, roads, jails, sewers, hospitals, housing, police and fire protection, etc., — just could not handle the very rapid influx of hundreds of millions of people who would come here if we simply opened our borders.
This country, as we know it today, would end. We already have too many people here whose love is for their home country. Britain has not been enforcing its immigration laws, and Fox News reported a few days ago that 40.6% of that country is now foreign-born and the number one name for boys born last year was Mohammed.
It has been said that if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. We need to have a legal, orderly, and limited system of immigration, and it must be enforced.
