Last week, Sens. Chuck Schumer and James Lankford proposed the idea of ​​a “border deal,” which could just as easily be called an “illegal immigration deal.”

The proposed deal includes providing legal advice to incompetent illegal aliens at American taxpayers' money, allowing 5,000 immigrants per day, and increasing green cards by 50,000 per year. There is.

I believe our immigration system needs improvement, but we can't do it until we first close our southern border completely and control the millions of illegal immigrants in our country.

House Republicans have already passed HR2, the Secure Borders Act, the strongest border bill in history. If the Senate had taken the border crisis seriously, it would have passed the House two months ago.

We must restart construction of our border wall and equip our Border Patrol agents with what they need to fight this crisis. That's exactly what HR 2 does.

Needless to say, the Fiscal Year 2024 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill that I proudly helped get out of committee and onto the House floor will go a long way toward securing our borders and solving this crisis. The FY24 Homeland Security spending bill allocates $2.1 billion to complete President Trump's border wall and $496 million for 22,000 new Border Patrol agents, while cutting wasteful government spending. ing.

We must control this crisis at our borders. Numbers don't lie. What's happening on our southern border is a national security issue. In the past three years, there have been 8 million illegal border crossings nationwide, and more than 6.7 million encounters at the southern border, turning every community into a border community.

To put this into perspective, this is more than the population of the entire state of Alabama. The bottom line is that under President Biden, the number of illegal crossings at the southern border is increasing faster than at any time in recent history, so the current administration and my colleagues across the aisle will It is past time to seriously tackle this crisis.

Jerry Carl represents Alabama's 1st Congressional District. He lives in Mobile with his wife Tina.