This immigration bill was never going to fix border
Last Sunday, lawmakers released the first major bipartisan bill to reform immigration policy in a decade. The Senate may vote on the proposal, a $118 billion plan that includes $20 billion aimed at bolstering immigration enforcement but the likelihood that it reaches the president’s desk is slim. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, described it as “dead on arrival” in his chamber.
The nation already spends more money on border policing than at any other point in its history. In the last two decades, Customs and Border Protection’s budget has almost tripled and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget has doubled. Today, the Department of Homeland Security pays for over 19,000 Border Patrol agents, a similar number of ICE officers and expensive contracts with private companies that quickly sift through enormous amounts of data. And yet, border encounters in December set record highs.
These measures, if enacted, will do little to improve how the United States manages migration, nor will it stop migrants from coming. If more money could keep people from crossing our borders, we would have paid for the solution years ago.
The bill, which President Biden supports, would set aside nearly $4 billion for Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security division that includes Border Patrol, to prepare for a “migration surge” by hiring new staff members, reimbursing the Defense Department for its help and paying for Border Patrol agents’ overtime.
In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the government’s network of immigration prisons, would get over $7 billion to increase the number of people it can detain and deport, hire more staff members and track more migrants through electronic monitoring systems.
Democrats, who have consistently pushed for more options for migrants to enter the United States legally, can point to expanded opportunities that the legislation would provide: 32,000 green cards for people with close relatives who are already here legally and 18,000 more work visas for people with highdemand skills during each of the next five years. The bill wouldn’t touch the federal government’s parole authority, a flexible legal power that goes back decades. Unhappy with the Biden administration’s use of parole, Republicans had hoped to limit the discretion immigration officials have to use it.
Instead, the bill would give federal officials immense new power to control of limit immigration. The president would have the authority to close the border to most asylum seekers if illegal crossings rose above an average of 4,000 in a week. If immigration officials arrest 5,000 migrants during that period, the law would require officials to reject most people hoping to find safe harbor in the United States. In December, agents apprehended approximately 9,600 migrants each day. If the proposed rules were in place then, Biden officials would have had no choice but to force asylum seekers to stay in Mexican border cities, assuming that the Mexican government agreed.
Donald Trump used the pandemic as a justification to seal the nation’s borders and swiftly deport migrants who attempted to cross into the country illegally, bypassing standard legal processes. Denied the opportunity to apply for asylum, as federal law permits, migrants did what migrants have always done: They crossed by whatever means necessary even if it meant violating immigration law in the process.
After months of closed-door negotiations, it seems as though Congress has squandered yet another opportunity to pass meaningful immigration reform. The bill does include some laudable provisions for more visas and options for work authorization. Unfortunately, its border-policing provisions are too lenient to satisfy many Republicans, who would rather the border be shut down completely and too detached from reality to improve the immigration situation at the border. Instead of empowering federal officials to block migrants at the border, Congress should limit itself to improving their ability to process people quickly by adding more immigration judges and asylum officers, as other parts of the bill would do.
As long as people continue to see in the United States an opportunity to live safely, thrive economically, or reunite with friends and relatives who already call this country their home, more policing won’t work. They will outmaneuver law enforcement officials like they always have.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is the author of “Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the ‘Criminal Alien.’ ”