The Border Numbers Do Not Lie, Even When Politicians Do
U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered more than 2.4 million migrants at the southwest border in fiscal year 2024, according to agency data released in October, and the first seven months of fiscal year 2025 show encounters still running above one million even after the administration's executive actions. Those numbers are not a policy success. They are proof that executive orders and press releases cannot replace a Congress that is willing to fix the laws that invite abuse.
The Hispanic voters I talk to in Texas and Arizona are not anti-immigrant. They are anti-chaos. They waited in line, paid the fees, submitted to background checks, and watched politicians on both sides treat the border like a campaign prop. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 57 percent of Hispanic adults say reducing illegal immigration is important, a figure that would shock cable news producers who assume the community speaks with one voice. We do not. And we are done being used as a shield for open borders.
The same Pew survey showed that Hispanic adults split almost evenly on whether to increase or decrease legal immigration, a detail that undermines the lazy narrative that Hispanics demand open borders as a matter of ethnic solidarity. What unites the community is not a policy position. It is a belief in fair process. People who followed the rules do not appreciate being told that the rules are meaningless.
Legal Immigrants Built the Working Class, Not the Welfare Class
The unemployment rate for Hispanic workers stood at 3.9 percent in May 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the labor force participation rate for Hispanic men remained above 80 percent, one of the highest of any demographic group in the country. Those numbers matter because they expose the lie that Hispanic immigration is a drain on the public purse. Legal immigrants work. They start businesses. They pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits over time. That is the record.
A 2023 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that immigrants who arrived legally through employment-based channels contributed a net positive to federal budgets within ten years of arrival, while those who arrived without authorization consumed more in state and local services than they paid in taxes during the same period. The difference is not ethnicity. It is legality. When Congress creates a line and punishes those who skip it, the result is a self-selected population that respects the rule of law from day one. That is the immigrant story conservatives should defend.
And we should defend it loudly. The Left wants to brand every enforcement measure as anti-Hispanic, but the working-class Hispanics I know are the first victims of wage suppression, overcrowded schools, and identity theft driven by unchecked illegal labor. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office documented thousands of cases in which unauthorized workers used stolen Social Security numbers, many belonging to U.S. citizens and legal residents, to obtain jobs. The victims are not abstract. They are our neighbors. They are our parents. They are us.
The small-business owners in my neighborhood are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and they are the ones who absorb the cost of a shadow labor market that undercuts wages and evades payroll taxes. They did not open a restaurant or a landscaping company so they could compete with contractors who pay cash under the table. They want enforcement because enforcement protects their investment. They are not the villains of this story. They are the evidence that the system works when it is respected.
Enforcement First Is the Pro-Immigrant Position
A functioning legal immigration system requires a credible deterrent against illegal entry, and that deterrent does not exist when asylum claims take seven years to adjudicate and most applicants are released into the interior long before their court dates ever arrive. The Department of Justice reported in March 2026 that the immigration court backlog had reached 3.6 million cases, a number that makes a mockery of the idea that the system is processing anyone in good faith. Legal immigrants waited their turn. They deserve a system that honors that choice.
The solution is not amnesty dressed up as reform. We tried that in 1986, and the illegal population grew anyway because enforcement was never funded at the levels promised. The solution is a wall of paperwork and consequences: mandatory E-Verify for all employers, penalties for sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct federal law, and an asylum process that detains applicants while their claims are reviewed quickly and fairly. That is not cruelty. That is the only way to preserve public support for the legal immigration that built this country.
Hispanic conservatives should lead this argument. We have the credibility to say that loving America and loving immigrants are the same thing, and that the way to prove it is to defend the legal path against the illegal one. The Alamo Post was founded this year to make that case without apology, and we intend to keep making it. The border is a mess. The law is clear. And the only people standing in the way are the politicians who profit from the confusion.
