(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Now that we’ve seen, in the first eight weeks of the Trump administration, a 96% reduction in illegal entries across the southern border—and this was done, remember, without the supposed need for comprehensive “immigration reform”—it’s logical to ask what the last four years were about.
Why did we have a completely open border? Why did 12 million people come into the United States from all over the world under illegal auspices? What was the reason? Why would people do that?
And remember, right now, the United States has somewhere between 50 and 60 million residents that were not born in the United States. Twenty-seven percent of the population of California is foreign-born, of all statuses—citizen, legal, illegal.
That’s an enormous challenge in assimilation, acculturation, integration. And we’re not doing that, of course. But why would we do that? Why would we have 16%, now, of the population of the United States as foreign-born? What was the rationale behind that, especially in the context of illegal entries?
Looking back, what were the Democrats, what was then-President Joe Biden, what were the handlers of Biden thinking? I suppose they thought that maybe people who were coming in without English, without high school diplomas—for the most part—without capital, and without skills would be dependent on federal largess.
I know you’re gonna say people who are not here legally cannot get Medicaid. Well, they can get Medicaid in an emergency. In California, anybody can get Medicaid, which we here call Medi-Cal.
So many people came in illegally and got on Medi-Cal that the system is broke. It’s $6.7 billion in the hole. Fifty percent of the population, of all births, are on Medi-Cal. And 40% of the California resident population are on Medi-Cal.
So, was the idea to get people dependent on the government? And then that would make government grow and more redistribution and more higher taxes. A way of, what? Having equity? Taking from the small, supposed, greedy elite and making them pay higher taxes to fund this social welfare?
Or was it utopianism, globalism, 21st century-ism, end of the worldism? In which you think that borders are a 19th-century construct. We’re all people of the same planet, as we see in Europe. So, let’s just get rid of borders. Let’s make it everything from Yucatan to the Arctic Circle, we can just go anywhere we want in this utopian dream. There’s no difference.
Why is somebody who was born in Chiapas or Oaxaca or Michoacan to dire poverty and cartels and corruption, why doesn’t he get the chance of somebody who’s born in Malibu? Well, as social architects, maybe the Left thought he should have the chance. So, we’ll just destroy the border.
Or a third reason why—was it more sinister? Did they think that after 2020, when the majority of states changed the balloting laws to such a degree that earlier mail-in and early voting had only constituted 30% of those who voted, 70% voted on Election Day—now 70% of all American voters do not vote on Election Day. They don’t go before somebody and show a driver’s license. Did they think, under this system, they could bring in 12 million people and, in some cases, they could vote?
Now, that’s a very controversial topic. The Left says that they never do vote. I’m not suggesting that they do in numbers, although, I will suggest that although it’s illegal at the state level, in most states, it’s absolutely illegal at the federal level.
Sixteen local jurisdictions allow illegal aliens to vote in city council, school board elections, local referendums. It’s a trend that the Left is trying to cultivate and mine. So, do they think that, eventually, the more people you bring in—so you have 50 or 60 million people who were not born in the United States—they’re going to be a constituency? And equity being what it is and parity being—they deserve to vote.
Was that the long-term goal? Or was it a fourth reason, just simple nihilism, chaos? People were angry at the Trump years. Or they were angry at traditional America. They think it’s racist and sexist. It doesn’t provide diversity or equity and inclusion. So, what we’re going to do is just flood the zone. Twelve million people. And we’ll see how you like it. We’re gonna put them in hotels in New York. We’re gonna send them to the inner city. And we’re not gonna send them to Malibu or Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. But we’re just gonna flood the zone and just make so much chaos that you’ll have to deal with it, sort of like California. Deal with it.
I don’t have the answer. I don’t know what was behind it. But I do know that never in the history of the United States, within four years, did the government, by intent, destroy the border, welcome in 12 million people, during the first year of a COVID-19 lockdown, where all of us had to be very careful, wear masks, and have proof of vaccination, with no audit at all of the people who were not here.
It’s inexplicable. And it’s so inexplicable that I’m gonna end today with I don’t have any answers other than providing the possible choices and alternatives I outlined.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
