HE STILL BELIEVES IN PROMISE OF AMERICA’S IMMIGRANTS
An historic migration surge has defined the tenure of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who defended the Biden administration’s response to the crisis in an interview with McClatchy.
Beyond America’s southern border, a new wave of migrants to the United States is reshaping communities across the country, fueling economic growth in the heartland and upending local politics from its smallest towns to its largest cities.
In Columbia, South Carolina, voters say immigration has become their top priority in the upcoming presidential election, despite having one of the smallest migrant populations in the nation. In rural Kansas, state lawmakers are pushing for a border crackdown as local farmers beg Congress to pass bipartisan immigration reform that would resolve a desperate shortage of agricultural labor. And in central California, a migrant Latino population deeply rooted in the local culture is grappling with the impacts of a new generation of arrivals.
The historic migration surge has rewired American politics ahead of the 2024 election and defined the tenure of President Joe Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, who, despite a political onslaught from Republicans, maintains a rare optimism in Washington over the promise of immigration in America and the prospects for reform.
“Immigration has been a place of political resort to really engender anger and emotions,” Mayorkas said in an interview with
McClatchy, “but if people look at it fairly and squarely, this nation has prospered because of legal immigration.”
The recent influx of migrants — the largest in modern American history — reflects not just a broken immigration system unable to handle record encounters at the border with Mexico, but a trend of instability across the Western Hemisphere that bears no signs of relief.
Polls suggest nearly half of Americans believe this new wave of migrants will make the country worse off in the long run. And yet, over the next decade, net migration is set to increase U.S. gross domestic product by roughly $7 trillion and increase revenues by $1 trillion, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office.
To Mayorkas, the solutions are clear. And so are the politics.
“There are leaders who want to deliver a solution for the American people, and there are officials who want to continue the problem to be able to really just communicate slogans,” he said. “We need solutions. The American people deserve solutions.”
ROOT CAUSES AND LEGISLATIVE ACTIONS
Sitting down for an interview at DHS headquarters in Washington, Mayorkas pushed back against criticism that the Biden administration could do more on its own through executive action to resolve the crisis.
“We’ve issued regulations to strengthen our enforcement operations in a number of different ways. Our executive actions have been challenged in the courts, just as the prior administration’s executive actions were challenged in the courts,” he said. “The enduring solution, the solution that will last and fix the system, is congressional action.”
Earlier this year, Mayorkas worked closely with Republican and Democratic lawmakers in the Senate on a bipartisan package that, if passed, would have been the strictest and most sweeping reform to U.S. immigration law since the 1990s.
The bill, endorsed by the conservative National Border Patrol Council, would have provided funding for additional Customs and Border Protection personnel, detention beds, asylum officers and immigration judges. It would have given the president explicit authority to shut the border in the event of a concentrated surge, while raising the bar required for migrants to claim asylum.
It was a package that drew ire from immigration advocates on the progressive left, angered by the new standards it would require of asylum seekers. But the effort ultimately collapsed under pressure from the right, after former President Donald Trump directed Republican lawmakers to oppose it out of the gate, calling it a “great gift” to Democrats.
“There was a bipartisan group of senators that delivered an extraor