President Trump’s success at bringing calm to the southern border at the beginning of his second administration came, surprisingly, without much controversy, perhaps because the crisis was undeniable. With the Biden-initiated crisis over, however, globalists on both the left and the right have seized the opportunity to push back on Trump’s larger and more fundamental agenda of mass deportation.

They now insist that although ending the border chaos may have been a good thing, further efforts to enforce our immigration laws are cruel and unnecessary. We should stop harming the supposedly hard-working people who are just seeking the American dream and providing our economy with much-needed cheap, menial labor. Rather than “indiscriminately” rounding up those who have merely come here illegally, Trump should focus on going after the absolute worst of foreign criminals.

This is a trap.

If we treat immigration enforcement strictly as a criminal matter, then we cede our rights as a sovereign nation by setting gratuitous conditions on when and under what circumstances we shall enforce our laws. Most individual immigrants are not the worst their home nations have to offer, but as a collective they are changing our country for the worse—and that is what counts.

As far as America is concerned, for the foreseeable future, there is no such thing as a good immigrant.

Consider the case of Harjinder Singh, the Indian truck driver who killed three people with a wildly illegal U-turn in Florida this month. Singh, as far as we know, had no criminal history prior to this incident. But, despite being licensed to operate an 18-wheeler, he cannot speak English or read traffic signs. Yet he still passes the low bar for qualifying as “American” in the eyes of immigration advocates because he was employed and therefore contributing to the GDP. If we follow their advice, more people like Singh will continue to pour across our borders, placing lives in danger, all for the sake of a little “economic growth.”

People like Singh should be the face of illegal immigration—not a member of MS-13. The average Third World immigrant is not a criminal sociopath, as you might guess from viewing the White House’s rogue’s gallery of thugs with menacing tattoos, but the truth is bad enough. A recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at a meat packing facility in Omaha, Nebraska found 70 illegal workers with stolen identities. One victim of such identity theft in California “has been working for nearly 15 years to regain their identity and fix the financial damage done by an illegal alien who was working at Glenn Valley Foods,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Most Americans will never encounter an MS-13 gang member. But they are much more likely to have their identities stolen or to get rear-ended by a car full of illegals without insurance.

Americans suffered these and many other injuries to their quality of life as corporate elites have set the nation’s immigration policy according to their own interests. They are desperate to turn the public against Trump’s mass deportations because, for once, Americans are receiving priority.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal offers a case in point. The piece depicts ICE (that is, a legitimate part of our lawful government) as a hostile presence in Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The Journal notes that many of the people being rounded up in Trump’s D.C. crackdown are immigrants. This is supposed to shock and offend the reader:

In practice, the most visible impact of Trump’s federal takeover has been the immigration-enforcement effort in places including Mount Pleasant. Authorities have pulled delivery drivers off mopeds, arrested construction workers and demanded proof of legal status from vendors selling mangos and watermelons. Vehicle checkpoints have sprung up nightly, and ICE vans have parked outside daycare centers and churches that tend to employ immigrants.

The scene painted, of a peaceful community being thrown into chaos by an outside force, is all too ironic. Over the past few years especially, immigrants on illegal mopeds have become an unpleasant fixture in cities like Washington, D.C. and New York. The longtime residents of these places will likely tell you in confidence that they agree with what Trump is doing.

We have plenty of data, from the lived experience of millions of people across the Western world, to reject mass Third World immigration regardless of the supposedly noble intentions of those seeking to come here. We know that the average Third Worlder is, at best, careless about the cultural standards and customs of the West and has little respect for the laws of his adopted country, which he sees as a mere ATM machine. Whether he is causing a mass-pileup on the highway, or stealing Social Security numbers to work illegally, or simply filling the air with rude noise, he is a burden that we can ill-afford.

Today, the middle-class is in free-fall and young Americans struggle to find jobs that can help launch them on the path to home ownership and family formation. Meanwhile, our neighborhoods fill up with immigrants who piling multiple generations under one roof to cover a single mortgage—changing the character of those neighborhoods and the quality of life within them. Generation Z Americans cannot even begin their careers due to low-cost immigrant competition, from H-1B Indians in white-collar jobs and Mexicans in the blue-collar trades. Our foreign-born population is still close to an all-time high; even with all the Trump administration has done to push back, it is only just beginning to drop for the first time in 50 years.

Trump’s critics want to neutralize the impact of this historic opportunity to advance a serious immigration agenda, as they realize the Overton Window has moved too far for them to remain in open opposition to it. So they seek to water that agenda down to the least controversial, and least effective, version possible. No sane person wants more crime, so they seem to go along with deporting criminal aliens. But the idea that unfettered immigration is only bad because of the crime that comes with it ignores the fact that immigration affects everything else, too. From the economy to our public infrastructure; from the character and feel of our neighborhoods to the integrity of our union—all of these things are altered in negative ways by levels of immigration we cannot easily absorb.

There are now entire cities where federal law enforcement cannot perform its legitimate functions because residents who regard the United States as an illegitimate occupier of “their” land obstruct them. From a political standpoint, this is an explosive situation that can only be defused by policies that put what’s good for the nation first, ahead of what’s good for Wall Street.

When a country is being invaded by millions of outsiders, it is absurd to ask that country to draw fine moral distinctions between “good” and “bad” invaders. Given enough time, the “good” ones who do not present as an obvious violent threat will still cause harm, because their interests will necessarily conflict with the existing population. It is beyond unwise for us to wait around to see what happens, while their numbers steadily increase.