The intellectual roots of Biden’s border failure
Conn Carroll
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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The new “pathways” created by President Joe Biden were supposed to encourage migrants to cross in an orderly, “legal” fashion, thus decreasing illegal border crossings.
And at first, it looked like it was working. Southwestern land border encounters fell from 211,992 in April of this year to 144,556 this June. “Biden administration says new immigration policy has slashed the number of migrants who can claim asylum at the border,” NBC News reported.
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But then the numbers started rising again. More than 180,000 in July. Up to 232,963 in August. Almost 270,000 in September. Now the border is so bad that the Biden administration has had to close multiple freight train ports of entry, foot traffic has been closed in San Diego, and vehicular traffic has been halted at multiple ports in Texas.
Biden’s border policies have proven to be a complete failure.
What happened?
The problem is, the Biden administration’s theory of how to manage immigration flows is based on a faulty premise.
Democrats and their Libertarian allies seem to think that the only way to reduce illegal immigration is to increase legal immigration. You can see this theory on display in the Cato Institute’s “Parole Sponsorship is a Revolution in Immigration Policy.”
Written by David Bier, the “Briefing Paper” details Biden’s parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, sometimes known as “CHVN parole.” The program, which was never authorized by Congress, allows 30,000 migrants a month from the countries listed above to fly into the United States and stay with host families for, in theory, two years. The migrants are all pre-screened for criminal and national security threats. The migrants do not have to show any fear of persecution. This is not an asylum or refugee program in any way.
Bier noted that in the months following the introduction of this program, illegal border crossings from the named countries also fell. Bier concludes that if we would just let more migrants in from these countries and expand the program to other countries, we could end the border crisis.
But Bier left one huge detail out of his report.
The same month that Biden started letting 30,000 migrants a month in from CHVN countries, Mexico also agreed to start taking 30,000 deported migrants from these same countries. Bier never mentions this.
The reason illegal crossing fell from the CHVN countries had nothing to do with letting non-asylum-seekers fly into the country and had everything to do with the fact that Biden started deporting migrants from these countries back to Mexico instead of just letting them in.
The only way to stop Biden’s border crisis is to stop letting migrants who cross the border illegally stay in the country. The easiest way to do this is to have them remain in Mexico while their asylum cases are heard. When they are denied entry into the U.S., most migrants just go home.
This isn’t a theory. It is history.
When Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador came into office in December 2018, he declared migration to the U.S. a “human right” and began guaranteeing migrants safe transit through Mexico to the U.S.
Southwestern border encounters quickly soared from 40,519 that December to 144,116 in May of 2019. Unlike Biden, former President Donald Trump took action, creating the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which denied migrants who illegally crossed the border access into the U.S. and instead had them wait in Mexico to have their asylum claim adjudicated.
The policy worked. Illegal border crossings fell from 144,116 that May to just 40,565 that December.
And if you don’t think Remain in Mexico was responsible for that dramatic turnaround, just ask the migrants who left.
“I need to find some money to buy a ticket to get back to [Ecuador]. No one told me [I’d be sent back] to Mexico,” one Ecuadorian told the Texas Tribune in July 2019.
“We don’t know if we will win asylum or not,” a Honduran migrant told the New York Times after he was returned to Mexico by Border Patrol. “We have contacted family to buy us tickets.”
“The United States policy to return people to Mexico and the pressure on Mexico to stop the migration are having a big impact,” an immigration lawyer in Tijuana told the New York Times.
“If it’s expanded across the border, it is going to have a pretty dramatic effect, in my opinion, on the numbers of people who are coming,” University of Texas professor Stephanie Leutert told the Texas Tribune about Remain in Mexico. “There is a big difference between waiting in Boston for your case and waiting in Mexicali or Monterrey.”
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The difference between being given an airline ticket to Boston or a bus ticket to Mexico City is all the difference in the world when it comes to border security.
Until the Biden administration is forced to make more deals with Mexico to take more migrants who cross illegally back, the crisis will only get worse.