During the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden vowed that “not another foot” of the wall on America’s southern border would be built if he became president. This is one promise that Biden will fail to keep.
Last week, the White House waived a variety of environmental and historic preservation laws in order to facilitate the construction of border barriers in Starr County, Texas – barriers that, in the administration’s own account, will do nothing to solve America’s migration challenges.
On Thursday, the president insisted that he still opposes border-wall construction in principle but that his hands were tied by legislation enacted under Donald Trump. “Money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get [Congress] to reappropriate, to redirect that money. They didn’t. They wouldn’t.”
It is true that the funding for new border-wall construction was enacted under Trump and that Biden tried unsuccessfully to divert that money into other programs. Yet the administration’s decision to grant the environmental waivers necessary to enable progress on the wall, in the absence of any order from the judiciary compelling it to do so, caught some of its allies by surprise. Given the rapidly growing political backlash to this year’s influx of asylum seekers, it is hard not to suspect that Biden’s action is a willful attempt to improve his electoral prospects.
If it is a political tactic, however, then it’s a dumb one. Building a wall on one small stretch of America’s nearly 2,000-mile southern border will do essentially nothing to stem the tide of illegal entries, let alone to resolve the bottlenecks plaguing our nation’s processing of lawful asylum seekers. If the aim is merely to project toughness on illegal immigration for messaging purposes, Biden’s insistence that he actually opposes the border wall undercuts that gambit.
In truth, the president has no great options for redressing the genuine political and substantive challenges posed by the asylum crisis. Since the expiration of Title 42, an emergency authority that enabled the federal government to summarily turn back asylum seekers on public-health grounds, the White House has embraced a carrot-and-stick approach to regulating migration. On the one hand, Biden has made it safer and easier for asylum seekers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to press their claims through orderly, legal processes. Under a new “parole” program, migrants from those countries who demonstrate that they face a credible threat of violence or persecution in their home countries can fly directly into the U.S., forgoing the hazardous journey to the border through Mexico. Those already near the Mexican border can use an app to schedule appointments when their claims may be heard. The program aims to process up to 30,000 such asylum seekers each month.
On the other hand, the administration has made it much harder for migrants who cross the border illegally to advance asylum claims. The new policy automatically rejects the asylum claims of illegal entrants, unless their cases feature a small number of extenuating factors.
This approach has earned Biden plenty of criticism from progressives in general and migrant advocacy groups in particular. Critics note that the parole program can process only a fraction of the number of migrants with credible asylum claims at any given time, forcing many to enter illegally in pursuit of refuge. Human-rights organizations maintain that Biden’s ban on asylum claims from migrants who enter the U.S. illegally violates both American and international law, which empowers those who set foot in the country to pursue asylum, irrespective of how they arrived.
Even as Biden’s crackdown on asylum seekers has antagonized some progressive organizations, it has failed to deter migration. Last month, more than 200,000 migrants unlawfully crossed the southern border, a record high for 2023 and up from 182,700 one year earlier.
In principle, the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to go to great lengths to immigrate to the U.S. should be seen as a national asset, not a crisis. America’s demographic structure is growing increasingly top-heavy, with workers retiring from the labor force faster than they are entering it. Unless we admit more working-age people into the country, this demographic shift will depress economic growth and make sustaining Medicare and Social Security at generous benefit levels more difficult. Critically, our economy has plenty of need for workers without high levels of education. We are experiencing labor shortages in many “low skill” sectors such as agriculture and food service. And with relatively little training, immigrants can help alleviate shortages in the child-care and home-health-aide sectors as well.
But maximizing the benefits of immigration, and minimizing the immediate costs, requires a variety of supportive policies. If you invest scant funds into resettlement programs and courts that adjudicate asylum claims, then large influxes of asylum seekers will overwhelm state bureaucracies, create massive legal backlogs, and promote a widespread sense of disorder. If you deny asylum seekers the right to work for months as they await their days in court, then they will become a burden on municipal social services. If you engineer a massive housing shortage through zoning laws that prevent the supply of homes from rising in response to demand, then sudden population increases will further drive up rental costs and exacerbate homelessness crises.
And this is precisely what the U.S. has done. As a result, this year’s large inflows of asylum seekers are creating some genuine problems in many American cities. In New York, which honors each of its resident’s right to shelter, the costs of housing and caring for migrants will run to $5 billion this fiscal year, forcing some cutbacks in other programs. The small border city of El Paso has been spending millions of dollars each month processing and transporting migrants. America is an exceptionally wealthy country, and in the long term, the economic impact of welcoming immigrants who are fleeing social crises in their home countries is highly positive. But if the federal government does not step in to spread the near-term costs across all the nation’s taxpayers, some municipalities will be burdened.
