The Biden administration is reluctantly embracing common sense on border security.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it will construct about 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.

"The secretary of Homeland Security has determined, pursuant to law, that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a Federal Register notice.

DHS should build 20 miles and more. While the Biden administration has done a terrible job managing the southern border, adding more wall to the U.S.-Mexico border should help address the problem. Physical barriers along a border are not the entire solution, but they are one part of many to deter some illegal crossings into the United States.

When former President Bill Clinton approved a 14-mile stretch of border wall between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, the sector saw a significant drop in illegal crossings. Apprehensions dropped from about 100,000 per year to 5,000 per year, as NPR reported in 2006. At the time, the assistant chief of Border Patrol's San Diego sector told NPR that the border wall was "highly effective."

Illegal crossings in the San Diego sector of the U.S.-Mexico border decreased by 96% from 1986 to 2017. Even liberal Politifact admits the biggest drop in illegal crossings came after a triple-layer barrier replaced the existing fencing in the sector during the late 1990s.

Similarly, a November 2018 study from Dartmouth College and Stanford University scholars said the Secure Fencing Act of 2006 helped prevent illegal immigration. The law added 548 miles of reinforcement fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“In total, we estimate the Secure Fence Act reduced the aggregate Mexican population living in the United States by 0.64%, equivalent to a reduction of 82,647 people,” the study read. It also mentioned how the wall boosted wages for some low-wage workers.

In August 2023 alone, more than 300,000 people tried to enter the U.S. illegally, a figure that is between five and 10 times higher than what the country typically faced during the Trump and Obama administrations. That said, the federal government needs to take a pragmatic approach to stop illegal immigrants.

It cannot embrace the liberal ideology that led President Joe Biden to declare that his administration would not build another foot of border wall. That may sound good to liberals as a sound bite, but the weak-on-borders approach from the Biden administration got the country into this lousy situation .

It is time for the current administration to take the border crisis more seriously, even if that means it has to take actions that do not neatly fit its liberal agenda.

Tom Joyce ( @TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.