Biden administration forced a false choice on Americans about immigration
Economist Thomas Sowell famously observed, "There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
Few ideas better explain America's immigration debate.
During the Biden-Harris administration, politicians, activists and much of the media often spoke as though weakening immigration enforcement came without cost. Border security was portrayed as the enemy of compassion. Anyone who questioned the consequences of illegal immigration risked being labeled anti-immigrant, xenophobic or worse.
The American people never accepted that false choice.
Neither did my parents.
They immigrated legally from a developing country in the early 1960s because they believed America was a nation of opportunity built on the rule of law. They never saw legality and compassion as competing values. They understood that one depended upon the other.
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Since my daughter Katie was killed in January 2025, I've been told more times than I can count that advocating for stronger immigration enforcement somehow makes me anti-immigrant.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The polling tells a different story than the rhetoric. If Americans had truly become anti-immigrant, support for legal immigration would have collapsed. It didn't. What collapsed was confidence that the government was willing to enforce the laws governing immigration.
That distinction matters.
Katie was 20 years old when she was killed while visiting friends at the University of Illinois. According to court records, the man responsible had previously been deported before unlawfully reentering the United States in 2022 during the unprecedented surge in illegal immigration under the Biden-Harris administration. Illinois then compounded those failures through policies that, in my view, reduced cooperation with federal immigration authorities and failed to account for foreseeable public safety risks.
Katie became one of the foreseeable consequences of those policy choices.
That is the trade-off too few leaders were willing to discuss.
Every public policy creates benefits, costs and risks. Honest leaders acknowledge them. Responsible leaders weigh them. Wise leaders build guardrails to reduce foreseeable harm. Reckless leaders pretend the trade-offs don't exist.
Compassion is a virtue. So is public safety. So is the rule of law.
A mature society should never have to choose among them.
Yet during the Biden-Harris administration, Americans were repeatedly told that enforcing immigration law "terrorized" communities while questioning illegal immigration reflected a lack of compassion. That rhetoric didn't elevate the debate. It distorted it. It turned the rule of law into the villain while too often dismissing the families whose lives were forever changed by foreseeable policy failures.
My family is one of them.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants who come to America legally enrich our nation. They build businesses, strengthen communities, serve in our military and pursue the same opportunities my parents sought decades ago.
They deserve better than an immigration debate that blurs the line between legal and illegal immigration.
They also deserve leaders willing to acknowledge that every public policy carries foreseeable trade-offs. Ignoring those trade-offs doesn't eliminate them. It simply transfers the costs to someone else.
That may be the greatest irony of the Biden-Harris administration's approach to immigration.
Those who claimed to be defending immigrants may have done more than anyone to undermine public confidence in immigration itself. By refusing to distinguish between legal immigration and illegal immigration — and by insisting that concerns about enforcement were rooted in intolerance rather than legitimate questions of governance — they weakened the public trust upon which every successful immigration system depends.
Sowell's insight was never merely about economics.
It was about leadership. Trade-offs exist whether politicians acknowledge them or not. Ignoring them doesn't make them disappear. It only determines who pays the price.
My daughter Katie was one of those people.
America has not rejected immigrants. It has rejected the false choice that says we must choose between compassion and the rule of law.
We don't have to.
We never did.
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If we want America to remain the most welcoming nation in the world, we must restore public confidence that our immigration system is lawful, orderly and honest about the foreseeable trade-offs of the policies our leaders choose.
That isn't anti-immigrant.
It is pro-immigrant, pro-rule of law, and, ultimately, the only way to preserve both.