MPI: Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0

2026/01/14 Leave a comment

Usual good and comprehensive analysis by MPI:

Having campaigned on and won re-election with immigration as a top issue, President Donald Trump has kept it at center stage in the first year of his second term. Immediately upon returning to office, the administration advanced sweeping changes to immigration policy, unprecedented in their breadth and reach. These changes have made the United States more hostile to unauthorized immigrants while also altering how the government treats immigration and immigrants of all legal statuses and the communities in which they live. The impacts on individuals, families, workplaces, and the nation’s overall economic outlook and global standing will be felt for years ahead.

While some efforts have stalled or not yet met the White House’s lofty goals, the administration has dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants in the country, deter unauthorized border arrivals, make the status of many legally resident immigrants more tenuous, and impose obstacles for lawful entry of large swaths of international travelers and would-be immigrants. These changes could set the course for reduced family, humanitarian, and employment-based immigration in the future, while also driving key aspects of U.S. foreign policy.

In This Article

To accomplish the administration’s mass deportation goal, Trump advisor Stephen Miller and other aides dismantled longstanding norms. The White House invoked archaic statutes, enlisted support from state and local law enforcement as well as federal agencies that historically had no immigration enforcement role, and pressured foreign governments to receive deportees. Perhaps most visibly, it militarized immigration enforcement: Scenes of troops and masked federal agents roaming U.S. streets, lobbing tear gas and in some cases violently—and even fatally—subduing individuals, have garnered global attention and profoundly changed how many residents go about their daily lives. Among other changes, some U.S. citizens now feel compelled to carry identification with them at all times.

The administration has leaned heavily on executive action rather than seeking legislative change in Congress. As of January 7, Trump had signed 38 executive orders related to immigration, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the 225 total orders signed so far during his first year, which is more than the 220 executive orders signed during his entire first term. The administration also ushered in hundreds of other actions via presidential proclamations and policy guidance that have had profound impacts on immigration policy. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that the Trump administration in the first year of its second term took more than 500 actions on immigration, surpassing the 472 actions over all four years of Trump’s first term.

While some elements of the administration’s approach mirror policies of the prior term, albeit at far greater scale and scope, the changes of the last year have been arguably more impactful than any during the first term. Administration officials appear to have learned from their first-term experience and have also benefited from a much more sympathetic Congress and Supreme Court. Indeed, Congress in July provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with a staggering $170 billion to upscale over Trump’s second term what was already the world’s largest detention and deportation machinery. And the Supreme Court has greenlit several high-profile actions, including revoking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from about 600,000 Venezuelans, although it blocked the administration from deporting noncitizens without due process and did not allow deployment of the National Guard for immigration enforcement. Key questions on birthright citizenship and other immigration policies are yet to be resolved.

The net change has been dizzying in its scope and speed. After the administration further shut down access to asylum, unauthorized arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border plummeted to the lowest levels since the 1970s. This development has allowed the administration to shift its focus largely to unauthorized immigrants living in the United States, whom MPI estimates numbered 13.7 million as of mid-2023. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office, while average daily detention has doubled. On December 19, DHS said that 622,000 noncitizens had been deported since Trump took office, a high—but not historic—number. It is below the 778,000 repatriations carried out in the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, and well short of the Trump team’s pledge of 1 million deportations per year. The administration’s deportation number likely includes noncitizens turned away at U.S. borders and at airports; limited release of immigration enforcement data means it is unclear who is being counted and how. While the administration claims 1.9 million people have “self-deported” during that same period, it has not provided any data, including on use of the CBP Home app, through which immigrants are offered a free flight and $1,000 payment if they return to their origin country.

The hardline approach has extended to many lawfully present immigrants and those aspiring to come legally. The administration has stripped temporary legal protections from more than 1.5 million humanitarian parolees, nearly completely halted refugee resettlement, and severely restricted access to asylum. It has also erected obstacles and therefore slowed the granting of lawful permanent residence, temporary visas, and U.S. citizenship. International students and scholars have been targeted for expressing their political opinions, many newcomers face extensive vetting of their social media activity and medical history, and hefty new fees and visa bonds have caused some would-be immigrants and visitors to rethink plans to come to the United States. Slower legal immigration will likely affect labor markets, local economies, and the broader economic outlook for years to come, with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Congressional Budget Office already reporting negative effects and potential future implications.

