““When we take administrative actions as we have done a number of times, we are challenged in court. Legislation is the enduring solution,” Mayorkas told CNN’s Dana Bash. “And by the way, we can, not, through administrative action, plus up the United States border patrol, customs and border protection by 1,500 personnel like this legislation proposes; we cannot through administrative action add 4,300 asylum officers so that we can work through the backlog and turn the system into an efficient and well working one, which it hasn’t been for more than three decades.”
Legislation seems unlikely to pass in a divided Congress, particularly after House Republicans tanked a bipartisan border bill negotiated in the Senate, with Speaker Mike Johnson declaring it dead on arrival.”
“Along with reupping his old ideas, Trump has spoken at length about how he intends to scale up his past policies, calling for the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He’s focused, too, on bringing back wide-ranging raids to round up undocumented immigrants and setting up new camps where they’d be forcibly detained. And he’s interested in testing out proposals he didn’t get to last term, such as severely limiting birthright citizenship.
Essentially, Trump’s second-term immigration policy is shaping up to be much like his first, but even harsher.
Take Trump’s proposal for a new travel ban, a policy imposed during his first term: “When I return to office, [it’s] coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” Trump said in a July 2023 speech.
That 2016 ban temporarily barred travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US before it was struck down by the courts (only to return in updated form). On his first day in office, President Joe Biden rescinded the ban. This time around, Trump is weighing expanding this ban to encompass people from even more places, including Afghanistan and Gaza, and to bar those who express “communist” and “Marxist” views.
Much of what’s driving Trump’s hardline immigration policies is how they resonate with Republican base voters, including those who subscribe to xenophobic ideas of keeping migrants out and economic claims about immigrants purportedly taking jobs or abusing benefits. Additionally, a recent surge in migrant apprehensions across the southern border, as well as an influx of migrants in major cities across the country, has put the issue more prominently in the news, and provided a platform for Republicans — Trump included — to argue the current administration doesn’t have immigration under control.
Two developments could make Trump’s immigration policy in 2025 more viable than it was in his first term as well. Trump is reportedly planning to staff his next administration with loyalists who will find a way to execute his vision, unlike some of the staffers who’ve tried to restrain him in the past. And changes to the judiciary because of Trump’s appointments — including the stacking of the Supreme Court with his nominees — could mean a better legal reception for his policies.”
“Since the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States has resettled more than 3 million refugees. That’s more than any other country, making America’s refugee resettlement program the largest of its kind in the world.
That doesn’t mean it’s big enough, and the annual number of people admitted through the program — people fleeing war, persecution, or violence — has fluctuated over the years, especially recently. The Trump administration slashed the annual cap on refugee admissions to a historic low of 15,000, while the Biden administration raised it to 125,000. That’s just a small fraction of the world’s total refugee population of 36.4 million, according to the United Nations.
But for the people admitted, the program tends to work really well. “Congress set up this elaborate coordination and support system for resettled refugees and it was very deliberately done,” said Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.
From the start, coordination between the federal government, states, and private resettlement agencies helps refugees land on their feet when they arrive. They qualify for health care, for example, and through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, they have access to services such as job training and case management. “They are also usually eligible for state benefits, like Medicaid, SNAP, food support, cash assistance if needed for families,” Schacher said. “Basically it puts resettled refugees in a position where they’re able to get all the benefits that citizens can get very soon after arriving.”
That assistance is crucial to helping refugees begin to rebuild their lives — especially as they do so after enduring traumatic circumstances — and it also benefits the communities that accept them. Studies have shown that once refugees resettle, they end up positively contributing to the economy: They eventually earn enough income to more than pay back in taxes the costs of the public assistance they initially received, and their spending helps boost local businesses and creates jobs. A study in Michigan, for example, found that refugees in the state pay some $130 million in state and local taxes each year. In 2016 alone, refugees in southeast Michigan contributed over $225 million to the regional economy in new spending and helped create thousands of new jobs.
The refugee program, in other words, benefits everyone involved. Yet despite its proven success, not all migrants have access to it. Asylum seekers, for example, don’t generally have access to federal benefits and, barring some exceptions, aren’t granted work permits. That’s in part why many cities have struggled to meet recent migrants’ needs, resulting in overcrowded shelters, a rise in homelessness, and overwhelmed local and state services.
As the country continues to face a growing migrant population, it’s worth considering what has worked in the past. “The only model we have for something like this is the refugee model, which acknowledges that that’s a national challenge,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “The fact that all these people are seeking asylum, makes it a problem that is akin, in our view, to the refugee problem. And the refugee [program] is the only time when the government gets involved in finding housing for migrants.””
“Only 3 percent of the people who have applied for green cards will receive one in FY 2024, as the backlog continues to grow and migrants continue to choose illegal migration pathways in large numbers. Today’s green card processing “reveals a legal immigration system that is utterly failing to direct aspiring immigrants to pursue the American dream in lawful and orderly ways,” wrote David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, in a report released last week.
About 1.1 million green cards may be issued in FY 2024, but there are currently 34.7 million pending applications. The backlog has its roots in the Immigration Act of 1924 and subsequent eligibility restrictions. While 98.1 percent of immigrant applicants were allowed to enter the country with permanent status from 1888 to 1921, just 16 percent of applicants were admitted in an average year once caps were imposed, per Bier. The rate fell to 3.8 percent in 2023.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the government has let 6.3 million green cards go to waste since 1921, failing to meet caps in large part due to processing delays.
Certain nationalities and green card categories experience more severe backlogs and selective processing. “Indians—who make up half the applicants in the employer-sponsored categories—must wait more than a century for a green card,” wrote Bier. People who try their luck at the green card lottery, which currently has about 22.2 million applicants, only have a 1 in 400 chance of getting a green card in a given year. Some who apply for family-based green cards “will face lifetime waits for many country-category combinations,” according to Bier.
By granting green cards to such a low percentage of applicants each year, the U.S. is leaving a lot of potential growth on the table. “Backlogged immigrants are likely to enter the United States and start working at higher rates than the general population, and they also appear to be more educated on average,” wrote Bier. And beyond being an important addition to the labor force, immigrants are helping to reduce the massive federal budget deficit and stave off population decline.
The Cato report suggests that Congress do away with “the unnecessarily onerous rules and arbitrary caps to approve current green card applicants.” After tackling the existing backlog, policy changes could be more modest, since “annual legal immigration would only need to increase more gradually to meet future demand.”
This report echoes the findings of June 2023 Cato Institute research, which found that “fewer than 1 percent of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally.” A variety of factors keep people from qualifying for the existing green card categories, including low annual visa caps, a lack of U.S.-based sponsors (either employers or qualifying family members), narrow definitions of eligible nationalities, and cost.”
“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.
But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”
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“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”
“For well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.”
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“The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.”
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“the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.”