Immigration is a top issue for voters. Unfortunately, the real picture is obscured by several zombie lies—false narratives that are kept alive for political value. One is that the terrible “bipartisan” Lankford-Sinema Senate immigration bill that failed earlier this year would have done more good than harm. Another is that there is any serious “vetting” done on most illegal aliens released and paroled in the United States—as DHS had to recently admit regarding an Afghan who plotted an Election Day terrorist attack in the U.S.

But the mother of all zombie lies is that mysterious “root causes” in the world (poverty, weak governments, crime, etc.) are responsible for the record flows of inadmissible aliens to our southern border rather than the loud and clear come-one, come-all message from the Biden administration.

The convenient corollary to the “root causes” canard is that there is nothing the U.S. can do to stem the flow of illegal migrants to our southern border. Far from it. Look at the map: Mexico’s border with the U.S. is 1,800 miles long. But its border with Guatemala is just 541 miles long, and with Belize, it’s only 160 miles long.

Before Mexico, Guatemala is the major gateway through which South and Central Americans must travel to get to the United States. The U.S. has huge leverage with Guatemala, from billions of dollars in remittances their people in the U.S. send back home to family, to trade, to aid.

Convincing Guatemala to tighten its borders with El Salvador and Honduras would reduce the flow of people coming to America from not only those two nations but also from Nicaragua, whose dictator, Daniel Ortega, is letting people from all over the world fly into his country without visas, well aware they are merely stopping there on their way to the U.S. A hardened Guatemalan border would also reduce incentives for people to cross the Darién Gap.

The........

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