Biden is sending the wrong signals on the border
The United States has had a clear legal policy for decades. The law permits immigration with a complicated system favoring family reunification over jobs skills. More than 1 million people are given legal permanent resident status annually under these laws, with millions more admitted to the country temporarily under student and employment-based visas. No one can reasonably argue that this is an inhumane or unreasonably strict policy.
The big dispute is over the millions of people who are undocumented, many of whom crossed the southern border illegally. As of 2017, roughly 10.5 million people were estimated to be in this category, millions of them working illegally in industries ranging from food services to construction. The number of people trying to illegally enter the country skyrocketed in 2019, with more than 1 million apprehended in their attempts for the first time since 2008. Roughly 800,000 of these people come from just four countries: Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Most of those in of the recent spike have arrived from the last three nations, which suffer from endemic poverty and unstable governance.
Some of these people are legitimate refugees who are eligible to settle in the United States, but many want to come here for economic reasons. Like any people, they are susceptible to incentives. Trump-era crackdowns slowed illegal migration because people reasonably concluded that they had less chance of remaining in the country. The signals from President Biden that he intends to dismantle those initiatives have sent the opposite message: The United States is opening to migrants. That, not any underlying change in conditions in their countries, is why the border is being flooded.
The progressive effort to focus on the humanitarian crisis sidesteps bigger policy questions. No reasonable person thinks that people — especially children — who are detained on our border should be housed in crowded or unhealthy conditions. The question is what to do with these people when they arrive here contrary to our laws. The left’s demands that those apprehended not be returned to their own countries, instead being released into the United States without any serious ability to track them and return them if their applications for asylum are denied, are really an effort to repeal our immigration laws through the back door.
Moderate Democrats know this is a political problem for the party. Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar represents a district on the Texas-Mexico border, and he has warned the administration not to ease up too quickly on border enforcement. He surely noticed the large swings toward President Donald Trump and the Republicans in the 2020 elections in heavily Hispanic areas both along the Rio Grande andin Arizona and California. Many Hispanic voters living in these areas appreciated Trump’s border crackdown; it’s their communities, after all, that bore the brunt of uncontrolled illegal migration before Trump. It’s not unreasonable to think even more Hispanics could switch parties if Democrats wholly reverse course.
Uncontrolled illegal migration is also an economic problem for citizens and legal immigrants trying to recover from the pandemic-induced recession. The United States is down about 9 million jobs from pre-pandemic levels. Undocumented migrants would compete for some, if not many, of these jobs, especially the millions lost in the restaurant industry. Americans must take care of our own before we extend a helping hand to others.
Biden’s intention to reverse Trump’s immigration policies gives the country a golden opportunity for bipartisanship. Republicans and moderate Democrats should come together to push a series of measures to ensure the administration adequately enforces existing immigration laws. They should also agree to institute mandatory use of E-Verify, the government database that checks whether a person is legally eligible to work in the United States, as a condition of passage of any grants of amnesty or a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here. The House is scheduled to vote on two such measures this week; these would be excellent vehicles for such amendments.
America is a pro-immigrant country, but it is also a country founded on respect for the rule of law. The growing border crisis shows how lax administration of immigration laws undermines that respect. Congress should forcefully remind Biden of that at every possible opportunity.
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