Hundreds of millions of foreign citizens, lawfully or not, cross the United States-Canada
and the United States-Mexico borders each year. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and
the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received $26 billion in Federal funding
in 2019, but all the while, year after year, our system remains in utter disarray.
Nonetheless, the Federal government feels that it is qualified enough to assist and aide
developing countries overseas with their border systems. In fact, $250 million of your
taxpayer dollars are going to building borders in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and
Oman.
This spending dates back to the 2016 Defense Department authorization, when Congress
determined that helping developing countries build economic, social, and political
institutions was a national security priority. One border improvement project in Jordan,
for example, includes “integrated border security surveillance, detection and interdiction
system along Jordan’s land borders.”
So, in the December 2020 blow-out appropriations bill, Congress spent $250 million on
“enhanced border security” in the Middle East and North Africa.Meanwhile, the United
States immigration system still has much work to be done. While we were busy funding
other countries’ immigration systems, in December 2020, the United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS) received a “flood” of new DACA applications, ultimately
resulting in a considerable backlog of over 81,000 applications, according to the agency.
While Americans may be divided on how to solve the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, we
should all agree that using our taxpayer money to fix someone else’s border is not the best
idea.