U.S. gives protections to Venezuelans amid migrant surge
What happened
Near-record migration levels strained America’s immigration system this week, as the Biden administration announced a plan that would give 472,000 migrants from Venezuela authorization to work and protection from deportation. Migrant crossings surged nearly 60 percent this summer, with border officials making 232,972 apprehensions in August. Those numbers appear to have grown since, with law enforcement making more than 8,000 daily apprehensions last week. The Biden administration announced 800 active-duty soldiers would join the 2,500 National Guard members currently helping police the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biden last week also made Venezuelans who arrived before
July 31 eligible for Temporary Protected Status, a program designed for migrants fleeing natural disasters and armed conflicts. The designation will let them stay in the U.S., and the administration has promised to fast-track work permits. Democrats such as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul who have been pushing for a solution to the crisis, which now reaches far beyond the border, cautiously celebrated the move as “an important first step” in managing an influx that has swamped shelters and stretched budgets in major cities. Since last year, New York City has received more than 116,000 migrants, Chicago more than 15,000, and Denver nearly 20,000. Some urban Democratic officials say Biden still isn’t doing enough to help—and they foresee a major anti-migrant backlash brewing. “You’re hearing sentiments that are not dissimilar from what you would hear at [Donald] Trump rallies,” said Chicago Alderman Andre Vasquez, “where asylum seekers are referred to as illegals.”
What the columnists said
There go Biden’s claims of “victory over illegal immigration,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. In June, the White House credited a dip in arrivals to a new system that lets migrants from certain countries apply for humanitarian parole via smartphone app. This was supposed to slow the tide of migrants expected after the lifting of Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction that let officials immediately oust most border crossers, and Biden bragged it was “working as intended.” Since July, though, the migrant crisis has reignited into “a raging fire.” And you can bet this “TPS amnesty” will “only make the problem worse.”
Republicans won’t accept anything except Trumpian “hard-line immigration policies,” said Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic. But economic collapse and political repression in Venezuela have driven out more than 7 million people—numbers comparable to the exoduses from Syria and Ukraine. TPS was created for exactly this kind of crisis, and extending it to Venezuelans has the backing of both moderate Democratic city mayors and progressive immigrant advocates. It’s a political risk—but a worthy one.
It will also probably “encourage more migration,” said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. This confusing political moment is “a foretaste” of the upheaval to come. Technology and yawning inequality between the West and the “poorer, younger Global South” will likely increase future migration—and fuel support for restrictions “even from people generally sympathetic to migrants.” The responses to migration are poised to be “dramatic, chaotic, and transformative.”