I vote for Democrats almost all the time, especially at the Federal level. But there are a few issues where I wish I could register my dissatisfaction in a way that doesn't mean voting for the GOP, with border security / illegal immigration being one of them.
At a basic level, I do not believe the Democratic Party, wants to reduce illegal immigration in any meaningful measure. It is only addressed when it becomes a big enough issue that it MUST be addressed, or when it negatively affects places like Chicago or NYC. Immigration reform / border enforcement wasn't part of any Build Back Better proposal, and it wasn't in the IRA that ultimately passed. I believe the goal is to allow illegal crossings, say we just can't afford to process & house them, release them into the US, then after a few years describe them as "long-resident unauthorized immigrants who’ve been living and working in the United States for years" so they garner maximum sympathy.
So, sorry Dara, although your positions are well-reasoned and extremely well-presented, I'm not too worried about the potential that some future President might enforce immigration laws. That didn't happen after the Reagan Amnesty, and it hasn't happened since then.
This makes me sound terrible, and I'm actually quite pro-immigration, but this article seems to rest on the assumption that no one that wants to immigrate should ever be denied, that no one who has managed to get in illegally ever sent back. My policy preference has always been a compromise involving allowing a path to legal status for those that have been in the country for a long time, and a super fast track for skilled immigrants and those that have studied in the US, in exchange for greatly heightened security and enforcement.
Pro immigration people (again, of which I am one) need to understand that the strongest case against a better immigration system is the sorts of arguments made in this piece, that expressly dodge the substantive questions about prevailing lawlessness. Even those that have been here decades took their chances. This idea that the government enforcing the law to the degree it probably should have always been might overlook some small number of people that unexpectedly have a reason to stay, which they themselves didn't even know about, sounds like a lame excuse for never fixing anything.
Anyway if I were in the admin I would be very inclined to accept a pretty hard line deal provided it gets loads and loads of funding to keep Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
I could be wrong, but it seems like the "Safe Third Country" rule that provides a "presumption of asylum ineligibility" for anyone who travels through a safe country on their way to the US is a bigger deal than expedited removal in terms of getting the border under control. To date the rules have only been administrative and precarious, but getting them into law along with enforcement money should be doable as part of the compromise bill.
I must be missing something as to why this isn't a bigger focus in the discussion.
Right now, there are 650 immigration judges. This number could be doubled for ~$320M a year, or about 0.01% of the federal budget. The catch is, any permanent immigration infrastructure can be deployed to deport illegal aliens from the interior of the country. Many Democrats would rather starve the beast than lubricate the enforcement of immigration law. Quite a few Republicans quietly welcome chaos at the border as long as Biden is President.
Practically any fix that would deter frivolous asylum claims would also make it easier to deport aliens who have been here for years. The basic options are 1) give enough unauthorized aliens legal status to make deporting the rest of them palatable 2) risk the deportation of sympathetic undocumented immigrants by a future administration, or 3) tolerate chaos at the border and admit we have very little control over who enters the country. I strongly prefer option one or two.
I lump this column under the basic analysis of "broken systems are broken for everyone." I think Democrats have kind of forgotten that basic point because Republicans behave badly around the issue, but if you are the party of effective government, you need to be the party of effective government and invest in the personnel necessary to make the systems work efficiently and effectively. That's how you deliver humane outcomes.
I'm genuinely skeptical that the GOP is open to doing anything useful on this issue, but the Biden administration ought to float a big budget increase for asylum officers and courts as the compromise on money for the other priorities. The chances of getting a good outcome in the long-term are much higher if we have an effective system with which to implement policy, including (hopefully) a better and more generous immigration system.
So, let's make the compromise about funding more asylum case workers and funding more un-expanded expedited removal of people who are, after all, scamming the asylum system. It's pretty amazing that some of the pandemic relief money was not used to vastly ramp up processing of the asylum backlog. Why provide Abbott and DeSantis with people to demagogue with and Adams to (rightly) complain about? And just maybe if we do this, word will get out that, sorry, walking a thousand miles will not gain you entry to the US unless you can prove your government is out to get you.
