A Broken Immigration System Remains Unresolved

We are living in an era of mass migration — driven by conflict, climate change, poverty, and political repression and inspired by the spread of online videos documenting migrants’ journeys to the United States.

Some six million Venezuelans have left their troubled country, the largest population displacement in Latin America’s modern history. Migrants from Africa, Asia, and South America are putting their family land as collateral, selling their cars or borrowing money from loan sharks to embark on long, often perilous journeys to reach the United States.

In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics show that encounters with migrants, especially asylum seekers, increased from 458,000 in fiscal 2020 to 1.7 million in fiscal 2021, 2.4 million in fiscal 2022 and 2.5 million in fiscal 2023.

In the first three months of fiscal 2024 alone, encounters reached 785,000—an average of more than 8,600 a day. U.S. Border Patrol says that more than six million people have been caught along the border with Mexico under the Biden administration, and more than two million have been spotted but not caught.

A new report from the Migration Policy Institute says that border and immigration officials “do not have the logistical, care, legal, and policy infrastructure to handle the unparalleled scale of migrant arrivals.”

The result is that “authorities are processing migrants rapidly and releasing large numbers of them into the United States with a notice to appear at later immigration proceedings.”

When it became evident last fall that aid to Ukraine would not get through Congress without major changes in border policy,?Kyrsten Sinema?(I., Ariz.),?Chris Murphy?(D., Conn.) and?James Lankford?(R., Okla.), started work on a bipartisan solution.

The result of their work was, by any honest reckoning, the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades. The measure was released Sunday evening, and by late Monday, it was all but dead. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and other party leaders called the Senate bill “riddled with loopholes” and said “any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House.”

Truth be told, the bill was largely done in by the specter of former President Donald Trump, the clear favorite for his party’s presidential nomination, when he wrote on Truth Social that unless the border deal is flawless, “we are better off not making a Deal.”

Mr. Trump seems to think that keeping immigration as a general election issue will be a key to victory, as it was in 2016, and that any agreement would benefit Mr. Biden in November. “This bill is a great gift to the Democrats and a Death Wish for The Republican Party,” Trump said on social media Monday.

Cities Under a Burden of Care

Nearly 2.5 million people crossed the southern border in fiscal year 2023, more than live in most U.S. cities. That has made the border an increasingly controversial issue, for mayors and governors dealing with large waves of migrants, and for Republican leaders keen to blame President Biden as he campaigns for re-election.

Denver, a city with a population of 713,000, has absorbed nearly 40,000 migrants in just over a year—more per capita than any other U.S. city. Only New York surpasses it in the total number of foreigners arriving since 2022.

However, this influx is taking a toll on Denver’s resources. The city has spent over $42 million in the past year to house and feed the new arrivals. Public schools have seen a surge of 3,000 students, creating a budget shortfall of approximately $17.5 million. Denver’s safety-net hospital has treated at least 9,000 migrant patients, incurring at least $10 million in unreimbursed care costs.

The Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda Bill

The aforementioned bipartisan Senate bill had promised to immediately unlock $1.4 billion to reimburse cities and nonprofit aid groups caring for migrants. Last year, the government paid out about $790 million, a fraction of what cities say they need to address the impact.

The legislation would have effectively shut down the border to asylum seekers if more than 4,000 attempted to cross daily, potentially halving the total number of arriving migrants.

It would have raised the bar for claiming asylum, particularly the “credible fear” threshold. It would have funded more detention beds, border agents, and expedited hearings and deportations.

Republicans who had championed those very same border restrictions now believe that Mr. Trump’s return to the White House will somehow magically restore order. However, the painful reality is that every modern president has grappled with border control challenges. Even in 2019, with fewer encounters, Trump resorted to “catch and release.”

