The bill doesn’t, in fact, offer funds for anything that might stop immigration. Instead, it demands that the Department of Homeland Security ensure border agents get adequate religious counseling. While it doesn’t require the Border Patrol to be staffed entirely with anti-vaxxers, it does require DHS to “make every effort to retain Department employees who are not vaccinated against COVID-19.”
The collection of peeves from the culture wars scattered through Republicans’ bill underscores just how crazy it was for anyone to believe the GOP would take an honest shot at solving what has become President Biden’s biggest political headache. Why do that if they can impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas instead!
And yet, the Biden administration’s many sophisticated, creative efforts to slow the flow of humanity toward the southern border seem no more effective than the legislative flotsam offered up by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his friends.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Biden issued 535 executive actions related to immigration in just three years, well above the 472 executed by President Donald Trump. Biden, moreover, is looking beyond the brute force favored by his predecessor to stop, cage and expel asylum seekers, crafting policies to deter unlawful entry and steer migrants toward official channels.
Despite all the creative policymaking, though, U.S. border agents have recorded some 6.3 million encounters with migrants since Biden took office. More than 2.4 million were allowed into the country. And they keep coming. In December, they hit 370,000, a record. Of them, 250,000 were encountered dashing unlawfully across the border — exactly the practice the administration has tried so hard to stop.
The humanitarian parole offered to nearly 300,000 asylum seekers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who applied through official channels was meant to dissuade them from trying to sneak across the border and then turn themselves in. So were the 350,000 appointments with U.S. agents offered to migrants who used the CBP One app while on their way across Mexico.
Efforts to coordinate migration policies with some Latin American countries — opening offices in several to handle applications from migrants closer to their homes — were designed to manage the movement of migrants up the Western Hemisphere before they got to the United States.
And there were sticks in the policy mix, too. The administration cut a deal for Mexico to accept tens of thousands of asylum seekers turned back each month. It started repatriation flights to Venezuela. And it declared that anyone caught trying to enter the United States without authorization would be, in most cases, deemed ineligible for asylum.
And yet for all the brainpower put into crafting incentives and deterrents, the administration’s border management strategy doesn’t rate much more than an A for effort. The new tools just haven’t worked at holding the line.
The deterrents aren’t deterring. The presumption of ineligibility for asylum has proven toothless because migrants caught between points of entry still must be screened and there isn’t enough processing capacity. A program to quickly remove ineligible families has handled only a tiny number of cases for similar reasons.
Migrants aspiring to live in the United States, whether fleeing violence or in search of a job, still think that, one way or another, they have pretty good odds of getting through to wait — perhaps for years — for their day before a judge in the backlogged immigration courts. And they are not wrong.
If there is a silver lining to the decision by Johnson and his fellow travelers in the House to reject any deal that might make Biden look good, it is that it prevents bad border policy from getting out the door. Some of the demands from Senate Republicans that Biden was willing to accept include boneheaded provisions such as threatening to “close the border,” whatever that means.
The immigration challenge will not go away. Desperate people will continue making their way to the U.S. border, pushed by violence, hunger or a desire to prosper. History suggests they will not be stopped by border agents with covid in a gas-guzzler, nor by a border wall.
Fortunately, a solution exists. The U.S. economy could use a lot more migrants to replenish its aging labor force. So could other countries across the hemisphere, which until recently had never contemplated becoming havens for migrants. There are ways to turn immigration, despite its challenges, into the win-win story it has been throughout the nation’s history.
This does require Congress to act, though. And that requires Republicans to let go of the culture war flotsam and get down to policymaking.
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