The United States has always been a country of immigrants. But according to data released earlier this month by the Census Bureau, never before has the foreign-born population been higher than it is now, never before has the foreign-born population been growing as fast as it is now, and never before has the percentage of foreign-born population lacking permanent legal status been as high as it is today.

What the numbers show, what the citizens of Springfield and Aurora are experiencing, are the real costs of an historically unprecedented flood of migrants into the country, an influx aided and abetted at every turn by the Biden-Harris administration.

From day one, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have purposefully dismantled immigration laws, sometimes simply by choosing not to enforce certain mandates, such as requiring all illegal border crossers to be detained or returned to another country, and by flagrantly abusing statutes to create dubious new pathways for otherwise illegal immigrants to enter and stay in the country.