The United States has always been a country of immigrants. But according to data released earlier this month by the Census Bureau, never before has the foreign-born population been higher than it is now, never before has the foreign-born population been growing as fast as it is now, and never before has the percentage of foreign-born population lacking permanent legal status been as high as it is today.

What the numbers show, what the citizens of Springfield and Aurora are experiencing, are the real costs of an historically unprecedented flood of migrants into the country, an influx aided and abetted at every turn by the Biden-Harris administration.

From day one, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have purposefully dismantled immigration laws, sometimes simply by choosing not to enforce certain mandates, such as requiring all illegal border crossers to be detained or returned to another country, and by flagrantly abusing statutes to create dubious new pathways for otherwise illegal immigrants to enter and stay in the country.

Take Springfield, a town of 60,000, where estimates from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Springfield Public Schools suggest 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians have recently been deposited without the existing community’s approval or consent. News media love to note that most of the migrants are in the country “legally,” but that does not mean they entered legally.

Remember the Haitian migrants massed under the Del Rio bridge in Texas? Almost all of them were released into the country on parole after illegally crossing the southern border. Many have since been granted Temporary Protected Status by Biden, giving them a legal status, but that does not mean they arrived legally. TPS was designed to offer deportation protection for migrants who entered the country illegally. 

Many of the Haitians in Springfield have also no doubt entered the country through Biden’s Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans parole program. In a clear abuse of a parole power meant for narrow emergencies, Biden has used this program to import more than 500,000 migrants from the named countries on a supposedly temporary basis. 

Despite clear evidence that the program is rife with fraud and abuse, Biden and Harris continue to use it to bring in more migrants to communities like Springfield and Aurora every day.

The scope of Biden-Harris efforts to change the population of the country can be seen in the Census Bureau’s latest Annual Social and Economic Supplements released this month. As of March 2024, there are 51.26 million foreign-born people in the country. At 15.5% of the total population, that is the highest percentage of foreign-born people in the U.S. ever. More importantly, the year-over-year increase between March 2023 and March 2024 was 2.48 million people. Not only is that a record high, but it also has a larger population than 13 states.

According to separate data from the Congressional Budget Office, the overwhelming majority of those entering the country under the Biden-Harris administration do not have permanent legal status, do not speak English, and do not have a high school education. 

The migrants are straining the resources and patience of Springfield, Aurora, and other communities across the country. Hospitals are overwhelmed with non-English speakers with no health insurance, schools are overwhelmed with non-English speakers who are placed in class next to natural-born citizens, and police departments are overwhelmed with drivers who were not taught to obey U.S. traffic laws.

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Leaving aside increased gang activity and lower wages for American workers, the people of Springfield and Aurora did not vote for this. Nor did most Americans, at least knowingly. Immigration was simply not an issue many voters cared about in 2020. But they care now. And they want far, far less immigration than what the Biden-Harris administration have delivered. 

Harris has done a good job covering up her leftist open-border policies. If she does win this fall, voters should expect much more pain like what is occurring in Springfield and Aurora and in many more communities.