As more and more undocumented workers cross the border between Mexico and the United States, President Biden is figuring out how to placate the majority of Americans on the immigration issue, especially in an election season. Last week, Biden announced his executive order to de facto shut down asylum for those crossing the border. According to the executive order, the U.S. government will cease to take asylum cases when there are more than 2,500 border apprehensions a day over a seven-day period and will expire two weeks after that number falls below a per diem average of 1,500 apprehensions for a week.
This executive order has a number of problems. The first, as pointed out by Cato Institute's analysis on the executive order, is that there have not been less than 1,500 apprehensions since October 2020, which, as a reminder, was during a pandemic. Why would you set a goal that has not been attainable in post-pandemic times? It also means that asylum is based on number of border crossing and not the strength of an asylum case. This defeats a primary purpose of providing asylum.
The second is that the United States has been down this path before with shutting off asylum. It was a pandemic-era policy called Title 42 that was started by Trump and was continued by Biden. Title 42 did not work out well. As my analysis on Title 42 from last year illustrates, Title 42 neither had an effect on COVID cases nor did it slow down immigration. If anything, there were more border crossings during Title 42 than there was during the heyday in border crossing in the 1990s.
Third, closing off asylum will give asylees no other legal recourse. Instead of trying to go through a legal path such as asylum, they will be incentivized to enter illegally and evade detection. This means more trespassing on private property, more crimes, more deaths of migrants, and more altercations between Border Patrol agents and migrants, much like we saw during the Title 42 era.
This leads to my fourth point, which is that this executive order is ignoring the labor demand to work in this country, which includes 8.9 million job openings in the private sector as of April 2024. There is no legal path for 99.4 percent of those who want to work in the country, not to mention that the average asylum case takes about four years to process. As I brought up last month, allowing for lawful entries into the country minimized the number of illegal border countries. Immigration is good for the U.S. economy, and yes, that includes the immigration of those identified as low-skilled labor. The sooner that the U.S. government makes entry to the country easier by removing arbitrary caps and red tape, the sooner we can solve the issues at the border. While Biden adopting Trump-like immigration policy might score some political points, it will do next to nothing to help with this country's broken immigration system.
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