The Parable of the Hessians
The current immigration situation appears to get worse each fiscal year (a fiscal year ends on September 30 of that year). A recent report cites these statistics:
FY2020: 471,954 apprehensions (just from January 2020 to September 2020)
FY2021: 1,956,519 apprehensions + 308,655 known got-aways
FY2022: 2,766,582 apprehensions + 606,150 known got-aways
FY2023: 3,201,144 apprehensions + 769,174 known got-aways
No more than 1% of apprehended border crossers get detained. With 8,396,199 apprehended from Jan 2020 to Sep 2023, that makes for just 83,962 detained. Add in the 1,683,979 known got-aways, and the tally rises to 9,996,216 from Jan 2020 to Sep 2023.
That’s 10 million which are known about.
Border officials claim that they know about 5 of every 6 attempts to cross, meaning that, if 10 million are known about, another 1.7 million are presumed to have made it through completely undetected — bringing the total to 11.7 million from Jan 2020 to Sep 2023.
That’s almost 12 million estimated by those in charge of protecting the border.
But the idea that you only ever miss 1 in each 6 attempts doesn’t square with the fact that there are 100 miles of unprotected border. It ought to be difficult to estimate the number of crossings that you do not know about, and it is presumptuous to think that you know about 5 of each 6 of them.
Another estimate of known crossings vs. unknown crossings is that only 25% of all crossings are apprehended or known as a got-away— so that the “10 million number” above represents only one-fourth of the total picture, and the true amount is 40 million border crossings from Jan 2020 to Sep 2023, many who are young men.
But history instructs us to be wary when large amounts of military-aged males seek entry. Back in the summer of 1776, large amounts of “German” soldiers came to New York and New Jersey, seeking entry. Because most of them were from the German province of Hesse-Cassel, they were called “Hessians.”
Source: https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/90
The British government had paid to rent those soldiers at a price that was worth 13 years of taxation in Hesse-Cassel, so the Landgrave (Duke) of Hesse-Cassel ordered his soldiers to go. While up to 19,000 came from Hesse-Cassel, other soldiers came from other German provinces, and elsewhere, for a grand total of about 30,000 hired guns.
Thomas Jefferson wrote about Hessians as one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence:
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
Imagine 1,900 young foreign males looking for lodging in Trenton, New Jersey, across the Delaware River. If the innkeeper tried to turn them away, they might call him a racist. If the innkeepers called them mercenaries, they could respond by saying that their commander ordered them there, so that they are not paid mercenaries.
They could respond by saying that they are merely “incorporated” killers, instead, following their orders while their executives collect all of the cash. But the innkeepers wouldn’t care if the soldiers personally collected cash for killing Americans, or if their “boss” did. They would just care that the soldiers were seeking lodging to do so.
Other nations frowned upon the British government hiring soldiers, not because hiring soldiers was out of the norm, but because the soldiers were hired in order to kill their own people (those who had colonized America). In the eyes of the rest of the world, hiring foreign soldiers to come in and kill your own people was morally wrong.
The good part about foreign soldiers being hired to come into America to kill Americans is that up to 20%-30% of them defected, and refused to continue to kill Americans, deciding instead to live peacefully among them.
Reference
[100 miles of the border are unprotected and no more than 1% are detained] — Former ICE Director, Tom Homan on FoxNews. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illegal-immigrant-population-soars-under-biden-government-data
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show 10 million crossings from Jan 2020 to Sep 2023] — https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_9d841124-7449-11ee-af4a-af115ad29337.html
[Of the ~20,000 Hessians still alive at the end of the war, up to 5,000 stayed in order to live in America, where people were more free] — https://www.loc.gov/rr/european/imde/germchro.html
[The rental price of Hessian soldiers was worth 13 years of taxation] — https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/hessians/
[General George Washington told the American people to treat captured Hessians humanely] — https://www.washingtoncrossingpark.org/captured-hessians/
[Captain Johann Ewald, the Hessian officer that Lord Cornwallis put in charge of planning, ended up on the side of America, writing that America must be free] — https://allthingsliberty.com/2014/08/8-fast-facts-about-hessians/