This article reviews the changes to U.S. immigration policy during the first year of the second Trump term….

Source: Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0

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A New Era of Immigration Enforcement Unfolds in the U.S. Interior and at the Border under Trump 2.0

2025/11/03 Leave a comment

Another good analysis by MPI:

Unauthorized migration at the U.S.-Mexico border plunged dramatically during the just-ended fiscal year, as the Trump administration leveraged new border controls, further asylum restrictions, and the promise of mass deportations, reaching about 444,000 migrant encounters recorded in fiscal year (FY) 2025. This sharp drop from 2.1 million encounters the prior year was also marked by reversion to a pattern last experienced more than a decade ago: Flows primarily composed of Mexican single adults and Central American unaccompanied children.

The steep decrease in unauthorized arrivals at the border and return to nationalities that are easier to turn back because of existing repatriation agreements has permitted the administration to direct its focus to immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior—in fact deploying significant U.S. Border Patrol assets to cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. To achieve its goal of mass deportations, the administration has increased coordination among federal agencies, elevated cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies, rapidly accelerated the build-up of detention capacity, expanded the use of fast-track removal powers, tapped the U.S. military, and established new agreements to repatriate returnees to third countries. As a result, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recorded more deportations from within U.S. communities during FY 2025 than the Border Patrol apprehended people crossing the Southwest border illegally—the first time since at least FY 2014, according to available data.

While detailed FY 2025 data about ICE arrests and removals have not been released since January, there is no doubt that interior enforcement has risen. But it has become increasingly complicated to track results because only selective statistics have been made public. Returning to regular reporting of detailed data on immigration enforcement across the various Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration agencies could not only improve the public’s understanding of current immigration enforcement activities but also inform state and local stakeholders who want to collaborate or who are affected by enforcement.

Ramped-Up Interior Enforcement and Mass Deportations

While U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to post border encounter statistics every month, DHS has inconsistently released immigration enforcement data  and its last detailed tables of ICE and CBP actions ended with November 2024 activity. Based on the latest publicly available figures, however, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that ICE conducted about 340,000 deportations in FY 2025, including noncitizens with a formal order of removal and immigration detainees who chose to end their detention with a voluntary departure. This would mark a level of activity 25 percent higher than the 271,000 deportations recorded by ICE in FY 2024. These fiscal year figures do not include deportations conducted by CBP, which DHS has yet to release.

The  administration says it conducted more than 400,000 deportations overall between ICE and CBP in its first 250 days, and was on pace to reach nearly 600,000 by the end of its first year. This projection falls short of the 685,000 deportations recorded by the Biden administration in FY 2024—and is well off the Trump administration’s pledge of carrying out 1 million deportations per year.

Location Matters

Where the deportations are happening is significantly different under the Trump administration, with more occurring within the U.S. interior rather than at the border. This has significant operational impacts, given deportations in the interior are likely to be far more resource intensive and carry higher individual and societal costs with enforcement happening in U.S. cities and against people who, unlike many recent border crossers, often have significant years of U.S. residence and deep community ties.

Of the 400,000 deportations conducted by the Trump administration through its first 250 days, MPI estimates approximately 234,000 were conducted by ICE from the U.S. interior, with another 166,000 by CBP.

ICE daily deportations, in fact, doubled from 600 in January to 1,200 since June. ICE deportations have increased as the number of immigrants being placed in detention centers has surged. Since the start of the Trump administration, the average number of noncitizens in ICE detention centers has grown gradually, reaching about 60,000 by the end of FY 2025 (see Figure 1). And by March, most detainees had been arrested by ICE in the interior, not by CBP at the border or through CBP transfer to ICE, as was usually the case under the Biden administration….

Source: A New Era of Immigration Enforcement Unfolds in the U.S. Interior and at the Border under Trump 2.0

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As the U.S. Unauthorized Population Expands, It Is Also Diversifying, New Fact Sheet Shows

2025/10/23 Leave a comment

Another informative MPI fact sheet. Would be nice to have an equally informative fact sheet or analysis for Canada rather than just a general number:

The unauthorized immigrant population has grown sharply, from 10.7 million in 2019 to 13.7 million as of mid-2023, MPI analysts find. Still, even as the unauthorized immigrant population has experienced the sharpest growth since the early 2000s, a full 80 percent have at least five years of U.S. residence—with 45 percent living 20 or more years in the United States. 

