More liberals are souring on Biden’s immigration bungling
Just a few months ago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a rare outlier among Democrats when he dared to criticize the Biden administration’s botched immigration policies. These had led to thousands of homeless migrants arriving in the city virtually overnight while no plan existed for housing them or letting them work.
For that, Adams was vilified by progressives, ostracized by the White House, and dropped from Biden’s reelection campaign. But if the Biden administration hoped to send a warning to other Democrats to keep quiet, it hasn’t worked. Instead, frustration over this administration’s immigration policies has been spreading north — and left. Even the most progressive Democrats are starting to sound more like Adams as they go public with their concerns.
Becoming one of the latest blue state officials to voice dissatisfaction, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey wrote a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas imploring the federal government to address the state’s ongoing struggle to accommodate arriving migrants in the midst of a housing crisis.
Healey’s letter describes a “federal crisis of inaction,” echoing Adams, who has repeatedly criticized the White House on immigration and said that the administration has “failed” New York as his city struggles to accommodate nearly 100,000 migrants, with almost 60,000 in the shelter system. Like New York, Massachusetts has a right-to-shelter requirement, though New York’s citywide requirement applies to most individuals and Massachusetts’ statewide requirement applies primarily to families and pregnant women.
On Aug. 8, the governor declared a state of emergency, saying that the demand for shelter has “increased to levels that our emergency shelter system cannot keep up with.” Massachusetts has increased its shelter capacity for families by 80 percent in the last year, and the state is spending $45 million per month supporting families. Shelters are currently holding over 20,000 people, including 5,811 families, up substantially from 3,618 families in December. Healey joins the leaders of Chicago, El Paso, and Washington, D.C.— which all have Democratic mayors — in declaring an emergency.
A spokesperson for the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities estimates that approximately one-third of individuals in shelters are newly arrived migrants. In response to rising demand, the state has increased shelter capacity by 1,500 units. Despite their effort to accommodate new arrivals and families already in the shelter system, “our service provider partners are stretched beyond their capacity,” said the spokesperson.
Adams and Healey both are broadly calling for more federal financial support and immigration reform, but more specifically for work permits. More Democrats are joining them, too. A week after Healey’s letter, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell signed a letter with other 18 other attorneys general to Mayorkas calling for “immediate action to ensure that new arrivals to our states can work to support themselves and their families,” emphasizing the need for work authorization.
The Biden administration’s current immigration policy forces newly arrived migrants into a state of limbo and dependence. Most migrants released into the United States under humanitarian parole cannot work without also applying for a work permit. According to a June 30 report from the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, because “parolees must apply separately for an Employment Authorization Document (EAD)” there has been an “increase in the number of EAD applications USCIS receives.” The report also says that EAD processing is the “most known bottleneck of the agency.”
The application process — which stands apart from the application process for asylum or visa status — is confusing without legal help, on top of being mired in backlog. Susan Church, the chief operating officer of the Office for Refugees and Immigrants, tells me that migrants are coming to this country expecting to work. “They did not come here to sit in a shelter and to be fed food by the government — they came here to work,” she said, quickly adding, “and to seek asylum, of course.”
But most paroled migrants must wait for their EAD applications to be processed. While the bulk of Afghan and Ukrainian parolees can apply for EADs immediately and can work for up to 90 days as their applications are being processed, other migrants must await the processing of their work authorization applications before getting a job. Though paroled Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans entering under the Biden administration’s sponsorship program can immediately apply for EADs, they will spend a long time waiting for approval — and many don’t even apply in the first place. On March 1, over 75,000 of these kinds of sponsored migrants received parole, including almost 33,000 Venezuelans. By April 13, for Venezuelans there were 15,600 receipts with only 2,900 approvals and 12,600 pending applications. That suggests that many migrants are effectively being forced to choose between under-thetable work or reliance on the state. Meanwhile, state and city governments across the country are being left to shoulder the costs of the federal government’s poor planning.
New York and Massachusetts have, for the most part, exhibited dexterous responses to the surge in migrant arrivals. This state, for example, has partnered with organizations like Catholic Charities of Boston to open more shelter space as quickly as possible. Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll has even appealed to private citizens to open up their homes. But as Healey wrote in her letter, though Massachusetts “has stepped up,” it can “no longer do this alone.”
And the pressure could still rise. Though Southwest border encounters fell in June, there are signs that they could increase again, or at least not decrease any further. According to numbers from the Niskanen Center, the number of migrants traveling through the Darién Gap in Panama is increasing, which, according to immigration policy analyst Gil Guerra, is “pretty indicative of the numbers that wind up being released later on by US Customs and Border Protection.”
The spike in migrants comes primarily from Venezuelans, who under the Biden administration’s sponsorship program, which is meant to deter trips to the Southwest border, can apply for one of 30,000 monthly humanitarian parole slots from their home country if they have a sponsor in the United States. This also means that Biden’s recent transit rule, which limits who can ask for asylum at the southern border, isn’t fully deterring migrants from the dangerous trek (plus, the rule will likely continue to face legal challenges from immigration activists). Guerra believes there is little that government policies can do to dissuade migrants from fleeing the “completely horrible conditions” of their home countries, meaning that the number of migrants who will continue to arrive under new policies is hard to determine.
While expediting work permits could certainly help migrants who have already arrived in the United States, it misses the main problem, which is that parole cannot efficiently accommodate so many migrants. The Biden administration has stretched the use of parole to its limit instead of pushing Congress to seek comprehensive immigration reforms that enhance the pathways for accessible, legal, and safe immigration to this country.
Migrants ready to work and contribute to their community are an asset, especially amid an employee shortage in Massachusetts. But the Biden administration’s current policy hamstrings their ability to work and sets them up for dependence on the increasingly strained state. And there has yet to be any sign that the federal administration can clean up the mess it has made.
So blue states and cities are right to brace themselves. For Massachusetts, which will continue to be as welcoming as possible, the emergency may be far from over.