Gregory Bull/AP Photo
Asylum seekers wait in a makeshift camp after crossing the nearby border with Mexico, September 20, 2023, near Jacumba Hot Springs, California.
The United States faces a genuine immigration crisis, procedural, political, and humanitarian.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s efforts to hold $106 billion in vital aid for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan hostage for a bipartisan deal on immigration restrictions has created a sense of urgency. But any such deal is politically unlikely. Worse, the deals under discussion would not solve the deeper problem.
The current system, carrying out U.S. treaty obligations that the U.S. and other nations agreed to after the shame of the Holocaust, requires the U.S. to provisionally admit refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries, while their claims are adjudicated. Even Donald Trump was not able to overturn this basic requirement.
The practical problem is that in recent years, the system has been overwhelmed by refugees fleeing violence in Central America. Neither the Border Patrol nor immigration judges can keep up with the massive flow.
COVID restrictions on public-health grounds temporarily reduced the numbers, but since May 2022, 1.85 million migrants have been allowed to enter the U.S. to await court dates to determine whether they could remain as refugees. But the court system is so backlogged that 1.77 million were simply released into the U.S., presumably to return to court when their case is called.
Most found their way to cities to seek jobs. Many are homeless. An estimated 200,000 are in New York City alone. This has created a first-class crisis for the nation’s big-city mayors, most of whom are Democrats, and an opportunity for Republicans to cynically embarrass both the Biden administration and mayors of liberal cities.
Currently, a bipartisan group of senators led by Chris Murphy (D-CT) and James Lankford (R-OK) are working on legislation that would narrow the “credible fear” standard. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the large number of refugees temporarily paroled into the country pending adjudication of their cases.
The Biden administration is caught between Senate Democrats up for re-election, many of whom want a much more restrictive immigration policy across the board, and those who support more liberal standards based on humanitarian concerns. A group of 11 Democratic senators led by California’s Alex Padilla has put out a statement decrying “harmful changes to our asylum system that will potentially deny lifesaving humanitarian protection for vulnerable people, including children, and fail to deliver any meaningful improvement to the situation at the border.”
Even if the Senate should reach agreement, House Republicans would be unlikely to support it. Many are holding out for the more draconian provisions of H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which would increase detentions and restrict legal immigration, in a fashion that Democrats would never accept.
In all likelihood, the military aid bill will eventually pass. But the linkage to immigration restrictions is all but dead.
The sensible formula of comprehensive immigration reform, combining a path to citizenship with better border measures and tougher sanctions against employers who hire people without proper documents, will await the return of genuine bipartisanship. It could be a long time coming.