Unauthorized immigrants made up 26 percent of the overall immigrant population in the United States in mid-2023. 

The fact sheet, Changing Origins, Rising Numbers: Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, draws from a unique methodology that MPI created with leading demographers at The Pennsylvania State University and Temple University that allows the assignment of legal status in data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). Given that the Census Bureau does not ask survey respondents if they are in the country without authorization, the resulting dataset offers a rare ability to study characteristics of the unauthorized population. 

The fact sheet is accompanied by detailed data profiles of the unauthorized immigrant population at U.S., state and top county levels. The profiles include countries/regions of birth, ages, years of U.S. residence, top job sectors, workforce participation, educational enrollment and attainment, English proficiency, income, homeownership and access to health insurance, among other characteristics. 

Among the key findings, all as of mid-2023: 

  • A growing share of the unauthorized immigrant population—as many as 4 million people, or 29 percent of the total—held a liminal (also known as “twilight”) status granting temporary relief from deportation and work authorization, through Temporary Protected Status (TPS), humanitarian parole, a pending asylum application or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). 
  • Nearly 4.2 million unauthorized immigrants were married to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (aka green-card holder). While marriage typically conveys the right to apply for legal permanent residence, most unauthorized immigrant spouses are unable to apply due to a 1996 immigration law. 
  • 6.3 million children under age 18 live with at least one unauthorized immigrant parent. All but 1 million of those children are U.S. citizens. 
  • 14 million U.S. citizens, green‑card holders or temporary visa holders share a household with an unauthorized immigrant.  
  • Mexicans accounted for 40 percent of all unauthorized immigrants—down significantly from their 62 percent share in 2010. 
  • 21 percent of all unauthorized immigrants lived in California; overall, half lived in California, Texas, Florida or New York. 

Source: As the U.S. Unauthorized Population Expands, It Is Also Diversifying, New Fact Sheet Shows

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Can Near-Historic Low Migrant Encounter Levels at the U.S.-Mexico Border Be Sustained?

2025/06/11 Leave a comment

Good question, force only or with other migration management measures that started under the Biden administration:

Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen to lows not seen since the 1960s. In April, the U.S. Border Patrol reported intercepting fewer than 8,400 irregular crossers—a stark contrast from the record high of nearly 250,000 encounters witnessed in December 2023. And data picked up elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere suggest unauthorized migration headed northward is slowing across the region: Reporting from the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle that divides Panama and Colombia, shows there were just 200 crossings in March, compared to more than 37,000 the same month a year earlier.

With these near-historic lows, the Trump administration can rightfully claim that it has secured the border at this time, building on declines that began in early 2024 and accelerated in the second half of the year. The longer-term test, however, is whether this success can be sustained through the administration’s new show of force alone, without the less visible migration management ingredients that led to the quieting border the administration inherited.

A Year-Long Story of Reduced Migrant Flows 

The current lows build on a pattern of reduced irregular arrivals that started with changes in Biden administration policies in early 2024. Amid the record level of Southwest border arrivals witnessed in December 2023, which came on the heels of two years of record border encounters during the Biden administration, the U.S. and Mexican governments negotiated increased Mexican enforcement at Mexico’s northern border and throughout the country, including checkpoints throughout well-traveled interior routes.

With this ongoing additional enforcement from Mexico, irregular arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased by 53 percent between December 2023 and May 2024 (see Figure 1). The impact of Mexican enforcement cannot be overstated: Mexican authorities recorded more encounters than did the U.S. Border Patrol  every single month between May 2024 and March 2025 (the most recent month for which Mexican enforcement data are available).

Figure 1. Irregular Migrant Encounters by U.S. Border Patrol at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2023–25

Note: The data here reflect encounters recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol of migrants crossing the border without authorization; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations encounters of migrants arriving at a U.S. port of entry without prior authorization to enter are not included here.
Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters,” accessed May 29, 2025.

