My youngest daughter Katie was killed when an intoxicated illegal immigrant slammed into the back of the vehicle she was riding in at nearly 80 miles an hour while it sat idle at a stoplight. Ever since, I have been trying to understand how reckless public policies allowed something so horrific, and so preventable, to happen.

Katie’s death forced me to look beyond slogans and political talking points and ask harder questions about what America’s immigration system has become, who benefits from it and who ultimately bears the costs when governments refuse to enforce meaningful standards.

The more I examined the data, the more I began to notice an aspect of the problem that often seemed ignored or dismissed in public debate. Perhaps because acknowledging it had become politically uncomfortable.

According to recent data from the Center for Immigration Studies, newly arrived immigrants now possess significantly lower levels of educational attainment than earlier waves of immigration.

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During the border-surge years engineered under the Biden-Harris administration and overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the composition of migration shifted heavily toward poorer regions of Latin America, bringing larger numbers of individuals with limited formal education and fewer workforce skills needed in a modern, technology-driven economy.

That matters because advanced economies increasingly depend on productivity, skills and institutional capacity. Educational attainment strongly correlates with earnings, poverty rates, tax contribution and long-term dependence on public systems.

America in 2026 is not the industrial America of 1920. Low-skill labor no longer guarantees upward mobility, even for many native-born Americans struggling under rising housing costs, inflation, healthcare expenses and stagnant wages. Yet policymakers continue expanding migration flows while insisting there will be no meaningful fiscal or social consequences.

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But consequences exist whether political leaders acknowledge them or not.

Lower educational attainment is closely associated with lower earnings, higher poverty rates and greater demand on public systems. School districts shoulder the costs of language services and educational remediation, often straining already struggling districts. Hospitals provide emergency care that is frequently never fully reimbursed, with taxpayers ultimately covering much of the burden. Cities face mounting housing pressures, while welfare systems expand to accommodate growing needs.

My own family has lived both versions of America’s immigration story. Decades ago, my parents came to the United States legally for the opportunity this country offered and not for benefits or special privileges that increasingly incentivize lawlessness surrounding immigration today.

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This is personal for me.

Katie’s killer, Julio Cucul-Bol, a Guatemalan national who used a Mexican alias while in Illinois, admitted through an interpreter in state court that he had no formal education and was unable to meaningfully communicate in either English or Spanish.

So, I have to ask the question Democrat Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and many other politicians never will: What purpose did allowing Bol into this country actually serve? How did it strengthen America, improve our communities, or better the lives of American citizens?

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My daughter is dead.

Reasonable people can debate immigration levels and legal pathways. But no serious nation can maintain public trust while weakening enforcement and insisting there are no downstream consequences for public institutions, fiscal stability, or social cohesion.

Many countries benefit enormously from large-scale emigration. Remittances from migrants working in the United States generate billions in foreign income while also relieving domestic political pressure.

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In effect, the United States increasingly subsidizes the consequences of governmental failure abroad. Rather than fixing conditions for their own citizens, struggling governments can export portions of their poverty to the United States while importing remittance dollars back home.

That dynamic may benefit political elites on both sides of the border, but it does little to encourage long-term reform, self-sufficiency, or stable institutions. In many cases, mass unmanaged migration may actually delay the economic and civic improvements those societies ultimately need most.

A truly moral and compassionate approach should not simply encourage people to flee struggling nations indefinitely. It should encourage the development of lawful, stable and prosperous societies where citizens can build meaningful lives in their own countries with dignity and opportunity.

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The United States should be an example to be emulated; a nation built on lawful behavior, strong institutions, accountability and opportunity. Not one that increasingly allows itself to be taken advantage of by governments unwilling to fix conditions for their own people.

Migrants should be drawn to America because of the opportunities created by economic freedom and social stability, not enticed by self-serving politicians offering taxpayer-funded benefits while refusing to address the consequences of weak enforcement.

States like Illinois increasingly respond to the departure of productive citizens not by confronting the policies driving people away, but by attempting to replace those losses through mass migration encouraged by expansive benefits and weakened standards. Administrations like Biden-Harris accelerated that approach nationally during the border-surge years.

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That is not a serious long-term strategy for national prosperity or institutional stability.

Every public policy carries tradeoffs, and citizens should not become collateral damage to reckless immigration policies pursued for short-term political gain.

A serious immigration policy would begin with honesty: honesty that educational attainment matters in advanced economies; honesty that mass low-skill migration creates fiscal burdens; honesty that weak enforcement and sanctuary policies carry real-world consequences; and honesty that America cannot permanently function as the economic and social safety valve for the developing world without eventually weakening itself.

