On Immigration
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In raising the issue of immigration during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump repeated online allegations that migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Those claims and the media response to them have overshadowed the bigger policy picture. While some anti-border control activists portray immigration as being like the tides and thus immune to human interventions, the past few years have demonstrated how much policymakers’ choices can influence immigration rates. This is especially the case with the executive branch, charged with enforcing and administering immigration law.
We don’t need to go to a small midwestern town to see the reality that U.S. immigration policy has created. From January 2021 onward, the Biden White House systemically set about dismantling border controls. President Biden rolled back interior enforcement, pushed the already-strained asylum system past its limits, and used executive power to grant legal status to migrants.
In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo that essentially exempted most illegal immigrants from deportation proceedings unless they presented credible threats to national security or public safety, or unless they tried to enter the United States illegally after November 1, 2020. That latter criterion would also seem to exempt from deportation migrants who entered the United States legally after November 1, 2020, and then overstayed their visa. This strategy of widespread non-enforcement took years to wend its way through the courts, but the message was clear: the Biden administration had little interest in enforcing immigration laws within the nation’s interior. A report from the Migration Policy Institute celebrated this measure as “perhaps [having] the most impact on the daily lives of immigrants and their families in the United States” of all the Biden administration’s actions on migration.
Biden also erased many of the immigration policies of his predecessor and thus set the stage for the current asylum crisis. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy required migrants who petitioned for asylum when intercepted along the southern border to return to Mexico to wait for their asylum hearing. During the pandemic, the Trump administration also invoked Title 42 to turn immediately back unauthorized migrants intercepted along the border. Biden announced the end of the “Remain in Mexico” policy within weeks of his inauguration, and he also began unwinding Title 42 (it was fully terminated in May 2023).
Compounding this dialing back of enforcement, the Biden administration also used executive authority in unprecedented ways to increase migration. According to a January CBS report, the administration granted “humanitarian parole” to more than a million migrants, temporarily making many of them eligible for employment in the United States. As a Migration Policy Institute report demonstrates, the administration also used parole in an unprecedented way by granting parole status to hundreds of thousands of migrants each year who were intercepted at the border. (Both Trump and Barack Obama issued parole at the border in only a few dozen cases each year.) Biden’s team also dramatically expanded the use of “temporary protected status” (TPS) by giving temporary authorization to work in the United States to hundreds of thousands of migrants, particularly from Latin America. A Congressional Research Service report in May estimated that almost 900,000 people currently hold TPS status, which often gets renewed.
Taken together, these executive actions created a powerful magnet for unauthorized migration. If intercepted, an authorized migrant could try to claim asylum and then be released into the interior of the country. The Biden administration’s humanitarian parole and TPS policies provide further incentives for such migration, and the CBP One border app provided a mechanism for funneling hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States to begin the long process of applying for asylum.
This magnet drew people from across the world to the U.S. southern border. In the 2020 fiscal year, the Border Patrol had about 400,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants; that number exploded to over 2 million encounters in both the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years. So far, the 2024 fiscal year has registered about 1.5 million Border Patrol encounters. The exact size of this unauthorized surge remains unknown, but there are a few hints. Drawing from federal data, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) calculates that, under Biden, the foreign-born population has grown at a rate unprecedented in recent American history—by about 6.6 million since his inauguration. CIS estimates that a majority of this growth has come from unauthorized migration. Federal data may well undercount the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, so the magnitude of this influx could be even greater.
The Infamous Gumball Lecture
The video below is of an immigration foe, arguing that we should ban all immigration. I completely disagree with that position, but his point that we cannot meaningfully address, let alone solve, world poverty by bringing in a handful of the world’s destitute is spot-on. In addition to that point, notice that when this lecture was taped in 1996 we were admitting 1,000,000 people into the country each year, selected on merit. One million.