The stricture about reducing the scope for future presidents to make bad decisions is actually pretty general and I wish Democrats had used their trifecta to do more of that.
If you eliminate the impossible and the impractical, whatever remains, however ineffectual, will be the course of action.
There will never be a Grand Bargain on immigration, and Democrats will never have the numbers or unity in Congress to enact any type of solution on their own. Asylum law is broken, so I say we either change it or ignore it.
We are quite good at interdicting unauthorized border crossings. We cannot, however, allow the word "asylum" to be a magical incantation that short-circuits The Process. The rule needs to be that if you show up at a port of entry without papers, you get turned around. There will be no hearing. There will be no due process.
It will be arbitrary. Many people will even call it immoral. I am not particularly proud of this course of action, myself. But I am making a political choice to preserve the future electoral viability of the Democratic Party. The idea that anyone can just show up and get into the country must be broken, to stave off the type of massive interior enforcement action the MAGA thought leaders want to undertake. I don't necessarily believe Joe MAGA in Altoona particularly cares if his neighbor Gonzalo gets deported or if every taco truck in America disappears instantaneously, but he wants to see his government send a message. This is the message.
Again, I don't like what I am proposing. But the trouble with a bleeding heart is that you eventually bleed to death.
The premise is strange. The problem with Trump is that he has no problem breaking the law, and by all accounts intends to empty the dept of justice from law abiding people. The concern here totally underestimated the trump problem. I don’t know what precise measures need to be taken in response to the breakdown of the immigration system, but fixing it (including at a minimum stemming the flow of illegal migrants) isn’t just a top American, and humanitarian interest*, it’s also a key to preventing a trump presidency. It’s palpably obvious that the “social justice left” (including self-designated “immigration experts”) are fine with this dysfunction and so can only write pieces opposing this or that measure while trying to convince us solutions are literally impossible. This is unacceptable with regards to the issue but more worryingly still exponentially increase the possibility of a trump presidency (the far right generally rises when people despair of mainstream politics as able or willing to address core problems). The question of this or that policy or law is thus negligible vs the basic danger of trump returning to power. Laws only matter when the critical mass of people in charge are law abiding !
(* and the pursuit of justice in its core sense- ie trying to determine who gets what based on principle not might makes right which is the current situation at the border !)
This entire discussion puts me directly into cringey internet meme territory: I'm taking crazy pills, flames on the side of my face, Fry squints at the camera, you name it.
My day job is at a company that provides data services to manufacturing. And the one thing we hear, with _perfect_ consistency from our customers, is that more than anything else they are constrained by the fact that they cannot hire enough line workers. Not "we can't hire them at our current salary," but "no one applies to any open position at all."
Meanwhile on a regular basis I pass by one of NYC's ad-hoc shelters for asylum seekers, the front of which is eternally surrounded by able-bodied adult men looking for under-the-table day labor jobs, because they are not _allowed_ to work.
Drawing a line from point A to point B here seems really simple, and yet...
This morning’s debate was highly clarifying for me. I went in opposing the “undocumented” label, and I came out far more convinced it was a term invented in bad faith and is extremely counter productive:
1. It doesn’t allow us to distinguish illegal immigrants and refugees entitled to asylum
2. It bets on muddying the waters by the ambiguous associations of “documents/documented” in the English language- is it that these people’s entry is unknown (“undocumented”) - in many cases no, people apprehended and even given a court date can then remain illegally , ditto for people overstaying their visa.
Is it that they lack the required documents (eg a visa)? Again, no. Some overstayed their visa. Some can come with a visa and be denied entry at the airport. Visa isn’t a right to enter, it’s merely a tool in the vetting process of determining whether us wants to let you in, so again- misleading.
