In 2007, amid the presidential campaign, then-Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) gave a harsh speech at a town hall in Iowa where he criticized former president George W. Bush for neglecting the border and the Republican Party for selling the country to “friendly” businessmen through illegal immigration.
On that occasion, the current president stated: “No great nation can be in a position where they can’t control their borders.”
“It matters how you control your borders. Not just for immigration, but it matters for drugs, terror, and a whole range of other things,” Biden added.
According to the then-senator, the increase in the influx of migrants was driving the phenomenon of having more cheap labor in the domestic market, which directly affected many blue-collar American workers.
At that time, the situation was unacceptable for Biden, which is why he proposed a hard-line immigration policy in that speech.
“When I’m back in my days as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and straight through as the leader of the Foreign Relations Committee, I’ve been arguing for the need to put more protection at our borders, meaning that you have more border guards. This president, refusing to add the number of border guards, now said he has to send the National Guard down,” Biden denounced. “He was against adding the number of border guards. I only can suggest the reason he was is because he needed that money for his tax cuts that were unnecessary.”
“He had put a higher value on tax cuts for the wealthy than he did on protecting the border,” said the Democratic senator.
A forgotten speech?
Biden’s words, uttered 17 years ago, were rescued in a viral publication on “They are importing voters.”
Incentives matter. They are importing voters. https://t.co/DLpTz6GMmS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2024
At the time, Biden even proposed measures strikingly similar to those former President Donald Trump carried out during his term.
“So I think what you have to do is you have to have a significant increase in the security at the border, including limited elements where you actually have a fence, not a fence 3,000 miles like these folks are talking about. But you’ve got to, there are certain places people can go over and under a fence, but you can’t take 100 kilos of cocaine over and under a fence,” Biden said.
In another part of his speech, the Democrat criticized “conservative” businessmen, accusing them of wanting to promote the regularization of illegal migrants in order to hire them.
“It’s amazing how the free enterprise system and our conservative business friends talk about free enterprise and the right of competition and supply and demand. And yet there’s one whole category of people they want to be allowed in on work permits that will take away jobs of Americans right now,” the Democrat said. “But the reason why the employers want this extra influx on a temporary basis, in my view, is it drives costs down. That’s not fair to Americans.”
Finally, as if he had a crystal ball, Biden anticipated that in fifteen years, the United States would regret its lax border policy.
“15 years from now, we’re going to be saying, what are we going to do about the flow of illegals into the country of the United States of America?” Biden stated. “We have to protect our border by putting more infrastructure and investment in the border to be able to control it, not just for immigration but for drugs.”
Biden’s full speech, independently verified by Voz Media, can be found on the C-SPAN page. The event was a town hall with the Madison County Democrats at the Madison County Historical Society in Winterset, Iowa.
Biden senator vs. Biden president
Now, 17 years after that speech, Biden is the president at the forefront of one of the worst immigration crises in the history of the United States.
This situation started in 2021 when the president decided to reverse several border policies implemented by former President Trump, including the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, also known as “Stay in Mexico” or the construction of the border wall.
Under the Biden administration, border crossings have only grown for the last three years. In 2021, arrests stood at 1.7 million; in 2022, the figure exceeded 2.3 million; and in fiscal year 2023, the figure reached 2.4 million. All this data at the time represented a record since the United States began counting migratory influx in 1960.
Meanwhile, according to TRAC immigration data from Syracuse University, a staggering 3.8 million people have entered the United States through its borders since Biden took office in 2021. Nearly half of these immigrants entered the country illegally and were never caught.
