Border talking points by GOP are out of date
Psst. Have you heard? Illegal border crossings are down. Way down.
From the last four months of 2023 to the first four months of 2024, illegal crossings at the U.S. southwestern border fell a whopping 40%, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Such crossings usually rise in the early months of a calendar year, as the weather warms, so this number might even understate the turnaround.
Two takeaways from this development: First, the standard GOP (and media) talking points about the “border crisis” are woefully out of date. Second: Anyone who cares about border security should support a presidential candidate with (ahem) good diplomatic relationships.
The latest trends at the border have earned precious little coverage, despite immigration featuring prominently this election cycle. Presumably, Republicans aren’t eager to tout the progress, which threatens Donald Trump’s narrative that only he can halt the migrant “invasion.” Biden administration officials have talked a little about these numbers, but they seem loath to prematurely declare victory. (And to be fair, April’s border apprehensions, at around 130,000, remain high by historical standards.)
So what explains the recent declines?
Texas claims its legally dubious border measures deserve credit, but the timing of the state’s actions doesn’t quite fit the trends. Instead, other factors have likely eased pressures.
Some relate to President Joe Biden’s domestic policies, such as creating more pathways for lawful entry, which reduce migrants’ incentive to brave dangerous terrain and show up at our border unannounced. The biggest factors, though, appear to be measures not from the United States directly but from our allies. Most significantly: Mexico.
Most migrants crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States are not Mexican nationals. They’re citizens of other countries, such as Guatemala and Ecuador, who transit through our southern neighbor. In early December, Mexico’s immigration agency ran out of funds to continue its migrant deportations and transfers. Not coincidentally, that is when unlawful crossings from Mexico into the United States peaked.
But by the end of the month, after negotiations with Biden and his top aides, the Mexican president committed to providing more funding and military resources to address irregular migration. This included military patrols, highway checkpoints and busing migrants en masse from northern Mexico (i.e., closer to the United States) to southern Mexico. Mexican authorities have been intercepting about 8,000 U.S.-bound migrants daily.
“It’s mostly about Mexico’s interdiction efforts, especially the ongoing efforts to stop migrants from getting to the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “That came after negotiations with the Biden administration.”
Whether Mexico’s efforts will continue at full force in the months ahead is unclear. The country’s previous crackdowns eventually petered out, when pressures built up on Mexico’s own southern border. Lower-level officials who enforce Mexico’s transit restrictions have also proved susceptible to bribes.
Fortunately, though, Mexico isn’t our only friend that has stepped up.
Other allies have worked harder to ensure that they’re not facilitating smuggling networks. Spain, for example, has implemented more transit visas, particularly for populations known to use Spain as a transit point to Latin America (and from there, into the United States).
Some of our allies — such as Canada, Greece and Spain (again) — have also opened up more legal pathways for migrants to work in their countries. This is happening partly because these countries need more laborers as their native-born populations age. But here, too, U.S. leadership and Biden’s relationship with key allies have encouraged other countries to share more of the global burden of mass migration.
“I cannot overstate the importance of these new labor pathways abroad,” a Homeland Security official told me. “Economic opportunity is an incredibly significant driver of migration patterns, including to the United States.”
Mass migration is a global problem, which requires global solutions. Likewise, U.S. border challenges are not exclusively, or even primarily, about securing our southern border; they require dealing with migration routes that begin thousands of miles away. That’s one reason the GOP’s myopic focus on “building the wall” failed to curb migration during the Trump era.
Trump supporters have conveniently forgotten that border crossings spiked in 2019 to their highest levels in over a decade and were reversed only when the coronavirus pandemic temporarily disrupted international migration patterns.
Deportation and migration are at heart diplomatic issues. Solving them requires having strong relationships with our allies — especially Mexico, which will likely elect its first female president next month.
But it’s not only Mexico; we need friends in countries much farther away and at all points in between. “There are people, today, making a decision in India to pay $60,000 to smugglers to get them to the United States,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “This is not a problem that a wall would solve.”
All of which is to say that voters who value secure borders should consider which presidential candidate proves better at forging and maintaining cooperative relationships with our allies. If you think that’s Trump, then boy, do I have a border bridge to sell you.