The point of the term seems to me to get us to the logical outcome that the solution for “undocumented” immigrants is to give them documents, ie what used to be called, far more correctly, total amnesty. In other words, the “undocumented” terminology seeks to impose the open borders worldview and to delegitimize the basic principle that a sovereign state can decide which foreigners can enter and stay within its territory. That’s very bad. That by so doing it also delegitimizes the rights of refugees makes it worse still.
The GOP wants things to happen on immigration, but does not want to pay for the labor that is necessary to make such a thing happen. It’s just another symptom of their policy-absent platform.
Also, a future Trumpist regime is not going to care about following the Administrative Procedure Act. They will just act without concern for the law or the ability to implement said agenda.
Thank you very much for this, Dara. There's plenty about the system that I don't like, but it's also important to know what the system is, and you've always done a great job conveying the facts and analysis on it.
>Most of the obstacles to this plan come from the need for legislative branch buy-in in the form of enormously inflated spending on immigration enforcement.<
The United States in my view has unambiguously entered a period of demographic stagnation, and maybe even demographic decline. I *welcome* the addition of new blood—human beings who have risked life and limb to make a fresh start in the Land of the Free. I understand there are related problems—housing comes to mind first and foremost. But that's a fixable problem. Indeed, the newcomers might be part of that solution, in that many of them can work in construction.
It would be sheer insanity to spend tens of billions of additional dollars making ourselves weaker and exacerbating inflation.
Dara Lind: thank you for a thorough explanation of a very complicated issue.
I'm struck that Lind "steer[s] clear of this family of statistic" in the third section but in the fifth says "even with the raised standard for passing a screening interview, passage rates haven’t dropped that much."
Aren't we steering clear of this family of statistic?
(Alternatively I'm confused and this isn't in the same statistical family?)
Another thing I find personally irritating about these discussions is the term "court" and "judicial review." In most cases, immigrants are not granted review in a real Article III court - they're granted a form of administrative adjudication consistent with due process. And much of what we're arguing about is what constitutes sufficient due process.
Lind is clearly extremely smart and extremely well informed. I'd love to read an article from her that sets aside her policy preferences and states how she thinks an effective anti-immigration policy should be put together. An intellectual challenge so to speak.
Why not set a list of countries from which asylum claims will be considered? And have that list revised periodically. Seems like an easy way to filter out the frivolous claims.
The concept of asylum essentially says anyone who meets certain criteria is automatically admitted, without limit, no matter how they arrive. It worked back in the 1950's when practical difficulties of reaching the United States limited the flow to a mere trickle, but it doesn't work in the modern age, when human smuggling is a booming and well-organized industry. It especially doesn't work given that it doesn't take that many people to overwhelm the court system and, once the court system is overwhelmed, the system is easily abused by simply passing the credible fear interview, disappearing into the woodwork, and not showing up to court.
To fix the current system, I think a distinction needs to be made between asylum and refugees. The concept of asylum should be limited to specific cases where the individual circumstance of the person makes it compelling to the national interest to let them in. For example, defectors from North Korea with information on Kim Jung Un's missile programs might fall into this category. The numbers would be extremely small (~100 per year).
Then, you have a refugee system to allow some number of people fleeing war or gang violence in their home countries to move to the United States. The number you let in should not be zero, like Republicans want, but not unlimited, like progressives want either. Those that are admitted should, of course, be allowed to work, so they are contributors to society, rather than a drain on it.
And, of course, the amount of legal immigration for people with skills needs to increase as well, and not just high tech skills. For instance, my local transit agency is currently reducing service because it can't hire enough bus drivers. There are numerous people driving buses in Latin America that would be very happy to move to the United States and fill a much-needed void. But, they can't be hired because the government's immigration policy won't let them in. The same is true for numerous other jobs. Clean energy, for example, is held back by a shortage of people qualified to install heat pumps and solar panels, a shortage that more legal immigration could help alleviate.
But, whatever details on skilled immigrants and refugees the government ultimately settles on, the fact remains that the current asylum system is a mess.
Very well-written article, Dara.
