In raising the issue of immigration during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump repeated online allegations that migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Those claims and the media response to them have overshadowed the bigger policy picture. While some anti-border control activists portray immigration as being like the tides and thus immune to human interventions, the past few years have demonstrated how much policymakers’ choices can influence immigration rates. This is especially the case with the executive branch, charged with enforcing and administering immigration law.
We don’t need to go to a small midwestern town to see the reality that U.S. immigration policy has created. From January 2021 onward, the Biden White House systemically set about dismantling border controls. President Biden rolled back interior enforcement, pushed the already-strained asylum system past its limits, and used executive power to grant legal status to migrants.
In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memo that essentially exempted most illegal immigrants from deportation proceedings unless they presented credible threats to national security or public safety, or unless they tried to enter the United States illegally after November 1, 2020. That latter criterion would also seem to exempt from deportation migrants who entered the United States legally after November 1, 2020, and then overstayed their visa. This strategy of widespread non-enforcement took years to wend its way through the courts, but the message was clear: the Biden administration had little interest in enforcing immigration laws within the nation’s interior. A report from the Migration Policy Institute celebrated this measure as “perhaps [having] the most impact on the daily lives of immigrants and their families in the United States” of all the Biden administration’s actions on migration.
Biden also erased many of the immigration policies of his predecessor and thus set the stage for the current asylum crisis. Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy required migrants who petitioned for asylum when intercepted along the southern border to return to Mexico to wait for their asylum hearing. During the pandemic, the Trump administration also invoked Title 42 to turn immediately back unauthorized migrants intercepted along the border. Biden announced the end of the “Remain in Mexico” policy within weeks of his inauguration, and he also began unwinding Title 42 (it was fully terminated in May 2023).
Compounding this dialing back of enforcement, the Biden administration also used executive authority in unprecedented ways to increase migration. According to a January CBS report, the administration granted “humanitarian parole” to more than a million migrants, temporarily making many of them eligible for employment in the United States. As a Migration Policy Institute report demonstrates, the administration also used parole in an unprecedented way by granting parole status to hundreds of thousands of migrants each year who were intercepted at the border. (Both Trump and Barack Obama issued parole at the border in only a few dozen cases each year.) Biden’s team also dramatically expanded the use of “temporary protected status” (TPS) by giving temporary authorization to work in the United States to hundreds of thousands of migrants, particularly from Latin America. A Congressional Research Service report in May estimated that almost 900,000 people currently hold TPS status, which often gets renewed.
Taken together, these executive actions created a powerful magnet for unauthorized migration. If intercepted, an authorized migrant could try to claim asylum and then be released into the interior of the country. The Biden administration’s humanitarian parole and TPS policies provide further incentives for such migration, and the CBP One border app provided a mechanism for funneling hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States to begin the long process of applying for asylum.
This magnet drew people from across the world to the U.S. southern border. In the 2020 fiscal year, the Border Patrol had about 400,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants; that number exploded to over 2 million encounters in both the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years. So far, the 2024 fiscal year has registered about 1.5 million Border Patrol encounters. The exact size of this unauthorized surge remains unknown, but there are a few hints. Drawing from federal data, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) calculates that, under Biden, the foreign-born population has grown at a rate unprecedented in recent American history—by about 6.6 million since his inauguration. CIS estimates that a majority of this growth has come from unauthorized migration. Federal data may well undercount the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, so the magnitude of this influx could be even greater.
To state that such an influx could be extremely disruptive for local communities is not to engage in conspiracy theories. Policymakers across the political spectrum are on record complaining about the effects of the border crisis. Big Apple mayor Eric Adams warned that the costs associated with the migrant surge would “destroy New York City.” In a 2023 executive order dispatching the Arizona National Guard to the border, Democratic governor Katie Hobbs assailed the federal government for its “inaction” on immigration. Working-class communities have disproportionately borne the brunt of this disruption. For instance, Massachusetts closed down a community recreation center for months in Roxbury (one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods) in order to house migrants.
Joe Biden is no longer running for president, but it remains unclear where Kamala Harris stands on many of these issues. In the Senate, Harris regularly voted against border-control efforts. Her specific immigration-policy commitments on the “Issues” page of her campaign website are minimal: “As President, she will bring back the bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law. At the same time, she knows that our immigration system is broken and needs comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”
Many proponents of border controls were deeply skeptical about the Senate border bill Harris has pledged to support. They argue that it could in fact provide a mechanism for a White House to grant de facto legal status to even more migrants; the bill would enhance the ability of DHS officials to grant immediate work permits to migrants intercepted along the border. The emergency powers delegated to the executive branch under this bill were arguably more about political optics than substance. These powers could only be temporarily invoked once the encounters with unauthorized migrants got above 4,000 a day (or almost 1.5 million a year), and even during those emergency conditions the government would still be mandated to process a minimum of 1,400 unauthorized migrants a day. As one of the architects of the Senate bill, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said on social media, “the border never closes” during even the supposed emergency.
Beyond the border bill, though, many of Harris’s positions on immigration remain unknown. Would she continue Biden’s unprecedented use of TPS and humanitarian parole to extend work authorization to migrants? A policy counsel at the American Immigration Council (not exactly a border-hawk outfit) told Mother Jones that he thought Harris “would take a similar approach” on those issues, but that’s only speculation. Adding to that vagueness, her campaign dodged giving a substantive answer to Axios about where Harris stood on her past pledges to use executive actions to grant legal status to migrants. In June, Biden reversed himself and issued an executive action that limits the processing of asylum claims for migrants intercepted on the border once daily encounters 2,500 (a lower threshold than set by the Senate border bill). Would Harris continue this policy? Harris claims there is a need for some kind of “path to citizenship” for unauthorized migrants, but the specifics of that are otherwise unclear—as are her positions on interior enforcement. Waving through a mass legalization while continuing the non-enforcement and asylum policies of the Biden administration would only invite even more unauthorized migration in the future.
Thinking about the bigger goals of immigration policy can help put the border in context. American society is very much the richer from the arrival of newcomers. One of the great promises of immigration is integration—the hope that immigrants and their descendants will be able to climb the ladder of opportunity while becoming full participants in the American experiment. While many elite voices adopt a centrifugal view of American life, in which different cultures keep to themselves—and avoid the dread specter of “cultural appropriation”—integration is a more expansive ideal, looking instead toward the forging of a new, common heritage through cultural mixing.
In addition to its grave humanitarian costs, the breakdown at the border causes Americans to lose faith in the immigration system—and in the rule of law. It also undercuts that vision of integration. A surge of unauthorized migration risks undercutting the wages of working-class Americans, including recent immigrants. Political responsibility means designing a system that looks out for the interests of native-born Americans while also helping immigrants themselves integrate into American life. The breakdown at the border has at once become a symbol of American polarization and an accelerant of that polarization. Restoring public credibility more broadly requires addressing the policy drivers of the crisis.
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