Following implementation of the Biden administration’s June 2024 Secure the Border rule,  irregular encounters continued to drop, with the ongoing aid offered by increased Mexican enforcement. This rule sought to disincentivize illegal entries and incentivize arrivals at a port of entry by further limiting access to asylum for those who crossed between ports of entry and permitting an appointment, through use of the CBP One app, to be screened at an official port of entry. Those who entered through the CBP One app could later go on to apply for asylum.

Irregular crossings dropped from 84,000 that June to 47,000 in December, a 43 percent decrease. Notably, encounters in December 2024 were 81 percent lower than the same month a year earlier. Proof that the carrot-and-stick approach was beginning to turn the tide was seen in November 2024, when for the first time more migrants arrived at ports of entry than between (see Figure 2). Though by a small margin, this shift established a pattern of more migrants seeking to enter lawfully via CBP One rather than risk entering irregularly.

Figure 2. Migrant Encounters At and Between Ports of Entry at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2024

Note: Office of Field Operations (OFO) encounters occur at ports of entry; U.S. Border Patrol encounters occur between ports of entry.
Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters.”

Inheriting an Increasingly Quiet Border

Thus, the current lows seen under the Trump administration represent a continuation of trends established during the prior administration—and momentum the Biden team put in place by increasing migration management cooperation with Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere as well as further narrowing access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, upon taking office, the Trump administration shuttered many of the programs that had become the basis for dramatic reductions in irregular arrivals.

During his first days in office, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the border and a migrant “invasion.” By cancelling use of the CBP One app while leaving the Secure the Border rule restrictions in place, the Trump administration made asylum inaccessible at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Most notably, the administration terminated access to Biden-era humanitarian pathways that had helped reduce chaotic arrivals at the Southwest border. The Trump administration swiftly ended admissions under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) parole program, which reduced irregular encounters of those nationalities at the border by 92 percent between October 2022 and December 2024. Nearly 532,000 individuals were admitted through the CHNV program, allowing them access to work permits and temporary relief from deportation. The administration also closed the Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) that had been set up in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala to consider migrants for refugee resettlement or other lawful pathways before they reached the U.S. border. More than 40,000 people were approved for U.S. refugee status through the SMOs.

Source: Can Near-Historic Low Migrant Encounter Levels at the U.S.-Mexico Border Be Sustained?

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MPI: Repealing Birthright Citizenship Would Significantly Increase the Size of the U.S. Unauthorized Population

2025/05/20 Leave a comment

Of note. Canadian non-resident self-pay births for temporary residents and those on visitor visa suggest equivalent Canadian numbers of those who could be affected would be around 5,000:

Ending birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to unauthorized immigrants or certain other non-citizens would have a contrary result from its stated aim of reducing the unauthorized immigrant population. New estimates from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Penn State’s Population Research Institute demonstrate how repeal would significantly swell the size of the unauthorized population—now and for generations to come. 

The new projections show that ending birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children with parents who are either unauthorized immigrants or temporary visa holders (or a combination of the two) would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075. 

Each year, an average of about 255,000 children born on U.S. soil would start life without U.S. citizenship based on their parents’ legal status, the research shows. 

President Donald Trump on his first day back in office signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to certain non-citizens. The order, which has been stayed by the courts amid questions over its constitutionality, specifies that going forward, only children born to at least one U.S.-citizen or lawful permanent resident parent would automatically acquire U.S. citizenship. The Supreme Court on Thursday will hold an oral argument on the issue. 

Beyond significantly adding to an unauthorized immigrant population that MPI estimates stood at 13.7 million as of mid-2023, the end of birthright citizenship for many children would create a self-perpetuating, multi-generational underclass—with U.S.-born residents inheriting the social disadvantage borne by their parents and even, over time, their grandparents and great-grandparents. By 2075, there would be 1.7 million U.S. born who were the children of two parents who had themselves been born in the United States, yet would nonetheless lack legal status, the authors estimate. 

“This creation of a class of U.S.-born residents deprived of the rights that citizenship conveys to their neighbors, classmates and work colleagues could sow the seeds for significant disruption to economic mobility and social cohesion in the years and decades ahead,” Jennifer Van Hook, Michael Fix and Julia Gelatt write in the analysis published today. 

