"America was built by immigrants.”
“They’re just our neighbors.”
These slogans are political shields. They turn legitimate questions about immigration policy into accusations of racism and cruelty, while the officials responsible for the consequences escape accountability. They ask Americans to judge policies by their stated intentions, not by their results.
America’s immigrant heritage is not a license to abandon the rule of law. Honoring lawful, orderly immigration does not require accepting disorderly, unlawful entry. Compassion does not mean suspending judgment, and a slogan is no substitute for sound policy.
My parents understood that. They came to America believing in its promise of law, order, fairness, and opportunity. They did not presume their hardships entitled them to special privileges or permission to bypass the rules. They waited their turn, asked permission, and entered through the front door. They came prepared to work and build a life, not expecting government benefits.
Why should their respect for the law count for less than a politician’s demand that we overlook its violation?
Since when does compassion overrule the law? The law applies to everyone, not just those whose circumstances make them politically convenient to defend. Yet this selective compassion often follows a familiar formula: identify a group labeled vulnerable or oppressed, cast it as the victim, and portray enforcing the law as an act of cruelty. Compassion then becomes political currency. It earns politicians moral approval, allows them to cast themselves as the good guys, and gives them cover to override the law while claiming the moral high ground. The deeper the inversion, the more easily the consequences are dismissed. The law is for everyone. This brand of political compassion is reserved for the select. That is not moral clarity. It is moral inversion.
The question is not simply whether immigration policy is compassionate. It is whether policymakers are behaving rationally when they create incentives for unlawful entry, fail to account for foreseeable risks, and then dismiss the consequences as the price of being humane.
The contrast between the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas administration and the Trump administration is not simply a difference in rhetoric. It reflects differences in policy direction, enforcement priorities, and consequences. The Biden-Harris-Mayorkas administration pursued policies that critics warned would undermine border control and strain communities. The consequences included border disorder, dangerous journeys for migrants, opportunities for criminal smuggling networks, and risks borne by American communities. Those outcomes deserve the same relentless scrutiny now directed at Trump.
Instead, we see a glaring double standard. Trump’s enforcement tactics dominate headlines and political outrage, while the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas policies, tactics, and failures that helped create the conditions confronting his administration receive far less sustained examination. The debate too often begins with how Trump is enforcing the law, not with the decisions and failures that made restoring enforcement such a consequential challenge.
That is dishonesty by omission. You cannot strip away the history, ignore the consequences of the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas policies, and then portray Trump’s response as though it emerged in a vacuum. If Trump’s tactics deserve scrutiny, so do Biden-Harris-Mayorkas tactics. If the human consequences of enforcement matter, so do the human consequences of policies that weaken deterrence, enable exploitation, and fail to protect communities. The standard cannot change depending on which administration is responsible.
The human cost must be part of that accounting. Migrants exposed to exploitation and dangerous journeys matter. So do American families whose lives are shattered by preventable crimes. So do victims who are too often reduced to footnotes in a debate dominated by political slogans. Compassion that recognizes one group’s suffering while overlooking another’s is not a complete moral accounting.
And what of the claim that these individuals are “just our neighbors”? A comforting label tells us nothing about a person’s background, character, conduct, or willingness to respect the law. Knowingly violating immigration law or using fraudulent documents does not establish that someone will commit a violent crime. But it does demonstrate a willingness to disregard legal requirements. That matters when government is making decisions about entry, vetting, and public safety. Unknown backgrounds call for responsible scrutiny, not blind trust.
My daughter, Katie, was 20 when she was killed in Sanctuary Urbana, Illinois. She was a passenger in a car struck from behind at nearly 80 miles per hour by an intoxicated illegal alien. Katie and another young woman died, and three others were seriously injured. The driver had previously been deported, reentered the country, and used aliases and false documents. According to court records, he spoke only Mayan K’iche’ and could not read or write English or Spanish. He also had HIV, which was not identified until after his incarceration. These facts raise urgent questions about how he entered and remained in the country, how he obtained an Illinois driver’s license, and whether meaningful safeguards and health screening existed under the policies in place. These are not abstract policy questions. They are questions with consequences measured in human lives.
Katie’s story, and the stories of other victims and their families, must matter when we evaluate the consequences of government policy. The human cost of failed safeguards is not an abstraction. It is a family’s permanent loss, a survivor’s lifelong trauma, and a future that will never be restored.
In more than 35 years in Finance and Accounting, I learned that good intentions do not excuse bad results. Organizations establish objectives, measure performance, investigate failures, and change course when the evidence demands it. Government should be held to the same basic standard. “That’s just how government works” is not an acceptable answer when the stakes include public safety and human lives.
The ledger is badly unbalanced when officials celebrate their intentions but refuse to account for the consequences. They demand compassion for those affected by their policies while too often showing little urgency toward the victims who bear the costs. They call for understanding, but resist scrutiny. They invoke history, but ignore the rules that made lawful immigration possible.
America was built by immigrants. That history deserves respect, not exploitation. Our country can welcome lawful immigration while enforcing its laws. It can show compassion without surrendering judgment. And it can recognize that restoring order is not an attack on America’s values. It is part of protecting them.
No administration should be judged without examining the consequences of its policies, tactics, and decisions.
Katie cannot be brought back. But we can refuse to let slogans silence the questions her death demands. And we can refuse to let the politicians whose policies failed escape accountability for the consequences.