Op-ed: They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress tonight won’t technically be a State of the Union message, but it will be close enough. Every president since Reagan has delivered such a speech at the beginning of his term, laying out plans for the next four years.

Trump no doubt will have plenty of things to say about his future agenda. But unlike his predecessors, he’ll already be able to point to accomplishments. Chief among them: ending the worst migration crisis in American—or perhaps world—history in just a few weeks.

This wasn’t supposed to be possible under existing law. In urging Congress to approve the Senate’s “bipartisan border bill” last year, President Biden said:

It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.

Biden and his allies (including, curiously, bill co-sponsor Senator James Lankford, R-OK) claimed the border couldn’t be controlled without the authorities the bill would bestow. That refrain was repeated exhaustively by the media. The New York Times asked in 2023, “Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works.” The Brookings Institution last year gave “Four reasons the immigration crisis isn’t going away”. And the Cato Institute pronounced that “Biden Can’t Stop Immigration. Time to Embrace It.” It was the lack of these powers that caused the prior three years of unprecedented illegal immigration, so the narrative went.

The 2024 bill failed; it was a confidence trick all along, crafted by Biden’s own Department of Homeland Security to codify the administration’s illegal border-busting policies. But regardless of policy, leading voices in media and policy circles asserted that mass migration was simply inevitable.

And then President Trump was inaugurated, and the impossible suddenly became possible.

. . .

[Read the whole thing at Commonplace.]