The so-called border bill touted by President Biden and a collection of “bi-partisan” Republicans is a healthy reminder of the pigheadedness and cunning of the political interests that rule the United States. No matter how unpopular their desire for endless mass immigration is among the voting public, they persist.

Like all previous bipartisan efforts to fix the border, the good of the country once again is forced to take a backseat to the unwritten but apparently morally binding obligation for America to be the go-to safe haven for millions of the world’s asylum seekers. From the point of view of these noble seekers, the border bill is a marvelous success: it throws billions of dollars at U.S. federal agencies to make the journey of illegal immigrants into the country faster, smoother, and more humane.

The bill is typical of the bogus solutions offered up by open-border Democrats and weak Republican collaborationists in that it serves only to expand and reinforce an utterly absurd bureaucratic monster. The U.S. immigration system permits illegal migrants to enter the country and avoid deportation indefinitely, all through a legal process that clogs the system with a flood of specious asylum claims. There are now more cases in the immigration courts than there are people in the city of Chicago.

While Biden’s willful abdication of border enforcement makes it clear he has no sincere interest in fixing anything, he is not wrong when he says that the system has been broken for decades. The asylum laws our country adopted after World War II are a poor fit for these times. Today’s situation is one where massive waves of economic migrants from the Third World—most completely indifferent to the fate of a host country their children are taught to despise—are continuously seeking entry into the country by hook or by crook. President Trump learned the hard way that the system makes it virtually impossible for the executive branch to assert the sovereign interests of the country. It was not until the unexpected arrival of COVID that he was finally able to seal the border by using  public health as a pretext.

The solution is to gut the absurd legal fiction of a “right to asylum,” but this would require us to violate the imaginary Constitution in the hearts of Emma Lazarus fans, if not the one on display at the National Archives in Washington. The former declares that America is a “nation of immigrants,”an article of faith before which every knee is now forced to bend. This strange worship of foreigners has been foisted on this country in ways that are unnatural and utterly disabling. It is simply impossible to secure the border so long as the issue is framed as a “compromise” with an endless throng and its desire to violate our border and our laws with impunity.

There is no need to complicate matters with more administrative limbo. The endless babble in Washington avoids the core problem, which is that the migrants do not fear the United States.

Consider the “asylum seekers” who attacked New York City police outside a migrant shelter last week and then flipped off the cameras after their arraignment. The arrogance of these thugs has caused outrage. But why should they respect a country that is too weak to protect its own borders?

Most Americans are liable to think of the criminals in New York as “bad apples,” rather than part of a bigger problem. That is just the issue. The supposedly benign majority of “asylum seekers” are taking advantage, and instead of swift deportations, they are rewarded with hosannas to their romantic desire for a “better life,” which they realize by violating our laws and making life more chaotic and expensive for Americans. In short, they are making America more like the Third World from which they escaped.

Trump had it right when he said, “some of them, I’m sure, are good people.” But “some” is not “all.” The goodwill of America has been exploited by migrants and their clever patrons who use the misfortune of a few drowned border crossers as moral blackmail to lower the country’s defenses. America is too busy exonerating itself of “cruelty” to assert the interests of the nation by keeping out the hordes of people who stream through mostly unharmed. Sooner or later, they’re marching into polling places and Social Security offices, demanding “rights.” Sooner or later they will get them, if they aren’t stopped.

The way out of this political fever dream will seem draconian to some, but the interests in favor of an open border will not be overcome with pleading, appeals to justice, or, least of all, grandstanding about hypocrisy (they know that they’re hypocrites and they don’t care!). America is up against a political regime and an ideology that has a zero-sum commitment to replacing and reconstituting the country as it was understood until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The GOP’s badly abused white base is all that is standing against the complete takeover of the country by this hostile regime. The regime is powerful and motivated, and it has at its disposal millions, if not billions of shock troops—those people are pleased to romanticize as the “huddled masses” Emma Lazarus immortalized in her poem now taken as gospel by foolish Americans.

There’s no substitute for action. Force answers only to force. The migrant crisis is not a policy failure—it is a willful attack. It’s time we started treating it like one.