Open Borders Are a Death Sentence to Western Nations
Governments have refused to respect the wishes of their citizens.
J.B. Shurk | July 13, 2026 www.americanthinker.com
As simmering conflicts between Western citizens and Western governments boil over the next few years, we must never forget how we got to this point: Elected officials and irremovable bureaucrats occupying permanent administrative roles have refused to respect the wishes of the citizens whom they ostensibly represent and serve.
From the United States to the United Kingdom, citizens have demanded that their governments secure national borders and end the steady flow of illegal aliens into their communities. From France, the Netherlands, and Germany to Australia and New Zealand, citizens have demanded that their governments arrest and remove Islamic immigrants who are guilty of rape, murder, or other violent crimes. With the exception of President Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration law and deport illegal alien criminals (despite formidable resistance from the courts, leftist NGOs, and Establishment politicians from both the Democrat and Republican Parties) in the United States, no Western official has done anything to remedy the scourge of unlawful mass invasion in a deliberate, meaningful, and effective way. Instead, Western governments hide from their citizens the true number of illegal immigrants living among them. Western governments hide from their citizens a full accounting of the crimes committed by foreign nationals who should never have been permitted entry in the first place.
Mass illegal immigration is not a new problem. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law in 1986. Defended by both political parties as a way of combating illegal immigration while providing long-term lawbreakers legal status, it effectively awarded millions of foreign nationals amnesty. Politicians convinced the American people to support this trade-off: In return for citizens’ reluctantly permitting the government to reward the unlawful behavior of foreign immigrants who had no right to reside in the United States, the government would protect citizens by cracking down on future illegal immigration and punishing businesses that hired illegal immigrant workers. The U.S. government never lived up to its side of the bargain.
Instead, U.S. officials have lied to their citizens for forty additional years. Until President Trump entered office, U.S. borders were not secured. Businesses were rarely punished for hiring illegal aliens. Unbeknownst to most American citizens, State and federal welfare programs continued to add illegal aliens to their taxpayer-funded dole rolls. School districts in both cities and small towns continued to enroll illegal alien children. Hospital emergency rooms continued to overflow with illegal alien patients seeking “free” medical care. American jobs — especially blue-collar jobs — continued to go to illegal aliens because employers could pay foreigners less, avoid state and federal taxes, and use the threat of deportation as exploitative leverage over their workforces. Illegal alien workers continued to place downward pressure on hourly wages. Illegal aliens continued to place upward pressure on the costs of housing, energy, and household necessities.
Sometime in the ‘90s, American politicians and government bureaucrats began admitting to Americans that there were roughly eleven million illegal aliens inside the United States. For the next thirty years, politicians and bureaucrats repeated the same “eleven million” figure as if no net-increase in immigration had occurred. Anybody living in small-town America knew this to be a demonstrable lie. In the nineties, local school classrooms were made up almost entirely of American kids who grew up speaking English in households whose families had been living in the United States for generations. As each year passed, those same classrooms were increasingly filled with kids whose parents had come from all over the world, and even small school districts were forced to hire staff who could attend to the needs of an increasingly foreign student body unfamiliar with basic English.
Former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has said repeatedly that there are more than one hundred million illegal aliens residing in the United States. In other words, roughly one out of every three people living inside the borders of the U.S. is a foreign national unlawfully here. If those foreign nationals are employed, then they are likely guilty of identity fraud and committing a number of additional state and federal crimes. Of those committing identity fraud, many are using social security numbers stolen from American citizens. Illegal aliens who steal Americans’ identities adversely affect citizens’ credit scores, tax obligations with the IRS, and background checks. Illegal aliens who fraudulently vote by claiming to be American citizens steal votes from actual American citizens. Foreign nationals who illegally vote in American elections deny American citizens legitimate representation and undermine Americans’ constitutional form of self-government.
In 1986, lawmakers from both parties promised an end to illegal immigration. Instead, tens of millions of new illegal aliens have continued to arrive. In return for grudgingly acceding to the government’s desire to provide a one-time gift of amnesty to those foreigners whose first act in the country was to break our immigration laws, Americans continued to lose jobs, pay more for everything, and be defrauded by identity theft. Even worse, they were forced to watch as foreign cultures transformed their schools and towns. They were forced to watch as foreigners successfully ran for political office and pushed foreign policies and beliefs upon American citizens.
New York City has a Muslim mayor from Uganda who has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for only eight years. Minneapolis has a Muslim member of Congress from Somalia who became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of seventeen. Roughly 4% of Congress are foreign-born naturalized citizens, while 15% of Congress have at least one immigrant parent. A third of the judges occupying prestigious and powerful positions on the D.C. District Courts were born in foreign nations. These numbers are going in one direction — up!
When President Barack Obama spoke enthusiastically about “fundamentally transforming” the United States, this is what he had in mind. If you invite third-world communists to break into your country, pretty soon your government will be filled with third-world communists, too. Americans were never consulted about this “fundamental transformation.” Politicians and bureaucrats steamrolled American citizens with tall tales of foreign immigrants fleeing violence in their home countries and seeking safety in the United States. Nobody tried to explain why all the foreigners fleeing persecution in their home countries still wave their national flags in American neighborhoods and at American sporting events. Nobody tried to explain why foreigners from all over the world couldn’t obtain asylum in countries closer to home. Nobody tried to explain why so many foreigners claiming asylum in the United States continue to visit their friends and families in their native countries.
No American ever voted for this radical transformation. No politician or government bureaucrat respected American citizens enough to seek their consent. Nevertheless, politicians and bureaucrats continue to lie to the American people by pretending that foreign nationals are not taking over their society. Because they despise American citizens, government officials tell obvious lies without shame.
Where is all this shameless and callous disregard for the will of American citizens headed? It is headed toward the same dead end already appearing in other Western nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and France: Increasingly, Western peoples are electing political representatives who promise to end divisive and deadly mass immigration policies. The more that government officials undermine their citizens’ electoral will, the more that citizens are turning to the streets to be heard. Peaceful forms of civil disobedience are evolving into violent altercations with police.
Instead of listening to their citizens, Western governments call them racists and censor their online speech. At some point, citizens will conclude that their governments have become threats to their security and way of life. Governments will lose their legitimacy. Western countries will become battlefields. Open borders guarantee that Western nations will die.
