Uncontrolled Migration

I wanted to bring three articles to your attention. In the first the editors of the Wall Street Journal take Democratic politicians to task for refusing to ameliorate the conditions they have created, preferring to blame it all on Trump:

The “breaking point has arrived this week at our border,” then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan warned way back on March 27. “CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border.”

He was ignored. But suddenly Democrats and their media friends are flogging a pair of new inspector general reports, including one on May 30 that documents the “dangerous overcrowding” at a border control station in El Paso. It describes how one “cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees,” and how migrants were “standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space.”

At a CBP facility in the Rio Grande Valley, says a July 2 IG report, “some single adults were held in standing room only conditions for a week.” Some migrants were desperate enough to clog the “toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.”

This is appalling, and Democrats want to blame it all on heartless Donald Trump. The Administration is an easy target, given its obsession with border enforcement and previous tone-deaf policies like family separation.

But Democrats should also look in the mirror. The perverse incentives of U.S. asylum policy have lured hundreds of thousands who are overwhelming border resources. Yet Democrats refuse to change the incentives that are the root of the crisis.

Migrants who cross the border, legally or not, can claim asylum. They are taught what to say to pass the low bar of “credible fear” in an initial asylum interview, and then most are released into the U.S. pending their final hearing. In the second quarter of 2019, more than 876,500 cases were pending in the immigration courts and they can take years.

In fiscal 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had funding for an average daily detention population of 45,274. But as of June 29 more than 53,000 were in its custody. With its beds full, ICE now releases some of those migrants who aren’t subject to mandatory detention orders, but it has also slowed the numbers it takes from CBP. The border patrol can’t by law stop apprehending illegal crossers, though it can’t pass all of them out if its facilities. Thus, the overcrowding.

Under a legal settlement known as Flores, CBP gives priority to children and families before single adults. Minors can’t be detained for more than 20 days, so parents are released with their children. Migrants now know that if they bring children on the dangerous journey north, they’ll move through the system faster and be freed sooner. Meanwhile, single adult migrants languish in increasingly deplorable conditions, as the IG reports show.

Health and Human Services, which cares for unaccompanied minors, has also been overwhelmed. The Trump Administration’s fixation on enforcement has worsened the problem. Ideally, the children are released to parents or other sponsors who take financial and legal responsibility.

But until recently HHS required fingerprints from everyone in the sponsor’s household that were shared with ICE and could be used for enforcement. The predictable result was that potential sponsors were reluctant to take the risk of picking up children lest they be deported. Recent limits on this finger-printing have helped move children out of government custody faster, but HHS continues to deal with near-record numbers. As of July 1 some 13,000 children were in its care, and as of June 10 it had taken in more than 52,000 this fiscal year—60% more than in 2018.

Late last month Democrats reluctantly voted to pass legislation to provide $4.6 billion in emergency funding, mostly for urgent humanitarian needs. But if last week’s Democratic debates are an indication, the party’s only immigration policy is to offer an open border and free welfare and health care to anyone in the world who wants to come to America.

That isn’t politically sustainable even if it were financially affordable. The answer is a political compromise that narrows the asylum loophole and trades border security for more legal paths to work in the U.S. Any politician who won’t work toward that end is merely grandstanding for the cameras.

In the second, from the Washington Post the head of the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration, Jeh Johnson, laments the present partisan food fight:

It’s time for some straight talk on immigration. There is almost none left in the highly emotional and politicized environment of the Trump era.

To govern in the immigration space and accomplish meaningful change requires compromise across Democratic and Republican lines. Very few solutions are black or white. Polls reflect that most Americans want to see two basic things when it comes to immigration: that we are fair and compassionate to those immigrants who have become honest and integrated members of our society (most notably the “dreamers”) and that we secure our borders. This broad consensus is drowned out in the current political debate, but it is actually the place from which the Obama administration tried to govern. We fought for comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in 2012, tried to expand upon it in 2014, focused our resources on deporting major felons and saw some of the lowest numbers of apprehensions on our Southern border in decades.

As someone who for three years owned the difficult issue of immigration generally and enforcing border security specifically, I know these hard lessons:

First, high volumes of illegal immigration on our Southern border (and the tragic overcrowding at holding centers that follows) cannot be truly solved unless we make the long-term investment to reduce poverty and violence in Central America. Congress and the Obama administration began with an investment of $750 million in 2016, but the yearly investment has decreased since, and Trump has now suspended it altogether. This is the exact wrong thing to do. State and Homeland Security officials have told me the modest assistance so far was starting to make a difference.