Compassion without limits is not governance. And no nation can indefinitely absorb the unresolved economic and institutional failures of other countries while expecting its own stability, cohesion and prosperity to remain strong forever.

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Martina Navratilova wants Billie Jean King to explain herself.

King is one of the most important figures in the history of women’s sports, a tennis icon who helped build the modern women’s game and spent decades fighting for equal opportunity, equal pay and respect for female athletes.

But King has also publicly supported trans-identifying biological male athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports.

In a 2025 interview with The Telegraph ahead of Wimbledon, King called the broader transgender-athlete debate in sports “a nightmare” and said people should listen to transgender people’s stories and make them feel included.

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That position has frustrated Navratilova, another tennis legend and longtime advocate of gay rights and women’s sports, because King has also publicly acknowledged the physical differences between men and women.

Asked how King could reconcile those two positions, Navratilova said the contradiction is obvious.

“I honestly don’t know because it doesn’t square,” Navratilova told OutKick.

Navratilova was responding to a clip of King discussing the obvious physical differences between men and women. In the clip, King said men are generally bigger and stronger, have different skeletal systems and bigger hearts, and that women never claimed they were physically the same as men.

That’s the entire reason women’s sports exist in the first place.

In 2020, King joined nearly 200 athletes in supporting a friend-of-the-court brief against an Idaho law that barred trans-identifying male athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports.

“There is no place in any sport for discrimination of any kind,” King said at the time. “I’m proud to support all transgender athletes who simply want the access and opportunity to compete in the sport they love.”

That’s the gap Navratilova is pressing.

“I think she thinks that they play fair and square, meaning males identify as women, take all the hormones and do everything, like Renée Richards did 50 years ago,” Navratilova said. “And that it’s just nice to include everybody.”

But Navratilova said the issue can’t be reduced to kindness or inclusion.

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She offered a hypothetical scenario: a high school boys basketball team holds tryouts, 10 boys make the team, and five boys who don’t make the boys team then try out for the girls team. If they make it, which they almost certainly would, five girls lose their spots.

“That’s not equality,” Navratilova said. “That’s a total takeover.”

And it’s not just about who wins, she said. It’s about roster spots, podium spots, awards, prize money, privacy, safety and the entire purpose of female-only categories.

For Navratilova, the answer starts with keeping sex-based boundaries intact.

“The solution is obvious,” she told OutKick. “No male bodies in women’s sports and no male bodies in women’s sex-based spaces for many different reasons, not the least of which is women’s rights to safety, dignity and fairness and privacy.”

Navratilova said her private conversations with King have made King’s public position even more frustrating.

“Billie Jean has repeatedly told me over the last four or five years that she would love to talk to me about it, that she defers to me because I know a lot more about it than she does,” Navratilova said.

But Navratilova said the conversations she expected, never really happened.

“Without talking to me really and listening to what my points were, she just went her way and put out the statement by her and the Women’s Sports Foundation about inclusion and all this stuff,” Navratilova said.

That, Navratilova said, is what surprised her most.

“I don’t think she really has heard the other side of the debate, so to speak,” Navratilova said.

Navratilova said she wants King to answer the question directly.

“Please get Billie Jean on record,” Navratilova said. “I’d like to know how she explains it because she hasn’t been able to explain it to me.”

OutKick contacted King and the Women’s Sports Foundation seeking comment and offering King an interview. Neither responded.

And Navratilova is not alone.

Nancy Hogshead, a three-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer, civil rights lawyer and former Women’s Sports Foundation president, went even further.

Asked whether King’s comments on male advantages suggested she was starting to come around, Hogshead rejected that premise.

“Oh no, she’s always known that,” Hogshead told OutKick. “She’s a hypocrite, she’s a total hypocrite.”

Hogshead said she could understand confusion several years ago, before more research and high-profile cases brought the issue to the forefront.

Her own view, Hogshead said, was not always what it is now.

“I was in favor of it too,” Hogshead said. “I thought this was about inclusion and nondiscrimination. I thought it was fair.”

That has changed.

“I was wrong,” Hogshead said. “I was dead wrong.”

Hogshead pointed to sex-eligibility disputes involving Caster Semenya, the Lia Thomas case and research on male puberty and athletic performance as part of what caused her to rethink her position.

She said the same evidence should matter for King.

“She knows, but she hasn’t made the connection,” Hogshead said. “As she says, men are faster, stronger, bigger lungs structurally, but hasn’t made the connection of like, oh, so that’s unfair to the girls to have to compete with that.”

Hogshead said her frustration with King and the Women’s Sports Foundation predates the transgender-athlete debate.

“I wouldn’t say I left,” Hogshead said of her 2014 departure from WSF. “I would say I got fired because I would not sign a contract.”

