Judges and governors and executive orders are shaping immigration policy in our country right now. Meanwhile last week, the Border Patrol reported its 2,000,000th arrest along the Mexican border for the fiscal year ending September 30. We have a labor shortage in America, people are risking their lives to come here and work, yet we haven't had a significant change in our guest worker laws in decades.
Where is Congress?
Immigration has changed in the last decade, shaped by global turmoil. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Immigration Statistics FY 2020 Enforcement Lifecycle report, encounters on the southwestern border surged in 2019, soaring to nearly 980,000 from 523,000 in 2018. Why?
Families. Entire families seeking asylum fleeing Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. And children. Children sent unaccompanied. This created a very different situation from the typical traffic of single adults from Mexico seen in previous years.
Migrants who "turn themselves in" to border officials can be processed under Title 8. Generally, under Title 8, if they make credible claims of harm if they were to return to their home country, they are processed to await an asylum hearing. At this point, they are allowed to live in the U.S., and after a certain period are allowed to work.
The pandemic suspended most border traffic for a time and in March 2020 the CDC invoked Title 42 which gave Border Patrol agents the authority to expel all migrants seeking to enter the country to prevent rapid transmission of contagious disease.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations used Title 42 heavily during the pandemic. Although the Border Patrol is allowing more migrants in under Title 8 – that is, to apply for asylum - than in 2020 under the Trump administration, data as late as March show 51% of all encounters at the border resulted in expulsion under Title 42.
Refugees keep coming. And we do not have a clear path to process them. Difficult decisions should be made with thought and extensive discussion.
Since 2019, immigration has changed again. In the last two fiscal years, reports show more asylum seekers are coming from the communist regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as opportunity and personal freedom are drying up. But they are also coming across the southern border from Russia, India and a score of other nations.
A Washington Post article describes the Yuma sector, where nearly all Border Patrol encounters result in Title 8 asylum processing, as resembling "an international arrivals hall."
Immigration has been a highly emotional and poorly managed issue this entire century. President Trump brought the issue to a boiling point in his 2016 campaign with over-simplified and histrionic rhetoric that ignited partisan tribalism and launched the culture wars that marked his presidency.
The Trump administration carried out nearly 400 separate actions regarding immigration policy. The most visible of these was the much-vaunted border wall.
But the administration forgot to notify the migrants. The third year of the Trump administration would see the greatest ever surge of migrants at the southern border. Nearly a million people tried to enter the U.S. at the southern border in 2019, a 47% increase over the previous year.
And the "unclimbable" wall is not much of a deterrent. In the San Diego sector, where the border wall is the highest, the largest trauma centers are inundated with grisly injuries from illegal immigrants falling off the 30-foot wall. The University of California San Diego Hospital estimates that treating these uninsured patients since 2019 has cost the hospital $13 million. There is no program to reimburse these costs. Because this also overlapped the pandemic, these injuries also impacted hospital access for citizens.
We have a White House looking to unravel the Trump administration's multitudinous actions regarding immigration policy. Most notably, the "remain in Mexico" policy for most asylum seekers was rescinded August 9.
None of this addresses the core issues.
We have a labor shortage.
People are literally killing themselves to get here to come work or escape government tyranny.
We haven't had a seasonal agricultural guest worker program, where many undocumented workers wind up, since 1964. Clearly there is a demand for one.
(There is a seasonal worker program for non-agricultural work such as landscapers, crab pickers, lifeguards or resort workers – the H2B visa. Seriously, Disney gets a guest worker program.)
Illegal immigrants keep coming and keep coming back. Many of the 2 million Border Patrol arrests are of the same individuals. Because there is work here, they will keep trying.
Because we are the greatest country in the world, those fleeing oppression will still seek refuge here.
We have a patchwork of policies that create more problems. We have sanctuary cities and states that aver they will not turn illegal immigrants over to immigration authorities and offer basic services. Fine and well. This also creates a shadow community of undocumented individuals who can be exploited by unscrupulous employers. It encourages more illegal immigration, including the movement of criminals and drugs. It solves little.
We have activist governors who periodically mobilize their National Guard to their southern border, and more recently, ship their asylum-seeking migrants to New York, Washington D.C. and Nantucket so those communities can provide services for them. These actions make headlines but solve nothing.
Legal immigration to the U.S. takes place via laws enacted in 1965 and 1990. There are caps on the different visa categories that are in some cases inconsistent. In recent years, about one million green cards have been issued annually, the majority of which require a sponsor.
About 2/3 of these green cards are issued to family members of legal residents; the remainder are employment-based or asylum-based.
The number of Title 8 encounters reported by the Border Patrol on the southern border through August is 1,149,449. Add in all entry points and the total is 1,471,271. There's a supply and demand problem.
This isn't something the White House should decide. We are in a new normal since 2019 with migrant demand and action must be taken. A wall isn't enough, obviously. There are not sufficient facilities at the southern border to process over a million refugees.
Hard decisions must be made. Should people fleeing tyranny be offered refuge, regardless of numbers? Should there be annual caps on the numbers of refugees allowed in under Title 8, and how should those be decided? Should migrants from Mexico be allowed to come here legally part of the year, or for up to three years, to work and return to Mexico?
These are all current realities that Congress should address without waiting another 32 years.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appears regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican, she lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run two head of dog, and two of cat. She can be reached at news.ind.merritt@gmail.com.