MIGRATIONTough New Immigration Rules Risk Empowering the Cartels
It’s undeniable that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, irregular migration—primarily from crisis-stricken countries in Latin America and the Caribbean—has reached unprecedented, unmanageable proportions. But it should be recognized that tight restrictions on asylum and parole will drive migration further underground, where criminal groups profit.
For Biden and the Democrats, everything—the president’s foreign policy agenda, the prospect of a government shutdown, even holding onto the White House—seems to be riding on negotiations around border and asylum policy, spurred on by the unprecedented numbers of migrants and asylum arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Although immigration hawks have made noise about a border crisis for years, it’s undeniable that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, irregular migration—primarily from crisis-stricken countries in Latin America and the Caribbean—has reached unprecedented, unmanageable proportions: in December, U.S. officials processed 300,000 migrants at the U.S. southern border—the largest number ever for a single month. Border officials encountered over 2.5 million people in 2023—a growing share of whom have ended up in cities like New York and Chicago, straining city budgets and prompting Democratic mayors and governors to demand more help from the Biden Administration.
Given the scarcity of legal pathways to immigrate to the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people—the vast majority fleeing economic crises and authoritarian governments in Latin America and the Caribbean—are pursuing the only legal option open to them: seeking asylum. But the asylum system is broken. Overburdened, underfunded courts routinely take years to decide on asylum cases and are unlikely to approve many cases currently contributing to the backlog. Latin American migrants flee life-threatening conditions—like extreme poverty, hunger, gang violence, and in some cases, corrupt authoritarian governments—but most of those arriving at the border do not face persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group: core criteria for receiving asylum.
In response to the dysfunction, Republicans in Congress are instead pressing a hard bargain, demanding Biden and Democrats enact the GOP’s vision of restrictive new border controls to a tee without expanding legal pathways. To dial up the pressure, they are blocking Biden’s proposed $105 billion package to aid Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and to fund existing border security measures. Despite weeks of negotiations by a bipartisan group of Senators, several House Republicans said in early January that they will accept nothing less than the measures laid out in a hardline immigration bill, known as HR 2, that passed Congress without a single Democrat vote in support last year.
