Many, including us, had high hopes. But last fiscal year’s 3.2 million “encounters” with migrants — occurring either at official entry points or, more often, when the Border Patrol nabbed migrants entering illegally elsewhere — were the highest on record, by a very long shot. Chances are this fiscal year, they will be higher.
Democrats might flinch at the proposition, but the Republican idea that it should be tougher for asylum seekers to enter the United States makes some sense. Hundreds of thousands of people who reach the southern border every year hope to leave a dismal existence behind, but most are not fleeing persecution, in fear for life or limb. They seek asylum because the U.S. asylum system is the only door available to knock on.
Limiting access to asylum for many of these migrants — by, say, raising the standard of proof required to apply for those caught entering illegally, or staffing up immigration courts so they can adjudicate swiftly migrants’ asylum applications — might not only work as a deterrent, restoring calm to the border. It would also restore asylum to its purpose as route to safety for those who fear for their lives.
And, yet, Republicans must acknowledge that their proposals are not up to the problem. U.S. history is full of failed efforts to build an impenetrable border. These efforts have never been a match to the desperation driving migrants toward it. If Republicans want to put an end to the crush of asylum seekers at the border, they have to provide other options for migrants to come.
The Biden administration’s failure to deter migrants illustrates these points. In May, after the Biden administration stopped using the covid emergency as an excuse to expel them automatically, it said asylum seekers caught by the Border Patrol would be presumed ineligible for asylum, ejected and forbidden from returning for five years. Still, in October, 64 percent of the 189,000 captured were released with a notice to appear in court.
Of the 44,000 who arrived at official border crossings in that month, having made an appointment using the CBP One smartphone app while they were trekking through northern Mexico, pretty much all were waved through to see a judge later.
Because there are nowhere near enough judges to adjudicate these cases quickly — in June, there was a backlog of nearly 2.2 million people waiting to have their day in court — the final determination might take years. This is not a process that will persuade prospective migrants to decline to come because they have low chances of making it in.
There are reasons for this failure. One is a lack of resources: The Congressional Research Service concluded that to clear the backlog of asylum cases in 10 years would require at least 700 immigration judges on top of the 649 employed at the end of last fiscal year. The Biden administration, moreover, has refused to confine families or minors, which make up a large share of new arrivals, preferring to release them to wait for their cases to be heard than to confine them or expel them.
And yet it would be wrong to conclude that draconian policies such as those deployed during the Trump administration — when children were separated from their families and put in cages — would produce more effective deterrence; migrant encounters with the Border Patrol increased by 365 percent during the last 10 months of the Trump administration. There were more than 1.2 million pending asylum cases at the end of Trump’s term, up from 520,000 at the beginning.
Indeed, if there is anything to learn from the many attempts to fix the border crunch, it is that the best policies are those that open new doors. The offer of “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans applying from their home country radically cut border encounters. (It didn’t cut the arrivals from Venezuela in part because Venezuelans have a hard time obtaining passports, a requisite to apply.)
Efforts by Republicans to curtail new avenues for migration are counterproductive. If the objective is to transform migration into the United States from a crush at the border into an orderly process, the country should move beyond the efforts to harden the border — sensible though some might be — to create new doors into it.
A bipartisan agreement — more border resources and procedural reforms, in return for more avenues in — has the best shot of fixing the border.
The Washington Post