The researchers’ projections use assumptions that in-migration, out-migration and fertility rates will hold steady. Yet even if the U.S. government fully sealed the border against illegal entries and ramped up deportations significantly, changes to birthright citizenship would still result in an unauthorized population that is 1.3 million larger in 2045 than it would be if current birthright citizenship interpretations held. 

Read the analysis here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/birthright-citizenship-repeal-projections. 

Source: Repealing Birthright Citizenship Would Significantly Increase the Size of the U.S. Unauthorized Population

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Trump Administration Bends U.S. Government in Extraordinary Ways towards Aim of Mass Deportations

2025/03/01 Leave a comment

Good analysis by MPI:

Invoking the specter of “invasion,” the Trump administration has set out to build a fundamentally new, all-of-government machinery to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations of resident unauthorized immigrants and new irregular arrivals.

To carry out this enterprise, the administration has enlisted federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that have previously never played significant roles—or any, in the case of the IRS—in immigration enforcement. It also has directed other federal law enforcement entities, including prosecutors, to prioritize deportations. And it has significantly increased the military’s involvement by deploying sizeable numbers of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, for the first time using military aircraft to carry out deportation flights, and, also in a first, detaining noncitizens arrested inside the United States at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Reaching beyond the federal ambit, the administration is also doubling down on its pressure on state and local authorities to conduct immigration enforcement actions traditionally reserved for federal agents, and is seeking or threatening to penalize those that offer resistance. And it has made cooperation on immigration a high priority in foreign affairs, taking an iron-fist approach to negotiations with foreign counterparts. Facing U.S. threats to impose tariffs, end foreign assistance, and take over the Panama Canal, Mexico and a number of other Latin American countries have agreed to implement migration controls, with some also agreeing to hold third-country nationals removed from the United States. So far, these countries have sought to appease the Trump administration, but policy implementation has been measured and strategic. Mexico, for example, has refused to accept deportees arriving on military planes and has also threatened reciprocal tariffs on U.S. imports should the Trump administration impose tariffs as early as March 4.

Finally, the administration has achieved something that several of its predecessors could not: Getting Congress to act on immigration legislation. The White House scored a victory when, within a few days of the inauguration, Congress in a bipartisan fashion passed the Laken Riley Act, the first stand-alone immigration legislation in nearly two decades. The law dramatically increases mandatory detention of noncitizens accused of certain criminal offenses.

The orchestrated, whole-of-government machinery displayed by this administration in its first month—accompanied by a muscular, carefully crafted messaging campaign—has the closest parallels with the actions that occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when broad swaths of the federal government were repurposed to serve the national security mission. The fundamental difference is that post-9/11 actions were a response to an actual attack on U.S. soil, whereas today’s rhetoric of “invasion” and the arrival of foreign “military-age” men intent on building an “army” is not matched by reality. While encounters of asylum seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border reached record levels in fiscal year (FY) 2021 and FY 2022, there is no evidence so far of a significant threat to national security or general public safety. And, in fact, irregular crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border significantly declined during 2024, and in particular during the latter half of the calendar year….

Source: Trump Administration Bends U.S. Government in Extraordinary Ways towards Aim of Mass Deportations

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The Unauthorized Immigrant Population Expands amid Record U.S.-Mexico Border Arrivals

2025/02/10 2 Comments

Helps explain some of the Trump administration concerns with the Southern border (but not the Northern one). Good series of explanatory charts:

Amid record encounters of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal years (FY) 2021 and 2022 and wide use of humanitarian parole to allow entry of migrants arriving without visas, the size of the unauthorized immigrant population has reached its highest level yet. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that approximately 13.7 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States as of mid-2023, up from 12.8 million the year prior. MPI revised upwards its estimates for 2022 and prior years, using an updated methodology that permits better addressing the Census Bureau’s undercount of new immigrants.

Between 2019 and 2023, the unauthorized immigrant population grew by 3 million, or an average of 6 percent per year (see Figure 1). The nation had not seen yearly increases this large since the early 2000s.