The current backlash to migrant inflows is not wholly rooted in the objective, material challenges that they pose. On parts of the right, opposition to the asylum seekers is informed by racial animus. And many voters across the political spectrum react negatively to large-scale immigration out of a general aversion to change. (On the left, this impulse manifests in anti-gentrification arguments that lament not merely displacement pressures but also the cultural changes that newcomers bring to a given neighborhood.) But when you combine such small-c conservatism, a right-wing media landscape dedicated to demagoguing immigration, and the genuine material problems wrought by large inflows, you end up with widespread political discontents.
In an NBC News poll released last week, voters said they trusted Republicans over Democrats to handle immigration by a margin of 45 to 27 percent. The GOP’s 18-point lead on the question is its largest on record. A recent national survey from Marquette Law School, meanwhile, shows Donald Trump leading Biden on the issue of border security by a 52 to 28 percent margin.
The backlash is also damaging Democrats in deep-blue states. A recent Sienna College poll found Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams with net-negative approval ratings, as voters panned their respective responses to the influx of migrants. By a 46 to 32 percent margin, voters said migrants had been a “burden” rather than a “benefit” to the state, while 58 percent said that New Yorkers had already done enough to help resettle the immigrants and should try to restrict the flow of them. Discontents with migration in the Empire State were so substantial that the survey found Biden failing to secure 50 percent support in a race against Trump while leading the Republican by only 13 points; in 2020, Biden’s lead over the mogul never dipped below 25 points.
Democrats in Illinois are also struggling to manage public discontent over the challenges of resettling migrants. The state’s governor, J.B. Pritzker, told the president in a letter last Monday that “the federal government’s lack of intervention and coordination at the border has created an untenable situation for Illinois.”
In the swing state of Arizona, Democratic governor Katie Hobbs has felt compelled to lash out against the White House, saying last month, “Time and again, I’ve asked the Biden administration for assistance at the border, but instead, they have chosen to redirect resources to speed the release of migrants without the support and coordination our local communities deserve.”
In this context, it is unsurprising that the president would reach for more draconian deterrence policies, whether in the form of a border wall or ban on asylum claims from those who enter the country illegally.
And yet, as the Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas has written, there is little reason to believe that harsh deterrence policies accomplish much of anything beyond imperiling asylum seekers’ lives. Simply put, U.S. government policy can’t discourage migration more than an immensely dangerous and expensive journey of more than 1,000 miles does. People who are willing to spend all their savings on a life-threatening trip from Central America or Haiti to the U.S. southern border are unlikely to be deterred by a border barrier or less permissive asylum process. A 2021 review of surveys taken in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico found “no evidence” that knowledge of immigration enforcement policies changed people’s thinking about whether to migrate. This is consistent with a 2018 paper on survey data from Honduras, which found that “the overwhelming motivating factor for emigration” was personal experience with crime and gang violence. Information about the likelihood of deportation did not significantly affect respondent’s plans about whether to seek entry to the U.S.
This survey data comports with real-world experience. Even Trump’s draconian family-separation policy did not succeed in reducing migrant flows with monthly border apprehensions increasing after the policy went into effect.
Deterrence policies generally do not change the calculus of migrants; they also inevitably fail to secure America’s nearly 2,000-mile southern border, which simply cannot be comprehensively monitored or hardened. Between 1992 and 2019, the U.S. funded a fivefold increase in the ranks of its Border Patrol agents with that agency’s budget jumping from $326 million to $4.7 billion. A 2016 paper analyzing the impact of such border militarization on undocumented migration from Mexico found that “U.S. authorities have little to show for billions spent on border enforcement between 1986 and 2010,” as these measures had “virtually no effect on the ultimate likelihood of entry.”
The reality is that America is one of the wealthiest societies in human history, and it shares a hemisphere with many countries that are suffering acute political and social crises and a massive border with its southern neighbor. Given these facts, our nation is going to draw migrants to it as inevitably as magnets attract iron.
If we made peace with this situation, then we could make it work for both migrants and native-born Americans. If we invested in robust infrastructures for processing asylum claims and resettling migrants, while expanding our housing stock through zoning reform and public financing, then mass migration would cause relatively little short-term friction, even as it greatly increased our nation’s long-term prosperity.
But Biden does not have the congressional support to do any of those things. He can improve federal policy at the margins. Although he has plenty of tools for making migrants’ lives harder, he has relatively few for resolving the fundamental problems posed by the existing asylum system. Politically, meanwhile, he cannot escape the fact that he leads the party that is widely (and correctly) perceived as more sympathetic to migrants. Biden could perhaps mitigate the political costs of this perception by projecting “toughness” about the border through rhetoric or policy. But he has had Trump-like border policies in place for the bulk of his tenure, and they’ve done him no discernible good.
His best bet, therefore, may be to do everything in his power to expand the capacities of his parole system; the more asylum seekers the government processes through an orderly legal system, the fewer who will generate chaotic scenes at the border. He could also expand his use of the Temporary Protected Status program to secure work permits for migrants.
At the same time, he and his party will simply need to make other issues more salient in next year’s election. No border wall can keep the Democrats’ immigration problem at bay. But a strong message on abortion, entitlements, tax justice, and democracy just might.