I vote for Democrats almost all the time, especially at the Federal level. But there are a few issues where I wish I could register my dissatisfaction in a way that doesn't mean voting for the GOP, with border security / illegal immigration being one of them.
At a basic level, I do not believe the Democratic Party, wants to reduce illegal immigration in any meaningful measure. It is only addressed when it becomes a big enough issue that it MUST be addressed, or when it negatively affects places like Chicago or NYC. Immigration reform / border enforcement wasn't part of any Build Back Better proposal, and it wasn't in the IRA that ultimately passed. I believe the goal is to allow illegal crossings, say we just can't afford to process & house them, release them into the US, then after a few years describe them as "long-resident unauthorized immigrants who’ve been living and working in the United States for years" so they garner maximum sympathy.
So, sorry Dara, although your positions are well-reasoned and extremely well-presented, I'm not too worried about the potential that some future President might enforce immigration laws. That didn't happen after the Reagan Amnesty, and it hasn't happened since then.
This makes me sound terrible, and I'm actually quite pro-immigration, but this article seems to rest on the assumption that no one that wants to immigrate should ever be denied, that no one who has managed to get in illegally ever sent back. My policy preference has always been a compromise involving allowing a path to legal status for those that have been in the country for a long time, and a super fast track for skilled immigrants and those that have studied in the US, in exchange for greatly heightened security and enforcement.
Pro immigration people (again, of which I am one) need to understand that the strongest case against a better immigration system is the sorts of arguments made in this piece, that expressly dodge the substantive questions about prevailing lawlessness. Even those that have been here decades took their chances. This idea that the government enforcing the law to the degree it probably should have always been might overlook some small number of people that unexpectedly have a reason to stay, which they themselves didn't even know about, sounds like a lame excuse for never fixing anything.
Anyway if I were in the admin I would be very inclined to accept a pretty hard line deal provided it gets loads and loads of funding to keep Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
I could be wrong, but it seems like the "Safe Third Country" rule that provides a "presumption of asylum ineligibility" for anyone who travels through a safe country on their way to the US is a bigger deal than expedited removal in terms of getting the border under control. To date the rules have only been administrative and precarious, but getting them into law along with enforcement money should be doable as part of the compromise bill.
I must be missing something as to why this isn't a bigger focus in the discussion.
Right now, there are 650 immigration judges. This number could be doubled for ~$320M a year, or about 0.01% of the federal budget. The catch is, any permanent immigration infrastructure can be deployed to deport illegal aliens from the interior of the country. Many Democrats would rather starve the beast than lubricate the enforcement of immigration law. Quite a few Republicans quietly welcome chaos at the border as long as Biden is President.
Practically any fix that would deter frivolous asylum claims would also make it easier to deport aliens who have been here for years. The basic options are 1) give enough unauthorized aliens legal status to make deporting the rest of them palatable 2) risk the deportation of sympathetic undocumented immigrants by a future administration, or 3) tolerate chaos at the border and admit we have very little control over who enters the country. I strongly prefer option one or two.
I lump this column under the basic analysis of "broken systems are broken for everyone." I think Democrats have kind of forgotten that basic point because Republicans behave badly around the issue, but if you are the party of effective government, you need to be the party of effective government and invest in the personnel necessary to make the systems work efficiently and effectively. That's how you deliver humane outcomes.
I'm genuinely skeptical that the GOP is open to doing anything useful on this issue, but the Biden administration ought to float a big budget increase for asylum officers and courts as the compromise on money for the other priorities. The chances of getting a good outcome in the long-term are much higher if we have an effective system with which to implement policy, including (hopefully) a better and more generous immigration system.
So, let's make the compromise about funding more asylum case workers and funding more un-expanded expedited removal of people who are, after all, scamming the asylum system. It's pretty amazing that some of the pandemic relief money was not used to vastly ramp up processing of the asylum backlog. Why provide Abbott and DeSantis with people to demagogue with and Adams to (rightly) complain about? And just maybe if we do this, word will get out that, sorry, walking a thousand miles will not gain you entry to the US unless you can prove your government is out to get you.