With the bill’s sudden collapse after high-profile negotiations, Denver and other cities face the reality that federal help isn’t imminent. Given the political pressures of the November elections, any near-term federal fix seems unlikely. Cities are left to cobble together local solutions to manage the ongoing challenge.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, has demanded that nothing should be more important to the United States than securing the border. “We must insist — must insist — that the border be the top priority,” Mr. Johnson said to reporters earlier this month after a meeting with President Biden and other congressional leaders.

For decades, bipartisan efforts to overhaul the broken immigration system have faced insurmountable challenges. The latest attempt crumbled after certain Republicans changed their stance, favoring talk over action.

“What is happening on the border now is not safe, it’s untenable, it’s a humanitarian crisis,” Elizabeth Neumann, who served in Trump’s administration in the Department of Homeland Security, told The Wall Street Journal. She blamed the impasse on a bloc of nativist Republicans who see any compromise as anathema.

“Republicans are not doing what they were hired to do, and it’s very disappointing. I’m deeply disappointed, but I’m not surprised.” This wasn’t the ending Republicans envisioned last fall, when they saw the opportunity to put Democrats on their heels and bring their own party together.

Polls showed independent voters increasingly concerned about border security, while Democratic mayors whose streets have been?overwhelmed with migrants?have pleaded with the president for help. As the latest such effort?fell apart on Wednesday, the negotiators behind it were left to lament that their months of earnest effort had amounted to nothing.

“We all negotiated in good faith. We delivered. We produced a bill many thought impossible,” said Sen.?Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent. “But less than 24 hours after we released the bill, my Republican colleagues changed their minds. It turns out, they want all talk and no action.” The lead Republican negotiator, Sen.?James Lankford?of Oklahoma, said, “Americans are ticked off that this is not resolved. They expect us to get things done, so why don’t we do that?”

Bottom line: Despite earnest efforts, the broken immigration system remains unresolved, leaving the nation less secure and allies waiting for assistance.

They Come Believing They Can Stay

For decades, single young men, mostly from Mexico and later Central America, tried their best to evade U.S. border agents to reach places eager for their labor.

Today, people from all over the world are pouring across the southern border, most of them just as keen to work. But instead of trying to dodge U.S. authorities, most look for border agents, sometimes waiting hours or days in makeshift camps, to surrender.

Being placed in a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle and taken to a processing facility is now considered a vital step toward being able to apply for asylum — now the most reliable way for migrants to stay in the United States, even if few will ultimately win their cases.

It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000-mile southern border, the migrants are banking on that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay. And by and large, they are not wrong.

Dysfunction on Who Can Remain

The U.S. is trying to run an immigration system with a fraction of the judges, asylum officers, interpreters and other personnel that it needs to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants crossing the border and flocking to cities around the country each year.

That dysfunction has made it impossible for the nation to swiftly decide who can remain in the country and who should be sent back to their homeland.

“I don’t know anyone who has been deported,” Carolina Ortiz, a migrant from Colombia, told a New York Times reporter in an interview in late December at an encampment outside Jacumba Hot Springs, about 60 miles southeast of San Diego.

For most migrants, the United States still represents the land of opportunity. Many come seeking work, and they are going to do whatever it takes to work, even if that means filing a weak asylum claim, several lawyers said.

To qualify for asylum, applicants must convince a judge that returning to their home country would result in harm or death based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

Three Million Pending Cases

Underfunded immigration courts that adjudicate claims are strained by the swelling caseload, so applications languish for years, and all the while, migrants are building lives in the U.S.

The number of asylum cases waiting in the United States was 300,000 in 2012. Now, that is the same number of cases in New York State alone. In total, more than three million cases are stuck in immigration courts, a million more than a year ago.

There are 800 immigration judges on the bench, up from 520 in 2020. But the number of judges increased after years of delay, and the backlogs grew in that time, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University.

It can take many years for an asylum case to be decided, even with more judges on the bench. The Congressional Research Service has estimated that it would need about 1,000 more judges to clear the current backlog by fiscal year 2032.