‘Secure the border’ calls are political theater

Calls to “secure the border” have never been anything but political theater — slogans to prove commitment to a safe homeland. Migrants have kept coming regardless, pushed from precarious lives, and pulled by the promise of security and economic progress in the United States.

Managing migration demands a different conversation, one that focuses less on the border’s impregnability and more on the mechanisms and incentives driving people toward it; one that speaks of the coordination needed with other countries on the migration path to jointly manage the flow of people across the hemisphere; one that takes account of migrants’ contribution to the nation’s prosperity.

Washington, unfortunately, is incapable of this kind of talk. The Biden administration seems out of ideas. And standing behind a standard-bearer deploying xenophobia as a selling point in a hotly contested bid for reelection, Republican calls to “secure the border” amount to little more than a political bludgeon.

Consider the demands presented by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in a letter to President Joe Biden last month. Johnson objects to asylum-seekers being released to wait for their day in immigration court and would like to see more of them quickly expelled. He wants Mexico’s help to house and retain migrants. He wants to end the parole program offered by the Biden administration to encourage asylum-seekers to apply through official channels rather than crossing the border. And, of course, he also wants the wall.

Nothing in recent U.S. history suggests this wish list can achieve the speaker’s goal of stopping large numbers of migrants from coming to the United States.

Immigrants in the 1980s were, for the most part, not seeking asylum. But millions still flocked to the United States. They were largely from Mexico, but also from Central America. Fleeing destitution and hungry for jobs, they crossed the border surreptitiously and settled in the United States as best they could — without legal authorization.

Walls and fences have gone up since then; motion sensors and drones have been deployed to detect and pursue people crossing the border. Border Patrol staffing has increased fivefold since the early 1990s, from around 4,000 to around 20,000. Nevertheless, the number of immigrants living in the United States without authorization climbed to more than 11 million in 2018, up from 3.5 million in 1990.

Today, migrants come from farther afield, including from South America, Asia and Africa. And there are more of them: Border Patrol agents ran into prospective migrants more than 2 million times in fiscal 2023, surpassing the peaks of 1986 and 2000. About 1.1 million more showed up at official ports of entry. Most hope to apply for asylum. And yet they are driven by the same goals as those who sought the United States decades before: a safe environment that provides an opportunity to survive and, hopefully, flourish.

Republicans are right that whatever the Biden administration is doing is not working. The president’s new strategy — to draw migrants toward official channels — isn’t working to stem the flow. The backlog of migrants waiting for their day in immigration court passed 3 million in November. Border agents are encountering more than 300,000 migrants each month. Encounters exceeded 3 million last year. The very concept of asylum is losing public support.

But the GOP has nothing better to offer. Its ideas are born of the myth that former President Donald Trump’s draconian policies — forcing Mexico to house Central Americans; separating kids from their families; putting some in cages — were successful. But migrants kept coming: U.S. agents encountered almost 860,000 migrants at the border in fiscal 2019, before the outbreak of COVID-19 began to hold them back. That figure is almost double what it was before Trump took office. The backlog in immigration court increased by 142% during his administration, to nearly 1.3 million.

The White House has already bent to the GOP’s will. It convinced Mexico to continue to take returned Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who passed through Mexico on their way to the U.S. border. It seems willing to make it tougher to claim asylum in the United States.

It’s not surprising that Republicans remain dissatisfied. It is, after all, an election year. And yet their additional, central demand — that the Biden administration stop using parole to provide legal paths for asylum-seekers who would otherwise launch themselves at the border — would only increase the chaos they claim they want to end. (Perhaps that is the cynical intention.)

The U.S. political system has always struggled with immigration. The last major shot at comprehensive immigration reform, passed in 1986 during the Reagan administration, was thoughtful by today’s standards. Provisions to offer legal status to the unauthorized population, alongside new temporary work visas and a threat to bring criminal charges against employers who hired unauthorized immigrants in the future, aspired to address all the main issues.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Employers had to require proof of workers’ legal status, but it didn’t matter how solid that proof might be. Migrants armed with bogus papers kept coming to work. Employers kept hiring them. Temporary work visas gathered dust in a filing cabinet somewhere in D.C. As a result, the idea of a grand bargain was poisoned.

Migration demands a different bargain today. It, too, must be comprehensive. It must restore discipline to the asylum process, tightening rules to ensure it remains a viable option for people truly fleeing for their lives, pursued by a predatory state or organized crime. But it also must acknowledge that a large number of migrants are driven by broader pressures — such as hunger, climate change and a desire for opportunity. Hardening the border will not keep them out.

Given the large numbers, any new deal will probably require other countries in the hemisphere to help shoulder the responsibility; to offer migrants a viable new home rather than simply a passageway to the north. And in the United States, it will require something that might look like that old reform of 1986 — a plan that acknowledges migrants’ contribution to American prosperity, and that treats migration not as a threat but as an opportunity.