The stricture about reducing the scope for future presidents to make bad decisions is actually pretty general and I wish Democrats had used their trifecta to do more of that.
It's going to be one of *those* days.
If you eliminate the impossible and the impractical, whatever remains, however ineffectual, will be the course of action.
There will never be a Grand Bargain on immigration, and Democrats will never have the numbers or unity in Congress to enact any type of solution on their own. Asylum law is broken, so I say we either change it or ignore it.
We are quite good at interdicting unauthorized border crossings. We cannot, however, allow the word "asylum" to be a magical incantation that short-circuits The Process. The rule needs to be that if you show up at a port of entry without papers, you get turned around. There will be no hearing. There will be no due process.
It will be arbitrary. Many people will even call it immoral. I am not particularly proud of this course of action, myself. But I am making a political choice to preserve the future electoral viability of the Democratic Party. The idea that anyone can just show up and get into the country must be broken, to stave off the type of massive interior enforcement action the MAGA thought leaders want to undertake. I don't necessarily believe Joe MAGA in Altoona particularly cares if his neighbor Gonzalo gets deported or if every taco truck in America disappears instantaneously, but he wants to see his government send a message. This is the message.
Again, I don't like what I am proposing. But the trouble with a bleeding heart is that you eventually bleed to death.
The premise is strange. The problem with Trump is that he has no problem breaking the law, and by all accounts intends to empty the dept of justice from law abiding people. The concern here totally underestimated the trump problem. I don’t know what precise measures need to be taken in response to the breakdown of the immigration system, but fixing it (including at a minimum stemming the flow of illegal migrants) isn’t just a top American, and humanitarian interest*, it’s also a key to preventing a trump presidency. It’s palpably obvious that the “social justice left” (including self-designated “immigration experts”) are fine with this dysfunction and so can only write pieces opposing this or that measure while trying to convince us solutions are literally impossible. This is unacceptable with regards to the issue but more worryingly still exponentially increase the possibility of a trump presidency (the far right generally rises when people despair of mainstream politics as able or willing to address core problems). The question of this or that policy or law is thus negligible vs the basic danger of trump returning to power. Laws only matter when the critical mass of people in charge are law abiding !
(* and the pursuit of justice in its core sense- ie trying to determine who gets what based on principle not might makes right which is the current situation at the border !)
This entire discussion puts me directly into cringey internet meme territory: I'm taking crazy pills, flames on the side of my face, Fry squints at the camera, you name it.
My day job is at a company that provides data services to manufacturing. And the one thing we hear, with _perfect_ consistency from our customers, is that more than anything else they are constrained by the fact that they cannot hire enough line workers. Not "we can't hire them at our current salary," but "no one applies to any open position at all."
Meanwhile on a regular basis I pass by one of NYC's ad-hoc shelters for asylum seekers, the front of which is eternally surrounded by able-bodied adult men looking for under-the-table day labor jobs, because they are not _allowed_ to work.
Drawing a line from point A to point B here seems really simple, and yet...
This morning’s debate was highly clarifying for me. I went in opposing the “undocumented” label, and I came out far more convinced it was a term invented in bad faith and is extremely counter productive:
1. It doesn’t allow us to distinguish illegal immigrants and refugees entitled to asylum
2. It bets on muddying the waters by the ambiguous associations of “documents/documented” in the English language- is it that these people’s entry is unknown (“undocumented”) - in many cases no, people apprehended and even given a court date can then remain illegally , ditto for people overstaying their visa.
Is it that they lack the required documents (eg a visa)? Again, no. Some overstayed their visa. Some can come with a visa and be denied entry at the airport. Visa isn’t a right to enter, it’s merely a tool in the vetting process of determining whether us wants to let you in, so again- misleading.