This growth is partially explained by increased irregular arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border, with a rising mix of nationalities from across the Western Hemisphere from countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who entered with humanitarian parole from Ukraine, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries. And it also stems from sizable numbers of Europeans and others who overstayed their nonimmigrant visa.

Most of the changes are expected continuations of trends that started several years ago. For example, the unauthorized immigrant population from Venezuela started to grow quickly following the severe economic and political turbulence that began there in 2015. Likewise, the unauthorized populations from Honduras and Guatemala grew rapidly starting around 2019….

Source: The Unauthorized Immigrant Population Expands amid Record U.S.-Mexico Border Arrivals

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Legal Pathways and Enforcement: What the U.S. Safe Mobility Strategy Can Teach Europe about Migration Management

2024/12/17 Leave a comment

Usual solid analysis from MPI, with approach and results undercover by media and not discussed by Harris campaign:

As the Biden administration comes to an end on January 20, so does one of the most ambitious migration management policy agendas in recent memory. Over the last four years, the administration initiated an innovative strategy mixing increased regional cooperation on immigration enforcement and a more orderly system for border arrivals with a significant expansion of lawful pathways and efforts to push humanitarian protection decisions away from the border. Based on the notion of “safe mobility,” this strategy eventually saw irregular migration to the U.S.-Mexico border drop to its lowest level in almost five years after a period of record arrivals. But it took a long time to implement the various elements—a period during which the U.S. public became increasingly restive over perceived chaos at the border and large numbers of irregular arrivals. Even as some key aspects of the strategy have yet to be fully implemented, the incoming Trump administration will assert its own, differing vision for migration management at U.S. borders and relations with neighboring countries.

Still, the Biden-era innovations have been watched with interest across the Atlantic, where many European governments are struggling to find an effective answer to similar mixed movements of asylum seekers and irregular migrants. While some of the U.S. measures were more developed than others, together they provide the seeds of an approach that ensures greater border control while advancing pathways for humanitarian protection.

The Biden experience makes clear, though, that sequencing matters. Many of the elements promoting protection pathways preceded the efforts for greater regional enforcement and heightened U.S. requirements to seek asylum at borders. It was not until June 2024 that many enforcement measures, including greater cooperation with the Mexican and Panamanian governments and narrowing of asylum eligibility at borders, were fully implemented, with irregular arrivals then dropping precipitously. As a result, the administration will likely be remembered more for the several million migrants who were allowed across the U.S.-Mexico border, rather than the combination of measures that finally brought irregular migration under control.

The incoming Trump administration will undoubtedly pursue a strategy based primarily on enforcement, not lawful pathways, and further reduce access to humanitarian protection. That does not mean, however, that a balanced approach that includes robust enforcement and lawful pathways is dead. Instead, for countries that want to pursue this, it points to the need for a more pragmatic approach that achieves early reductions in arrivals while also preserving pathways for protection, not delaying the enforcement-focused elements of the strategy….

Finally, the Biden administration initiatives offer a crucial lesson about managing public trust and messaging. First, it has become almost gospel that the orderliness of migration (in a planned, legal way) matters almost as much or more than the absolute numbers arriving. The CHNV and SMO programs would seem to have fulfilled this criteria—migrants arrived with authorization at airports and with a sponsor or local agency ready to receive them and support their initial reception costs. Yet there was little messaging to U.S. publics by the government about either program, leaving the door open for critics to exploit the narrative, accusing the administration of paying to fly in future voters. It also seems that numbers may, in fact, matter after all. While more than 860,000 migrants came in through CBP One appointments and another 800,000-plus through the CHNV process and similar parole processes for Ukrainians and Afghans, nearly 4.2 million other migrants were allowed in after crossing a border without authorization, in addition to others who managed to cross the border undetected. For many local communities and service providers, who received minimal support from the federal government for the costs incurred in addressing the needs of these new arrivals, the pace of change and demands placed upon them were great….

Source: Legal Pathways and Enforcement: What the U.S. Safe Mobility Strategy Can Teach Europe about Migration Management


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Experts pour cold water on Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship — but issue a stark warning

2024/12/12 Leave a comment

Think this assessment largely correct. More performative but not without consequences and distracts from what the administration can and will do:

…”President-elect Trump is trying to send a message to people all over the world and also to unauthorized immigrants in the United States that he’s going to be tough on immigration,” argued Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan think tank.

