The migrant crisis at America’s southern border is a looming existential threat to the country and Congress has become totally dysfunctional while the elderly man pretending to be President seems not to realize that he has the authority to fix the problem without Congress saying a word.
The Constitution and Congress gave him (well, a predecessor) that authority a long time ago.
But it’s complicated, so let’s look at it.
A Snarl and A Half
America’s immigration is a mess. It’s always been a little bit of a mess because the United States has a lot of border and a historically laissez faire attitude. It became a bigger mess under the Reagan administration and then an even bigger mess under the Obama administration, but it got a great deal messier under Joe Biden’s presidency, primarily because undocumented immigrants learned to claim asylum while Biden’s administration now grants what they call “parole” to hundreds of thousands of gate-crashers.
You know the problem has reached a crisis when Democratic mayors joined Republican governors in demanding the federal government address the situation – NOW.
It’s an election year, so everything has a political flavor to it. Republicans blame the Democrats for the border crisis and they’re not wrong. Democrats are in charge in Washington DC, immigration and the borders are a federal enumerated power, and the Democrats have failed to find a credible way to address the problem. If they don’t wake up and smell the coffee burning, their worst nightmare might become president again.
Facts
The current United States immigration system admits over one million immigrants a year (675,000 permanent visas, 400-500,000 chain-migration applicants, and about 50,000 refugees who have been vetted prior to entry). This is among the most generous legal immigration system in the world. Good for us!
Don’t dislocate your shoulder patting yourself on the back just yet.
Back when I took sociology in college, the rationale was that admitting more than 1% of your population via immigration in a year was not healthy. A country can’t assimilate more than that. At 1 million legal immigrants per year, that’s about one-half of one percent of our population, so we could admit more, but that’s another topic. Let’s address the real issue now.
In the three years that Biden has been president, about 6 million undocumented immigrants have entered the country illegally. Some have been processed by the Border Patrol before disappearing into the country, but most have simply come across the border and disappeared into the country. We have no idea who these people are or what they want.
In Fiscal Year 2017 (October 2016 to September 2017), the US Customs and Border Protection encountered 526,901 unauthorized migrants trying to enter the country. It took Trump a while to get the flow of migrants under control, but the numbers plummeted to 646,822 in 2020. Some of the reduction was covid-related, but a lot of it was because Trump actually enforced America’s existing laws concerning illegal border crossings.
And then he lost the 2020 election and Biden became president.
In FY2023, customs agents encountered 3.2 million unauthorized migrants. According to the Department of Homeland Security about 3.1 million have attempted to enter the country through the southern border, but they admit they only encounter between 30-50% of actual crossers.
Why?
Most South American migrants are lured here by the hope of employment in the prosperous United States, while others are driven by the breakdown of public order and economic stability in Venezuela. But there’s also many who are somehow coming from Africa and Asia. (If you can afford the passage across an ocean, maybe you can’t claim you’re poor). Many correctly view Biden as more welcoming toward illegal immigrants. One of his first executive orders liberalized the processing of illegal immigrants, so they’re not wrong to perceive that.
What has made this surge unique in the Biden administration is the vastly expanded use of parole and asylum by those who would normally not be granted legal entry.
The United State actually has one of the most liberal legal immigration systems in the world. Or did—until the Obama administration inexplicably slowed down the processing of applications in 2014. Why? I’ve heard a lot of half-assed answers, but none of them are terribly satisfying. It seems like a deliberate choice to break a system that was working relatively well.
The asylum laws were established in the wake of World War II to accommodate peoples who feared persecution if they returned to their native lands. This was primarily an issue with European Jews at the time. Endorsing a United Nations convention on refugees, the US passed the Refugee Act of 1980. A refugee must apply from abroad and an asylum seeker can apply from within the United States to be eligible for asylum if they had been persecuted or had a “well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” If their asylum status was accepted, they would be eligible to work in the United States, and after five years they could apply for citizenship.
I know two people who are American citizens today after they (separately) applied through the asylum system while they were here on visas. The system works if you work it.
Like every other country, the United States doesn’t have to accept every application for asylum or refugee status. The president sets the annual limit. Obama set the ceiling around 80,000. Trump, aware of the large influx of illegals coming across the Southern border, dropped the legal asylum limit at 15,000 in FY2021. Biden immediately raised the limit to 62,500 for FY2022. There is no limit on grants of asylum. For the first 15 years of the twenty-first century, asylum applications were generally in the five-digit range but began to rise under Trump, which coincided with huge mass immigration in Europe. In FY2022, there were 259,912 applications and in FY2023, 478,885.
We know from journalistic investigation by Lauren Southern that this huge jump in asylum applications resulted from human smugglers advising border crossers to let themselves be caught by border security and then apply for asylum. Border patrol agents have said that the Biden administration doesn’t require these illegal crossers to establish a legitimate fear of persecution in order to be granted a Notice of Appearance in court before being released.
It’s enough to say you fear such persecution.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities can hold only 35,000 undocumented migrants at a time, so the pressure is on to process everyone and give them transportation into the interior of the country. The definition of “fear” is pretty loose and families and unaccompanied minors face a much lower scrutiny if claiming a fear of persecution.
Combine this surge of asylum applicants with a shortage of immigration judges and there is now a backlog of 3.1 million cases. Illegal immigrants granted preliminary asylum permits are released into the country, virtually without screening, with a Notice of Appearance for a court date 4-10 years out. Two-thirds of them never reappear for their court date.
Do we think they’re going to hang onto that piece of paper for a decade?
