The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ of Immigration

WASHINGTON, DC, Aug 9 — The “ins” and “outs” of immigration: illegals, the ins, are crossing our southern borders in record numbers while Americans, the outs, are renouncing their citizenship in droves and leaving the country for tax havens.

And we have no one to blame except the progressive socialist Biden administration.

“We are on pace to encounter more individuals [read that “illegal immigrants”] on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” declared Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, making the admission sound like an achievement.

Massive caravans of illegals were assembling south of the border well before the 2020 Presidential Election in hopes that Biden would win and go easy on them when they crossed over.

The floodgates opened when he was declared the winner. The border patrol has had its hands full ever since. Indeed, President Biden and his minions have overturned President Trump’s border protocols.

In July alone, 210,000 migrants tried to get in, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. The border patrol says that more than a million arrests have already been made at the border since the beginning of the fiscal year in October to date, and the fiscal year has still two months to go. The number compares with just 458,000 arrests in the entire October to September 2020 fiscal year.

While most of the activity is about illegal immigrants in the border states, middle America is coping with the resettlement of unaccompanied minors who have crossed over.

And so, gripes abound about the Biden administration’s handling of these children. For example, Kim Reynolds, the Governor of Iowa, and Bill Lee, the Governor of Tennessee, have called for a Congressional investigation of the administration’s handling or mishandling of unaccompanied children. In their request for hearings, they noted that “Both Iowa and Tennessee have faced a series of disturbing incidents involving the transport of unaccompanied children into our states, under the cover of darkness, with no advance notification.”

The “outs” are the thousands of wealthy American citizens who are renouncing their citizenship and heading for welcoming foreign destinations. It’s unlikely that they are motivated mainly by the government’s mishandling of the illegal immigration crisis. Their reasoning is more likely the threat of new, “sock-it-to-em” taxes.

Apparently, they take umbrage at the Biden administration’s aim to raise taxes. For example, the administration is threatening to increase capital gains taxes to a whopping 43.4%, up more than double the current rate of 20% as a threat. That’s probably what caused New Yorker Boris Johnson to give up his citizenship a few years back. He’s been living in England since he was five years old. The IRS sought to collect some $50,000 in capital gains taxes when he sold his home in London in 2016.

So, he decided to give up his American citizenship officially and become an Englishman. Johnson’s name may ring a bell; he is the Prime Minister of England these days.

In 2020 an all-time record of 6,707 Americans gave up their citizenship, up 237% over 2019. The numbers will be lower this year due to the fact that the required in-person interviews were suspended due to the coronavirus, according to international tax lawyer David Lesperance. He says that “there are probably 20,000 or 30,000 people who want to do this [renounce their citizenship], but they can’t get the appointment.”

Axios suggests that the proposed increase of the capital gains may be the case of the American exodus, and despite the fact that it is still a proposal, “it did prompt a lot of calls to Lesperance from people wanting to find out which foreign countries might grant them citizenship.”