The U.S. border was illicitly crossed fewer times last month than in any February in the country’s history. There were 28,654 encounters and apprehensions of illegals reported nationwide. For those who might see border security, and deportations, as cruel acts against the poor and hopeless who want only to escape to a land of plenty, we offer another way of looking at illegal immigration.

Because the February number is actually good news.

The phrase “moral hazard” comes to us from the insurance industry. It refers, says Law & Liberty, “to the possibility that insuring against costly outcomes actually increases the reckless behavior creating the need for insurance in the first place.”

We often hear about the moral hazard of foreign aid. As long as we send money to struggling nations, their “leaders” will never liberalize their economies and root out the corruption that wrecks their societies. They don’t have to deal with the consequences of their policies.

It takes no leap of logic to apply the tag to an open-border policy, much like the one the Biden administration oversaw for four years. When unfettered entry into the U.S. is a pressure release valve for countries where millions are mired in perpetual poverty, those nations’ leaders, who are more often than not grifters and authoritarians, have no incentive to free their economies and purge their governments of the mobsters and entrenched insiders whose misfeasance limits prosperity to only a select few.

To quote ourselves from a little more than a year ago, during a month when there were more than a quarter of a million encounters and apprehensions of illegal crossers, these countries “can continue to send their ‘tempest-tost’ homeless and poor to America and not concern themselves with the hard labor needed to fix their problems, or worry about staying in power. Their benign neglect, and in some cases outright depravity, condemns countless future generations to lives of squalor and desperation.”

There is a second moral hazard in regard to open borders that is also largely — in fact, almost entirely — ignored by the Democrats who have imported an army of illegals.

“The status quo entrenches a moral hazard: Illegal aliens are not only endangering Americans by crossing the border illegally, but also themselves,” writes Luma Simms, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a legal immigrant.

“Open borders are not humane, nor compassionate. They make it easy for violent offenders to enter our country and for bad actors to traffic people, especially children.”

Neither of these mattered to the maniacal Democrats, though. They wanted an open border to add numbers to their voting bloc and to boost the populations in sanctuary cities and blue states that would give them additional U.S. House seats. Illegals are just pawns in their despicable scheme to hold absolute political power.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board