During Biden’s first visit to the border earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott handed him a churlish letterblaming him for the whole mess. “This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” it charged.
Immigrant advocacy groups and social justice warriors likewise were disinclined to give a Democratic president the benefit of the doubt. Instead they bewailed Biden’s “cruel” plan, absurdly describing it as something that could have been ripped out of former President Trump’s immigrant-bashing playbook.
Performative politics aside, Biden’s instincts are right. America’s immigration system is irreparably broken. But securing the border is just the first step to fixing it. The deeper political challenge is to build a broad political consensus for updating our obsolete immigration laws and align them better with America’s economic needs.
U.S. authorities encountered a record 2.4 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, breaking the previous year’s record of 1.7 million. (The numbers include people caught multiple times trying to cross the border.) That works out to about 8,000 people a day, and border officials are overwhelmed.
Biden’s plan has three main elements: expediting expulsion of illegal entrants to deter people from flooding the border; boosting federal spending to bolster anti-smuggling operations and hire additional immigration officers and judges to speed up review of asylum cases; and opening the nation’s doors to more legal immigrants.
Specifically, it would expand the successful Venezuela parole program to include up to 30,000 newcomers per month from Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba if they have a work sponsor, pass background checks and don’t try to cross the border illegally. And it would triple to 20,000 the number of refugees from Latin American and Caribbean countries annually resettled in the United States.
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Multicultural Meanderings 