President Donald Trump has accomplished something that every elected Democrat and some Republicans, such as Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), said was impossible. He has secured the southern border against illegal immigration without needing Congress to pass a new law. 

Now, unfortunately, some Republicans are trying to undo his success. Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), a former Univision journalist, has introduced legislation she calls the Dignity Act, which would make Trump’s deportation efforts more difficult and would grant amnesty to millions of migrants who entered the country illegally. She wants, oddly, to create new pathways for future Democratic presidents to flood the country with foreigners whom Americans do not want in the country.

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At the height of the border crisis created by former President Joe Biden’s maladministration, more than 300,000 migrants were arrested in a single month for illegally crossing the southern border. It is estimated that over the course of Biden’s four years in office, the illegal immigrant population swelled by more than 5 million. When Biden was president, Lankford and Democrats insisted that new legislation was indispensable if order was to be restored.

Trump, once again in the Oval Office, proved them wrong. He simply enforced existing law. The most recent data show that just 9,306 migrants were arrested after illegally crossing the southern border in June, an all-time low.

However, some Republicans now make an argument that sounds reasonable for those only passingly familiar with immigration history. They say that with the border secure, it is safe to give citizenship to those already here illegally. Salazar’s bill does not give citizenship to every illegal immigrant, just to those who came before Biden was president and were under 18 years old when they arrived. (This would include Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an alleged gang member and human trafficker.)

Those who cannot provide evidence that they were under 18 years old when they entered the country would be given amnesty rather than citizenship and would be enrolled in something called “the Dignity Program” which would give them “temporary” legal status, work authorization, travel authorization, special protection from deportation, and, we’re not making this up, exemption from Social Security and Medicare taxes. 

The legislation contains bells and whistles about criminal background checks, requirements to buy health insurance, and promises that those granted amnesty will be excluded from means-tested welfare programs. However, there is no forcing mechanism anywhere in the legislation empowering anyone to make sure a future Democratic president upholds any of these requirements. Instead, it is chock-full of waiver authorities granted to the Department of Homeland Security to ignore safeguards and make up reasons for granting amnesty.

Future presidents could flood the country with migrants because anyone granted amnesty through the Dignity Program would be given the right to bring all of their children into the country. Migrants from the Dominican Republic could import their whole families. The legislation would establish chain migration on steroids.

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The bill’s most crippling flaw is that it does not connect amnesty and border security. A section titled “Border Security” calls for more funding, more “barriers along the border,” more strategic plans, more interagency cooperation, and higher pay for border patrol agents. Trump has shown that such stuff is unnecessary.

However, he will not be president beyond January 2029, and any president could open the floodgates again. Nothing in the Dignity Act links the number of illegal border crossings to the amnesty portions of the bill. The security Trump has won is temporary. It will last only as long as there is a Republican in the White House. Amnesty powers under this legislation would be permanent and would make future waves of illegal immigration easier.