Earlier: A Legal Immigrant Asks If The Biden/Mayorkas “No Borders” Policy Is Now Being Applied In Airports

A VDARE reader who recently reentered the country at an airport noticed a problem. Border agents aren’t properly inspecting aliens or their documents:

Is the Biden/Mayorkas “No Borders” policy being applied in airports?

I am an immigrant to the U.S. of over 30 years’ standing, almost all as a Green Card holder.

Fairly often, I used to go overseas. Reentering the U.S. on a Green Card used to be a fairly problematic experience. Always the card was carefully compared with a computer list, sometimes one was asked to step aside to answer questions.

Last week, coming back after my first post-COVID trip, none of this occurred. My documents were glanced at for less than 5 seconds, no questions were asked at all, and I was waved through.

I asked a friend, a veteran traveller [sic], was this usual now. He confirmed this, and also pointed out that baggage inspections seem to have been abolished. The whole exit process seems to be “Nothing To Declare“ in practice and no facilities for inspection seemed to be in place.

As a former immigration official, I can testify that airport border agents don’t worry about protecting the country. Instead, they worry about protecting U.S. Customs and Border Protection from complaints from foreign visitors about wait times. After all, CBP won’t receive complaints when illegal aliens or drugs enter the country. But they will receive complaints, on an app no less, about a long wait in line. CPB’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, wants to save money by hiring fewer agents, which means fewer illegal aliens and drugs will be stopped.

I noticed the problem five years ago. Customs inspection booths were unmanned, and passengers were rapidly funneled through lines for review, with few taken out of line for a baggage search. Agents were collecting customs declarations after passengers gathered their luggage.

In 2019, agents stopped inspecting luggage entirely and customs declarations were surrendered at initial immigration inspection—long before aliens landed at baggage carousels.

Apparently, that problem might be worse. The short, fast-moving lines for foreign visitors that A Legal Immigrant described are a sign that agents aren’t properly inspecting foreign visitors or returning Green Card holders.

Our VDARE reader is right. No one is watching the border at airports. The border at airports is as open as the southwest border with Mexico.