By Sherman Frederick/Properly Subversive

Immigration in America is a big mess. Upon this, reasonable minds agree.

Sherman Frederick

Pew Research estimates 14 million people with no documentation lived among us as of the end of 2023.

Current Population Survey (CPS), however, shows the immigrant population (legal and illegal together) hit 53.3 million and 15.8 percent of the total U.S. population in January 2025. That’s higher than the previous historical peaks in 1890 and 1910.

The new Trump Administration estimates the illegal population exceeds 20 million. They promised to fix it.

To give credit where credit is due, President Donald Trump is off to a remarkable start on deporting criminal illegal aliens, and he has effectively stopped the flow of migrants across the southern border.

But it will take years to bring full compliance.

A rough chop of the options comes down to three basic choices:

  1. 1. Require everyone to register, and give them a choice of citizenship or a work card.
  2. 2. Require registration with the promise of a work card only.
  3. 3. Require declaration and a return to the country of origin, where they may apply to return, with no guarantees.

The spider in the wood pile still exists, no matter what, because not everyone here illegally will declare themselves, even under the most generous of terms. They simply prefer to stay in the shadows for whatever reason.

So going forward, we’ll need a firm policy that produces reverse migration over a period of years. We’re on the right track, although the official numbers are not in, it looks like 2025 brought a reduction of illegal immigrants by about 300,000. Stopping the open border policies of the past was an important event. Deporting people who are here with criminal records and/or bad intent is next.

After that, it’s going to require a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage documentation.

And that will take years. You can take issue with the Trump tactics, but he’s right at the core in saying we can no longer kick this can down the road.

NO, WE CAN’T BE FRIENDS

Censorious liberals, like the ones who shat on free speech during the Obama and Biden Administrations, always ask, “But, we can still be friends, right.” 

The answer to that is “no,” and people who cherish the American experiment must do all they can to see that those folks don’t get back in power. They attempted to silence opponents on their way to building a more progressive future. It failed and produced the backlash coinciding with the moral collapse of the Democratic Party and the rise of the MAGA revolution.

Thanks to Elon Musk and his release of the Twitter Files, we know the raw truth, chapter and verse, only hinted at by fascists like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, two former Democratic Party presidential candidates. The former believes “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [climate change disinformation] out of existence,” and the latter said she thinks social media companies must moderate content on their platforms or else “we lose total control.”

Moderate for her and most Democrat elites of that vintage means legislating opposing viewpoints out of existence.

Hate to sound so harsh, but as one of those voices forbidden to question COVID policy when it counted, I want no part of a return to that kind of deal.

End of discussion.

(Sherman Frederick is a longtime Nevada journalist. You can read more of his writing at shermanfrederick.substack.com. You can also reach him directly via email at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)