Under a Reagan era policy, undocumented migrants can also temporarily enter the country via “parole”, but (legally) only on a case-by case-basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. Paroled migrants must apply for normal legal admission after a specified period of time, but the Biden administration has vastly expanded the use of parole and made it more or less permanent. The groups qualifying under this policy used to be very limited, but now include Afghans, Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians, as well as just about any individual seeking admission at ports of entry. They are granted permission to obtain employment without going through the green card process and may apply for permanent status without going through the normal processes.
This means of the 6 million undocumented immigrants who flowed across the Southern border in FY2023, only about 3.1 million had any contact with Border Patrol, with 1.5 million are actually being tracked by the immigration system. And remember, we still admit over 1 million immigrants legally.
We’ve absorbed the population of a 51st state in three years.
The southern border of the United States has as much security as a bus station during Spring Break.
Feeling the Pain
Many of these illegal migrants stayed in the Southwest and West, taxing the ability of towns, cities and states to provide services. The city of El Paso (population 677,000) absorbed over 200,000 illegal immigrants in FY2023 and spent $89 million last year on migrant services while the state of California spent $900 million. Other illegals traveled to northern cities and towns, often on flights funded by the federal government. Citizens who were previously proud to live in a “sanctuary city” now face the cost of sheltering these extra people while their governments try to maintain public order with people who don’t even know the rules—or, as was the case when a dozen migrants beat the crap out of two New York City cops, don’t care what the rules are. The surge in migrants have taxed the welfare system of these liberal states to t he point where they can’t provided needed services to American citizens who need it. Many of these Democratic-led cities now have outraged citizens pressuring public officials to fix the problem…NOW!
With 150,000 undocumented migrants filling New York City, 62% of New Yorkers (a very immigrant-friendly city) say this is destroying the city. When Chicago spent $361 million on 34,000 illegal migrants in 2023 ($10,600 per migrant), Chicago’s black community turned out in rage. The Democratic mayor of Edison, New Jersey (population 100,000) objected to the 1200 migrants that showed up there.
And the Federal Government Does…?
Biden has made half-assed efforts to slow the flow of illegal immigrants, trying to get applicants to apply online or from processing centers in their own countries, or at designated ports of entry, but if they were already across the border – well, once you’re inside the borders of the United States you have vastly more rights than if you’re outside of the country (Verdugo-Urquidez). This is true even if you came in legally. Biden’s re-application of long-standing (they’re not new) rules slowed migration for a short while, but the effect didn’t last long.
Plans, So Many Plans
November 2023, Senate Republicans unveiled a set of proposals addressing illegal immigration. They tied it to a highly unpopular proposal for military aid to Ukraine and Israel. They demanded the border wall be completed, and they wanted asylum and parole rules toughened. Instead of having to convince an overworked border officer that there was a “significant possibility” that their claim of asylum would be accepted by a court, applicants would have show that it was “more likely than not” that their claim would be accepted. The Republicans wanted to eliminate the broad class-based criterion for humanitarian parole. They wanted parole to be granted “rarely” and only for a year with a possible one-year extension. They also wanted the Biden restrictions on application for asylum, which were under court review, codified into law. They further wanted families facing court hearings held in detention rather than released on their own recognizance. Finally, they wanted other claimants returned to a contiguous country like Mexico while they awaited immigration court hearings.
Remember, migrant rights diminish when they’re on the other side of the border.
So, essentially, they wanted a return to the previous system which had worked fairly well in the past. Most of these provisions already exist in the federal code. They don’t require Congress to vote on them again to be in force. They just need the Biden administration to do its job.
Of course, leading Democratic Senators rejected the Republican proposals. California Senator Alex Padilla warned that the proposals would “eviscerate our asylum system, endangering families and children fleeing violence and persecution.”
That the vast majority of illegal migrants crossing our southern border are military-aged men unaccompanied by women or children seems to have escaped notice.
The ACLU stirred up lots of “immigration advocacy groups” bent on rejecting these “anti-immigrant” proposals. Biden (or more likely his puppet master) urged Democrats to find a compromise agreement with the Republicans on reform proposals. After all, the Democrats need war in Ukraine and Israel to win the 2024 election.
Starting in December , a bipartisan group began meeting to work out a deal. This group is apparently stalled – or at least very slow in producing a proposal. They agreed they could toughen up some asylum criteria, but they don’t agree on reforming the “parole” protocols. There’s no word on other proposals.
And it probably doesn’t matter because our border has very few barriers to illegal border crossers. You can wade across the Rio Grande during most times of the year. Although I’ve always been skeptical of “the Wall”, it would take a decade to complete even if they concentrated on the areas where it’s most needed. Illegal border crossers will still claim “persecution” to get into the country and establishing a better definition of credible fear won’t teach Border Patrol officers how to discern what’s a bogus assertion over what’s legitimate. And once in the country, our Constitution grants crossers rights that those who wait patiently in their country of origin don’t have.
The existence of parole and asylum just encourages illegal border crossings and both those situations will continue to exist under the Republican plan. And the bill likely won’t get through the House, which has an alternative bill that actually addresses the rising number of illegals trying to get into the country.
I want to look at H.R. 2, which contains provisions that might actually work, but will face opposition from American businesses, but I think this article is too long, so I’ll split it in two.
Lela Markham is an Alaska-based novelist and commentator who doesn’t hate immigrants, but thinks they should follow the rules when they enter our country just as their home countries expect American citizens to follow the rules when we enter theirs.
I didn't know a lot of the details that you've brought out -thanks for your research.
I have to admit I owe a debt to Senator Dan Sullivan for a newsletter he sent to his constituents and to Gov. Mike Dunleavy for one of his educational emails. Sullivan is not always a solid sourse of information, so I end up fact-checking him and pretty soon, I had an article.