The point of the term seems to me to get us to the logical outcome that the solution for “undocumented” immigrants is to give them documents, ie what used to be called, far more correctly, total amnesty. In other words, the “undocumented” terminology seeks to impose the open borders worldview and to delegitimize the basic principle that a sovereign state can decide which foreigners can enter and stay within its territory. That’s very bad. That by so doing it also delegitimizes the rights of refugees makes it worse still.
The GOP wants things to happen on immigration, but does not want to pay for the labor that is necessary to make such a thing happen. It’s just another symptom of their policy-absent platform.
Also, a future Trumpist regime is not going to care about following the Administrative Procedure Act. They will just act without concern for the law or the ability to implement said agenda.
Thank you very much for this, Dara. There's plenty about the system that I don't like, but it's also important to know what the system is, and you've always done a great job conveying the facts and analysis on it.
>Most of the obstacles to this plan come from the need for legislative branch buy-in in the form of enormously inflated spending on immigration enforcement.<
The United States in my view has unambiguously entered a period of demographic stagnation, and maybe even demographic decline. I *welcome* the addition of new blood—human beings who have risked life and limb to make a fresh start in the Land of the Free. I understand there are related problems—housing comes to mind first and foremost. But that's a fixable problem. Indeed, the newcomers might be part of that solution, in that many of them can work in construction.
It would be sheer insanity to spend tens of billions of additional dollars making ourselves weaker and exacerbating inflation.
Dara Lind: thank you for a thorough explanation of a very complicated issue.
I'm struck that Lind "steer[s] clear of this family of statistic" in the third section but in the fifth says "even with the raised standard for passing a screening interview, passage rates haven’t dropped that much."
Aren't we steering clear of this family of statistic?
(Alternatively I'm confused and this isn't in the same statistical family?)
Another thing I find personally irritating about these discussions is the term "court" and "judicial review." In most cases, immigrants are not granted review in a real Article III court - they're granted a form of administrative adjudication consistent with due process. And much of what we're arguing about is what constitutes sufficient due process.
Lind is clearly extremely smart and extremely well informed. I'd love to read an article from her that sets aside her policy preferences and states how she thinks an effective anti-immigration policy should be put together. An intellectual challenge so to speak.
Why not set a list of countries from which asylum claims will be considered? And have that list revised periodically. Seems like an easy way to filter out the frivolous claims.
The concept of asylum essentially says anyone who meets certain criteria is automatically admitted, without limit, no matter how they arrive. It worked back in the 1950's when practical difficulties of reaching the United States limited the flow to a mere trickle, but it doesn't work in the modern age, when human smuggling is a booming and well-organized industry. It especially doesn't work given that it doesn't take that many people to overwhelm the court system and, once the court system is overwhelmed, the system is easily abused by simply passing the credible fear interview, disappearing into the woodwork, and not showing up to court.
To fix the current system, I think a distinction needs to be made between asylum and refugees. The concept of asylum should be limited to specific cases where the individual circumstance of the person makes it compelling to the national interest to let them in. For example, defectors from North Korea with information on Kim Jung Un's missile programs might fall into this category. The numbers would be extremely small (~100 per year).
Then, you have a refugee system to allow some number of people fleeing war or gang violence in their home countries to move to the United States. The number you let in should not be zero, like Republicans want, but not unlimited, like progressives want either. Those that are admitted should, of course, be allowed to work, so they are contributors to society, rather than a drain on it.
And, of course, the amount of legal immigration for people with skills needs to increase as well, and not just high tech skills. For instance, my local transit agency is currently reducing service because it can't hire enough bus drivers. There are numerous people driving buses in Latin America that would be very happy to move to the United States and fill a much-needed void. But, they can't be hired because the government's immigration policy won't let them in. The same is true for numerous other jobs. Clean energy, for example, is held back by a shortage of people qualified to install heat pumps and solar panels, a shortage that more legal immigration could help alleviate.
But, whatever details on skilled immigrants and refugees the government ultimately settles on, the fact remains that the current asylum system is a mess.