Hogshead alleged the contract would have restricted her from speaking publicly about sexual abuse and harassment involving athletes.

Asked why she believed a women’s sports organization would want to limit her ability to speak on that issue, Hogshead pointed to what she described as King’s aversion to backlash.

“Because Billie Jean didn’t want to go into any room and face hostility or having somebody be against her,” Hogshead said.

Hogshead connected that episode to the current fight over transgender athletes in women’s sports.

“I think it’s more political for the same reason, for the exact same reason that she didn’t wanna be involved in the sexual abuse issue or she didn’t want the Women’s Sports Foundation to be involved,” Hogshead said. “It’s hard to be the tip of the spear.”

To Hogshead, both fights come back to the same issue: whether women’s sports leaders are willing to take unpopular stands when women and girls need defending.

OutKick separately asked the Women’s Sports Foundation whether Hogshead’s role ended because she refused to sign a contract restricting her from speaking publicly about sexual abuse in sports and whether King was involved in or aware of that contract decision. WSF did not respond before publication.

That leaves a central question unanswered.

If men have physical advantages over women, and King says they do, then why should biological males who identify as women be allowed into female categories?

Navratilova’s position is especially notable because she has personal history with Renée Richards, the transgender tennis player who sued to compete in the women’s draw at the 1977 U.S. Open.

Richards later coached Navratilova.

That history matters because Navratilova didn’t come to the issue as an opponent of inclusion.

“Because of Renée, I was completely all-in for inclusion,” Navratilova said. “Most of us welcomed Renée into the fold.”

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But Navratilova said Richards competed at a very different moment and under very different circumstances.

Richards was 43 and not in peak playing shape when competing against women, Navratilova said. At the time, Richards was essentially a one-off case.

“It was only one because she won the right to compete in a court of law,” Navratilova said. “There were no others. Even if there were other transgender people, they would have to sue for the right to compete.”

That has changed.

In recent years, trans-identifying biological male athletes have competed in women’s and girls’ sports across the country, from high school track and field to college and junior college volleyball to cycling, swimming and other sports.

Navratilova said the change forced her to reconsider the issue in a way she did not have to when Richards was the only example. But, more importantly, Richards also has a new perspective on the issue.

“Renée herself now says she should not have been able to compete,” Navratilova said. “She realizes now she had an advantage.”

Richards made a similar argument in a 2024 position paper published by Sports Illustrated in 2025. “I believe that having gone through male puberty disqualifies transgender women from the female category in sports,” Richards wrote, adding that a “retained physical advantage persists” even after testosterone reduction

That’s why Navratilova says it’s no longer enough to rely on the language of inclusion without answering the competitive question.

“Boys are faster, stronger, quicker than girls,” Navratilova said. “And so, if it doesn’t matter who wins, why do they have to compete as a girl? If they feel like a girl, they can still compete with the boys if they don’t care where they end up. Why is it the girls that need to suck it up?”

Navratilova came out publicly as a lesbian in 1981 and became one of the most prominent openly gay athletes in the world.

That’s part of what makes the backlash against her so striking.

Navratilova has been called homophobic, transphobic, bigoted and worse for her position on women’s sports. She told OutKick the attacks are especially frustrating because many of the people attacking her don’t know what it was like for gay athletes when she came out.

Asked what she makes of being called homophobic, Navratilova dismissed the idea.

“It’s just stupid,” Navratilova said. “I came out before they were born, so they don’t know what it was like.”

Navratilova said the criticism from within the LGBTQ advocacy world has been painful because she still believes in equal rights.

“I respect everybody’s right to human rights, equal rights everywhere,” Navratilova said.

But she said equal rights do not include the right for male-bodied athletes to enter female sports or female-only spaces.

“You do not have a right to come into my space,” Navratilova said.

That doesn’t mean the verbal attacks haven’t stung.

“What does it make me feel like? Just sad,” Navratilova said. “Just really sad that they would just name-call rather than have a discussion and totally discount what I went through and twist it around.”

King’s legacy in women’s sports is undeniable.

She fought for women to have opportunities, respect, prize money and a professional tour of their own. She famously beat Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes,” a moment that became larger than tennis and helped cement King as a symbol of women’s equality.

But that history is exactly why Navratilova and Hogshead say King’s current position deserves scrutiny.

Women’s sports were not created because women lacked talent, discipline or courage. They were created because biological sex matters in athletics.

King knows that. She has said so herself.

That’s why Navratilova wants an answer.

How does King square a lifetime spent fighting for women’s sports with a position that allows biological males to compete against females?

So far, King hasn’t answered that question for OutKick. And according to Navratilova, she hasn’t answered it for her, either.