Politics & Power Quote by John Linder

“Demanded” does a lot of work here: it launderes a political choice as a democratic mandate. Linder isn’t arguing for a policy so much as staging an obligation, positioning Congress as the reluctant employee of an angry customer. It’s a classic move in immigration rhetoric, where responsibility gets outsourced to “the voters” and moral ambiguity gets swapped for managerial necessity.

The phrasing “get a hold on the influx” borrows the language of flood control and crisis management, implying a force of nature rather than human beings making high-stakes decisions. “Influx” suggests volume; “illegal immigrants” collapses a messy legal reality into a single, stigmatizing identity. The sentence tightens further with “security around our borders,” a phrase that sounds practical and neutral while quietly shifting the frame from labor markets and humanitarian pressures to threat prevention. Once immigration is “security,” escalation becomes commonsense.

The subtext is reassurance: I hear you, I’m on your side, and the problem is out there - at the border - not in the incentives, employers, or policies that pull people in. It also signals alignment with a broader national mood that surged through the 1990s and 2000s, when “border security” became the precondition for any reform discussion, often functioning as a permanent gate that never quite opens. Linder’s intent is to sound responsive and tough while keeping the specifics hazy enough to unite anxious constituents under one clean, decisive verb: tighten.