“He hopes that people will choose not to make the trip to the United States and not try to enter,” she told Salon in a phone interview. “I think he also hopes that people who are living in the United States without status might opt to leave the country on their own.”

Trump has signaled an interest in repealing birthright citizenship since his first run for president, including the change in his immigration policy proposal in 2015, according to CNN. Trump insisted to Axios in 2018 that it was possible to do so through an executive order and last May, Trump released a campaign video proclaiming he would sign an executive order to roll back the right on day one of his presidency, according to NBC News.

The impact of repealing the right would be immense. A 2020 MPI and Pennsylvania State University analysis found that ending birthright citizenship for U.S. babies with two undocumented immigrant parents would lead to a 4.7 million-person increase in the population of unauthorized people by 2050, including one million children born to two parents who had been born in the U.S. themselves.

That population would skyrocket to 24 million by 2050 from 11 million at the time of the analysis’ publishing if U.S. babies with only one undocumented parent were also denied citizenship, the researchers found.

Gelatt said that such an action from the Trump administration would create a “multigenerational class of people who are excluded from full rights” and citizenship, which would restrain their ability to achieve higher earnings, support their families and contribute to the country through taxes.

“Denying people that legal status, even if they’re born in the United States, would put people in a much more legally vulnerable, economically vulnerable position,” she said.

Depending on the exact language of Trump’s proposed executive order, ending birthright citizenship could also impact U.S.-born children’s parents, added Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School. Such an order could potentially prevent officials from issuing passports, Social Security numbers or providing welfare benefits to family members of those children.

But Trump has no viable legal pathway to repealing birthright citizenship, Yale-Loehr told Salon in an email. An executive order can’t repeal an amendment, and any executive action Trump took attempting to do so would “trigger immediate litigation.”

Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which was intended to grant citizenship and civil liberties to formerly enslaved African Americans. Contrary to what Trump told Welker, more than 30 nations, largely in the western hemisphere, provide birthright citizenship.

Amending the Constitution to upend the 14th Amendment would require a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate as well as ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Even with slim Republican majorities in both chambers during Trump’s next term, such a proposal would be unlikely to get past either chamber.

His proposed executive order is also unlikely to withstand any legal challenges as the likelihood of the Supreme Court, despite its conservative majority, striking birthright citizenship from the Constitution is slim to none, added Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA School of Law professor and faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and policy.

“Even though people say that the court has become more conservative, this would be even further in the direction of trying to overturn the past than we’ve seen,” he told Salon in a phone interview.

Ending birthright citizenship would upend the foundation of how the nation has historically seen itself — as a country of immigrants — flying in the face of the purpose of the American Civil War and much of the United States immigration history since its founding, Motomura said. He pointed to the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim ArkSupreme Court decision that held that U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants were U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment even though their parents were, at the time, legally barred from obtaining citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Acts.

“This is all part of the racial history of the United States. This is why this is so bedrock compared to other things that the Supreme Court is sometimes characterized for doing as being quite radical,” he explained. “This goes way beyond overruling Roe v. Wade. I think that was a radical move, but this is no comparison. This is quite a bit more of a rethinking of what the country is even about.”

Given how unlikely it is that Trump would succeed at repealing birthright citizenship, what purpose, then, could Trump’s focus on ending the right serve? Generating political value, Gelatt and Motomura argued, the former pointing to the importance of illegal immigration and the border to voters during the 2024 election.

Source: Experts pour cold water on Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship — but issue a stark warning

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MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

A reminder given the falsehoods in the USA election:

Immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population, notwithstanding the assertion by critics that immigration is linked to higher rates of criminal activity. This reality of reduced criminality, which holds across immigrant groups including unauthorized immigrants, has been demonstrated through research as well as findings for the one state in the United States—Texas—that tracks criminal arrests and convictions by immigration status.

A growing volume of research demonstrates that not only do immigrants commit fewer crimes, but they also do not raise crime rates in the U.S. communities where they settle. In fact, some studies indicate that immigration can lower criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established….

Source: MPI: Immigrants and Crime in the United States

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