Second, we cannot, as some Democratic candidates for president now propose, publicly embrace a policy to not deport those who enter or remain in this country illegally unless they commit a crime. This is tantamount to a public declaration (repeated and amplified by smugglers in Central America) that our borders are effectively open to all; this will increase the recent levels of monthly apprehensions at our Southern border — about or more than 100,000 — by multiples. For the same reason, we cannot formally decriminalize unauthorized entry into this country, though first-time illegal border crossers are in fact rarely prosecuted for that misdemeanor (except for last year’s disastrous “zero-tolerance” policy).

The Obama administration’s immigration priorities for deportation included both those who committed major crimes and those who were apprehended at the Southern border. Those apprehended at the border were allowed to remain this country while their deportation and asylum cases proceeded to conclusion.

Third, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has attracted criticism from the left for accepting last week a more moderate version of legislation to provide humanitarian aid to migrants at the border. The media sensationalized the speaker’s agreement as a “striking defeat” and a “capitulation.” Give her a break. Those who govern in a democracy know that progress requires compromise, and the speaker made the obvious calculation that it was more important to deliver prompt help to those facing inhumane conditions on the border than it was to delay and hold out for everything House Democrats wanted.

All this comes amid a larger alarming trend in today’s politics, on both sides of the aisle. To win support from a vocal and committed segment of a major party’s base — and simply for the sake of a good applause line — candidates for office now espouse extreme policy proposals that are unworkable and have no hope of winning the broad support of Congress and the people they represent.

while in the New York Times Ross Douthat remarks:

So it’s a good time to step back and assess the disastrous cycle in which our immigration policy has been caught.

The cycle started with a gap between the elite consensus on immigration — unabashedly in favor — and the public’s more conflicted attitudes, which differ depending on the day’s headlines and the wording of the polling questions. Across the first 15 years of the 21st century, too many Beltway attempts to simply impose the elite consensus set the stage for backlash, populism, Trump.

Unfortunately that backlash did not just give us a more restrictionist president. It gave us a restrictionist president who mixes ineffectiveness in legislating, incompetence in administration, and an impulse toward “toughness” as the response to every challenge — one that easily becomes a license for cruelty when a crisis hits. As it has, in the form of the wave of family migration — to which the Trumpian response has been, first, the formal inhumanity of the child separation policy, and since then, the informal inhumanity of an overwhelmed detainment system.

This inhumanity, in turn, has driven many liberals — led by the Democratic Party’s would-be nominees for president — to repudiate not only the specific evils of Trump’s approach, but the entire architecture of immigration enforcement as implemented by, well, the last Democratic president. The camps for asylum seekers must not just be made more humane; they must be closed. Deportations of non-criminal aliens must not only be limited; they must be ended. As migration rates increase exponentially, the government must respond by … decriminalizing illegal entry and extending public benefits to undocumented immigrants.

These policies are far more reckless than the old path-to-citizenship, more-guest-workers elite consensus, because they learn exactly the wrong lessons from the last five years of turbulence. We now have multiple case studies, European and American, of how in a globalized and internet-connected world migration can suddenly cascade, how easily a perceived open door can lead to a dramatic rush to enter — and then how quickly the most generous societies can find themselves retreating to enforcement and lurching toward populism.

For this cycle to break, for immigration policy to stabilize instead of whipsawing between folly and cruelty, you would need fraternal correction to happen within both the right-wing and left-wing coalitions.

That can’t happen when it’s as or more important to you for your political opponents to lose as it is to win.

There are some facts of which more people should be aware:

• The detention facilities on the border were built by the Obama Administration.
• The fatality rate among migrants detained at the border is roughly the same under the Trump Administration as it was under the Obama Administration. It’s just more highly publicized.
• In other words on the border the Trump Administration has largely continued the policies of the Obama Administration. It is the rhetoric, the optics, and the way it is covered in the media that are different.
• The number of migrants who originated in the “Northern Triangle” (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has increased greatly over the last year and a half.
• That is true despite declines in the violence rate in those countries over the period in question. Indeed, the homicide rates in Guatemala and Honduras have actually been declining since 2011.

The number of migrants who cross our borders is more closely related to economic conditions in the U. S. and in the sending countries than it is to violence in those countries.

Here’s an opinion I’ll express. “Hispanic” means a language community, not a community bound by ties of blood or culture or even interest. The overwhelming preponderance of Hispanics in the United States are Mexican-Americans. Do not expect Mexican-Americans to greet the new Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans coming into the country with open arms.