Boy, have times changed.

Just one year ago, the Biden administration and New York’s elected gentry entrenched themselves against the Republican Party’s positions on border-security and sanctuary-city policies.

And look at us now: President Joe Biden is waiving 26 federal laws to construct a new border wall in south Texas.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has gone from “We’ll not only house you but protect you,” to “Go somewhere else,” while Mayor Eric Adams is in Central and South America trying to convince future migrants that the days of high-end hotel living in New York are over.

I say to them: Welcome!

Welcome to the side of financial stability, geopolitical sanity and humanitarian sustainability.

Welcome to the side of reality.

In one week, with these 180-degree shifts in posture, the Democratic narrative has fallen and shattered harder than Humpty Dumpty, and likewise, all their woke bosses and all the spin men can’t put the nonsense back together again.

Nor should they even try.

The GOP’s entirely reasonable positions — that border crossings need to be regulated and sanctuary cities cannot spend themselves into oblivion — were long rejected by Democrats as racist, xenophobic, nativist, rooted in white supremacy, etc.

They wagged their fingers, yelling, “Haven’t you read the poem on the statue?“ or shouted down from their high horse something to the effect of “It’s not who we are.”

As we just found out, it is who we are.

More to the point, we must now have a public reckoning: The Republican Party’s positions on border security and immigration have always been entirely rational and pragmatic.

Let’s not forget tens of thousands of foreign-born individuals were granted asylum status during the Trump administration, as they had been throughout the Obama administration, and Bush’s and so on in the past.

Countless Americans now claim citizenship as a result of their own adherence to the rules over the past few decades.

The appalling crime is the Democrats’ eagerness to allow those who’ve crossed illegally to skip the queue of all those still waiting for their own naturalization and visa-processing to play out. 

New York is a diverse, multiethnic city; how many of us have family members and friends who are still following the rules throughout this seemingly endless process?

But perhaps therein lies the problem: We once had rules, and for the most extreme Democrats, any rules on immigration are bad.

The situation also elicits some questions.

What was the tipping point for the governor and mayor?

Was spending a projected $11 billion on the self-inflicted crisis manageable, but $12 billion cracked the bank?

Was it when we hit 200 hotels but not 199?

What was the tipping point for Biden?

“Building the wall” is literally the abandonment of his entire raison d’être. 

Democrats spent the entirety of the Trump presidency trying to disprove the effectiveness of walls, fences and barriers.

Walls were “immoral,” according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while Biden promised on live television to “never build another mile of border wall” ever again.

How can they now say a new wall is immediately needed along the Texas frontier without this being the leading story of every nightly news program this week?

Instead, the media will largely give them cover.

There will be few followup questions on Biden’s failed border policies. Never any public accounting.

Within hours after being sworn in as president Jan. 20, 2021, Biden signed six executive orders to reverse President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including ones to halt border wall construction, end deportations from the US interior and rescind travel and immigration restrictions.

He then changed 89 customs and border policies.

On March 24, 2021, he appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the border czar with a mission to address the “root causes” of illegal immigration into the United States.

This has proven to be a doozy of a failure. How can it be swept under the rug?

In the first fiscal year following these virtue-signaling immigration actions, illegal crossings at the southwest border topped 2.76 million, breaking the previous annual record by more than 1 million.

In contrast, in the last fiscal year under Trump, illegal crossings had fallen to just more than 400,000.

Accordingly, New York Democrats have passed or implemented successive sanctuary-city policies in 1989, 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2022.

They have expanded our “right to shelter” to include migrants and extended privileges to foreign nationals that are reserved for US citizens, including drivers’ licenses, financial aid, public health care and, if they get their way in court, the right to vote.

It’s disingenuous, at best, to say our current migrant crisis constitutes an unforeseen emergency.

This is a rake they need not have stepped on.

It’s understandable, then, many Democrats have buyer’s remorse.

So to those shopping around for solutions, I offer the practical policies those of us in the Grand Ol’ Party have been promoting for years.

There’s plenty of room inside our big tent.

Joe Borelli is the minority leader of the New York City Council.