By Tom Ozimek
Elon Musk is alleging that President Joe Biden’s overarching strategy on the border since he took office is to let in as many illegal immigrants as possible and then legalize them by legislative reform so as to secure a permanent Democrat majority and rule the country as a “one-party state.”
Mr. Musk laid out the case for this claim in a Feb. 2 post on X, in which the tech entrepreneur offered a look back at President Biden’s first action after assuming office on Jan. 20, 2021, which Mr. Musk said was a “simple, yet effective” strategy to keep Democrats in power forever.
On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he proposed the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which immediately sparked uproar over provisions like pathways to citizenship for some 11 million illegal immigrants.
The measure, introduced in the House of Representatives but died with the end of the 117th Congress, was revived in a somewhat modified form in May 2023 as the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2023, which remains stuck in Committee.
Both prior and current versions of President Biden’s immigration reform bill propose pathways to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, including DREAMers and farm workers.
But as the Biden administration’s legislative efforts to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants have remained in limbo amid Republican opposition, the number of illegal border crossings under President Biden’s watch has soared to record highs.
‘Outrageous’
Republicans and others have accused the Biden administration of being intentionally lax on border security, even precisely so as to let in more illegal immigrants for political benefit.
President Biden and members of his administration have rejected this claim, accusing Republicans of playing politics with the border crisis and of cynically denying the administration the opportunity of meaningful immigration reform by legislative means.
Mr. Musk, who has become an increasingly vocal critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the illegal immigration crisis, laid out in his post on X what he says is President Biden’s nefarious strategy on the border.
“Biden’s strategy is very simple,” Mr. Musk wrote.
First, “get as many illegals in the country as possible,” and second, “legalize them to create a permanent majority—a one-party state,” he continued.
“That is why they are encouraging so much illegal immigration. Simple, yet effective,” he wrote.
Mr. Musk continued in a follow-up post by saying that the strategy he described earlier “explains why there are so few deportations, as every deportation is a lost vote.”
“As happened this week, you can literally assault police officers in broad daylight in New York, be released with no bail, give everyone the finger and *still* not be deported,” he wrote.
“Outrageous,” he charged.
‘Slow to Figure It Out’
Among the many reactions to Mr. Musk’s post was the argument that President Biden has the power to stop the flow of illegal immigration across the border, but chooses not to, and that the record numbers of unauthorized border crossings in recent times validate what many have been alleging is a long-running Democrat scheme to expand their voter base.
“I was embarrassingly slow to figure it out,” Mr. Musk replied to the post.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Musk’s remarks.
Some commenters reacting critically to Mr. Musk’s post said that the vast majority of illegal immigrants who would be given a pathway to citizenship under President Biden’s legislative proposal are people on overstayed visas, rather than those who crossed the border illegally.
Others argued that the Biden administration is deporting people than former President Donald Trump did when he was in power.
While it’s true that more people are being deported under the Biden administration, critics point out that it’s merely a reflection of the massive increase in the number of illegal immigrants entering the country in recent years.
Federal authorities deported over 142,000 illegal immigrants in 2023, nearly double from the year before, according to a recent report from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But the number deported is just a fraction of the 2 million known entries reported by Border Patrol along just the U.S. southern border in 2023.
It comes as a record-breaking number of illegal immigrant encounters was logged in December, with both nationwide encounters (371,036) and those along the U.S.-Mexico border (302,034) setting new records.
The stunning numbers come amid House Republican efforts to impeach Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his handling of the illegal immigration crisis.
Republicans have introduced two articles of impeachment against Mr. Mayorkas, accusing him of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and that he “knowingly made false statements and knowingly obstructed lawful oversight” of DHS.
In a four-page memo issued on Jan. 28, DHS responded to the impeachment articles, calling them a “distraction from other vital national security priorities and the work Congress should be doing to actually fix our broken immigration laws.”
Republicans “don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it,” the DHS memo charged.
“That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary Mayorkas,” it added.
The Biden administration has rejected allegations of mishandling border security, though the president recently admitted that the country is facing a “border crisis.”
Both President Biden and Mr. Mayorkas have variously blamed a “broken” immigration system, along with factors like crime and corruption in countries that people are fleeing from in search of a better life in the United States, and even climate change.
