President Joe Biden’s failure to guard the border is threatening the jobs, wages, and schools needed by ordinary Americans, says an op-ed by former Vice President Mike Pence.

“Until left-wing politicians recognize the true nature of the border crisis and its roots in far-left policies, the crisis only will get worse,” Pence wrote in his April 21 article for DailySignal.com. “American families will be punished with lost jobs, lower wages, overcrowded schools, and overburdened public services,” he added.

Pence’s comments are “either complete smoke-blowing, or he has come to understand the really fundamental problems about our immigration policy and their effect on working-class Americans,” said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Pence “does not have a good record on immigration, but he may have learned a lot during his time in the White House,” she said.

“I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt,” she added.

Besides, “what’s important is not what politicians think, but what they do,” she said.

And, she continued, “the more they go on record in this way, the harder it makes it later for them to renege.”

Moreover, she noted, the 2024 “primary voters have long memories and will not be fooled by insincere statements that are contradicted by actions.”

Before being picked to serve as Vice President to President Donald Trump, Pence was governor of Indiana and did little to offset or curb the inflow of foreign workers.

For example, the Indiana-based Cummins Inc. uses the federal H-1B program to import hundreds of cheap and inexperienced Indian visa workers annually. Those visa workers take the jobs needed by the young American engineers who trained at universities to design and build engines.

In 2015, Pence folded when business groups opposed a GOP-backed religious freedom law.

In the White House, Pence and his aides did little to help Trump. Pence’s top aide, Marc Short, for example, was hired from a Koch brothers business group, and he played a largely passive role as Democrats blocked Trump’s immigration reform bills and his plans for a border wall.

Since February 21, Pence has been “a distinguished visiting fellow” at Heritage Foundation. The foundation’s board is also looking to replace the recently departed president, Kay James.

Pence’s op-ed on Biden’s tolerance for illegal migration, however, was welcomed by pro-American reformers.

Pence wrote:

President Joe Biden inherited the most secure southern border in American history. Under the Trump-Pence administration, we built more than 450 miles of the world’s most robust border wall, reducing illegal crossings by over 90%.

…

The catastrophe now unfolding at our border is a direct result of progressive policies and pronouncements emanating from Democrats in Washington. But Democrats can end this disaster just as quickly as they caused it. All they have to do is reinstate commonsense border enforcement and stop treating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol as a concierge service for illegal aliens.

The truth is, support for open borders and unlimited immigration is a key precept of today’s Democrat Party. It is extremely telling that most Democrat politicians refuse to even utter the word “crisis” to describe what obviously is an unmitigated disaster. Many on the radical left likely don’t see the current crisis as a failure, but ultimately as a victory in their never-ending struggle for open borders.

…

The savage drug cartels that profit from human smuggling will grow richer and more powerful by the day, bolstering their ability to terrorize their home nations while flooding American neighborhoods with a sea of poisonous drugs and violence.

And American families will be punished with lost jobs, lower wages, overcrowded schools, and overburdened public services.

Pence focused on the similar threats posed by mass illegal immigration and of legal open borders — and ignored the existing and huge economic impact of legal migration and of legal visa workers:

America is a welcoming nation to many who come in search of opportunity, but we also must be a nation of laws. Open borders combined with free health care, education, and welfare is a recipe for disaster. You can be for working-class families or you can be for open borders—but you cannot be for both.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democratic, rational, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly university-credentialed progressives — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.

The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families. It moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, from red states to blue states, and from the central states — such as Pence’s Indiana — to the coastal states such as New York.