(Daily Signal)—Don’t hold your breath that some senators will be able to squeeze border sanity out of the White House in exchange for billions more in aid to Ukraine, all before they go home for Christmas.
Before discussing the latest effort, it’s worth noting new laws aren’t even needed to fix about 80% of the border crisis. President Joe Biden could with a phone call restore policies that kept the border controlled under previous presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
But unlike them, he has allowed his administration’s policy to be dictated by a leftist hard core that rejects borders and law enforcement. He has also diverted billions of tax dollars to the non-governmental organization mass immigration support industry. After nearly three years, we know that the Biden administration officials will not only fail to enforce immigration law, but that they also will continue to subvert and defy it.
So, where are we on border security deal negotiations?
It looks like senators won’t reach agreement before leaving Washington this Friday until the New Year. Even if they did, the deal would need to pass the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has shown a spine when it comes to fighting for real border security.
In backroom negotiations, the Washington Post reports Senate “Democrats have made major concessions … and advocacy groups on the left are furious.” Nonsense.
The embryonic Senate deal would reportedly make it easier for the Department of Homeland Security to deport illegal aliens whose asylum claims fail in court. But with the current backlogs, it takes five or more years for even a patently bogus case to conclude. DHS already has all the authority to deport it needs, yet their annual targets are to remove fewer than 30,000 criminal convict illegal aliens a year, never mind the millions of illegal aliens without such convictions who the administration has released into the country. They have no intention of deporting anyone else here illegally, including failed asylum seekers. The expensive and lengthy asylum process is just Kabuki theater for this administration.
The Senate proposal would also give Biden a new legal authority to expel illegal migrants before they can enter and claim asylum. This power would be simlar to Title 42, which allowed summary expulsions because of COVID-19 until May of this year. Pro-illegal immigration activists describe this as a massive concession, but it isn’t. The president already has the authority—and duty—to deter or detain illegal aliens instead of processing and releasing them as he does. If the cap to trigger the new expulsion authority is at the discretion of Biden’s DHS secretary, then it would never be reached.
Hence, the new, improved Title 42 would be triggered by some acceptable number of illegal border crossers. Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson once said that 1,000 of these a day was a “bad day.” We’re now experiencing over 10,000 a day. If the cap is, say 3,000 a day, then you can expect Biden’s DHS to divert all their energies into expanding their bogus and illegal immigration parole programs. These bypass the required visa process to fly illegal aliens directly to U.S. ports, thus avoiding high numbers between ports of entry. The open borders activists in charge of the nation’s immigration policy have done everything in their power to subvert Congress and the law, and they won’t stop now.
Most importantly, “the White House has not expressed any willingness to limit Biden’s power to parole certain categories of immigrants,” a demand that “could throw the negotiations into a tailspin,” according to the Post.
Immigration parole is the administration’s favorite open border tool. Disregarding the clear language of the law and the expressed congressional intent behind it, Biden uses parole as an infinite method to bring in illegal aliens. If parole is untouched, the Biden administration can ramp it up exponentially, moving the traffic from the border to interior U.S. airports, and allowing in unlimited illegal migrants under the guise that they will claim asylum. This has not solved the problem; it has just hidden it better in Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ shell game. Using parole, DHS will continue to pour in hundreds of thousands of aliens for whom they have no proven identification, let alone criminal records or background checks.
Senators have to resist a “border security” trap and not sign on to a fig-leaf deal that hands the Biden administration more tools and money to bring in more illegal aliens.
Only serious reforms, like those the House passed in May, will restore the rule of law to our borders. What’s needed includes a substantial change to the current asylum process to weed out the bulk of fraudulent or spurious claims before they clog the pipeline, and a hard numerical cap on the use of true “humanitarian” parole —say 1,000 a year, among other policy and defunding changes. The Senate should not agree to a bad deal that would further harm America.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
NO!
While the exact figures are difficult to come by, what was once public information is getting to be more and more SECRET data, the US gov’t expended approximately one–half trillion dollars on ILLEGALS . . . last year, on them, for them to them and in transporting them to the USA!
Goal: 100 million ILLEGALS by or before 2030 — — to defund citizenship, destroy national identity and sovereignty (please forget all this voters nonsense like I got recently from a Judicial Watch request — CISA and the voting systems companies have that covered!)