It's Not Biden's Fault We Don't Have a Coherent Immigration Policy
Indeed, it's not any President's fault. Congress has not been able to agree on one.
Imagine, instead of the current situation on the border, with unaccompanied children showing up to make mostly questionable asylum claims that will either get them paroled into the United States or placed in detention, that we had a policy that would allow 500,000 families with children to migrate to the United States each year from Latin America, requiring these families to apply for these visas and be subjected to background checks, while anyone caught crossing the border while making a bogus asylum claim would be deprived of the ability to apply for this new category of visas. Do you think we’d have a border crisis right now?
Or, imagine, instead of the current situation, we hired thousands of new immigration judges to quickly adjudicate, within a couple of weeks, asylum claims, such that no children ended up in long term detention and prospective migrants knew that risking their child’s life by sending them up to the border was highly unlikely to get the child admitted into the United States. Do you think we’d see lots of unaccompanied children at the border right now?
My point isn’t to endorse either of those scenarios specifically (for the record, I would generally favor the first one, as I support a high level of legal immigration, but do not object to hiring more immigration judges to adjudicate asylum claims either). My point is that it is pretty easy to imagine legal schemes that run either in a more pro- or anti-immigration direction, that would stem the flow of children to the border that we are seeing right now. The reason we do not have a solution to the problem is because Congress cannot agree on one.
Congress is hopelessly divided on the basics of immigration policy. That actually does not mean it is impossible to pass legislation- there are probably congressional majorities on several issues, such as the “Dreamers”, the people who were brought by their undocumented parents to the United States and really know no other country than this one, and possibly even on some more controversial issues such as “e-Verify”, the computer system that allows employers to check whether their workers hold lawful documentation to work.
But all of the elements of what the press always calls “comprehensive immigration reform” actually do not answer what is the biggest question, the one that drives all the caravans and unaccompanied children and kids in cages and everything else- how many people do we want to legally admit into the country. Not even the most ambitious immigration compromises want to touch that issue.
And this is why every President seems to end up in a situation where there’s a “crisis at the border”. The basic reason for such “crises” is that there a lot of people in Latin America who would like to live here but, because they don’t have close relatives to sponsor them to come, have no legal means to come here. There is no line or lottery for them. That last point is very important. People often talk about undocumented immigrants needing to “wait in line”. But there is no line. If you don’t have a relative here, and you don’t fall within one of the skilled occupations where a prospective employer can sponsor you for a visa, there is no legal way for you to emigrate to the United States.
But there is illegal immigration, and there is also asylum. Coyotes, the businesspeople who smuggle aliens to the United States, exploit these two features of our immigration system in marketing their services to prospective immigrants. You can hire a coyote, hope to evade the Border Patrol, and try to make a life for yourself in the shadows in the United States. Or you can cross, get caught, and claim asylum. Coyotes also exploit the special humanitarian solicitude that the United States extends to unaccompanied children and families who come to the United States and seek asylum, and encourage those methods.
And then the President has to do something. The President can be tough, as President Trump was, separating families, putting kids in cages, and making deals with Mexico to deter immigration. Or the President can be more humanitarian, as President Biden is trying to do. But either way, people are going to try to cross, because they have no other way to come here. And that gets back to Congress.
There’s been a lot of media criticism on the left in the wake of the latest crisis, complaining that the media overcovers the “border crises”, that it’s not that many people compared to the population of the country, that too many politicians and journalists hold opportunistic photo-ops at the border. That, I think, misses the mark. The periodic waves of people who are attempting to cross into the country without papers do not stop being a story because the waves are periodic. They are a human story as well as a policy story.
But where the media probably does miss the mark is on the policy. It all goes back to Congress. We have to decide whether to have a liberal legal immigration policy or a stingy one. Either decision could very possibly stanch the flow of unaccompanied children at the border. But as long as Congress fails to act, it makes every President look bad, even though the crisis wasn’t his doing. The media should start asking members of Congress how many people they think should be allowed to come to the country legally. Because until Congress answers that question, the border “crisis” will go on and on.