“When it comes to immigration (legal or illegal), I still take cues from that radical social-justice warrior Ronald Reagan. “(I)t makes one wonder about the illegal alien fuss,” the Gipper said in a 1977 radio address after a New England town restricted apple pickers to U.S. citizens and then couldn’t find enough people to do the work.
“One thing is certain in this hungry world; no regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the field for lack of harvesters,” he added. Reagan didn’t even shy away from the A-word. “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally,” Reagan said in his 1984 presidential debate.”
“In sharp contrast to today’s undocumented population, “illegal” European immigrants faced few repercussions. There was virtually no immigration enforcement infrastructure. If caught, few faced deportation. All of those who entered unlawfully before the 1940s were protected from deportation by statutes of limitations, and in the 1930s and 1940s, tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants like Nora O’Donnell’s grandfather were given amnesty.[viii] The few not covered by a statute of limitations or amnesty had another protection: until 1976 the government rarely deported parents of US citizens.[ix] There were no immigrant restrictions on public benefits until the 1970s, and it wasn’t until 1986 that it became unlawful to hire an undocumented immigrant.
In sum, from the early 1900s through the 1960s, millions of predominantly white immigrants entered the country unlawfully, but faced virtually no threat of apprehension or deportation. Businesses lawfully employed these immigrants, who were eligible for public benefits when they fell on hard times.”
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“[x] often in the context of racialized debates targeted mainly at Latinos. Researchers have documented how through the 1960s, racialized views of Mexicans shaped law and bureaucratic practice.[xi] Over the next decade, Congress: ended the Bracero program, which had allowed as many as 800,000 temporary migrants from Mexico annually to work mainly in agriculture; cut legal immigration from Mexico by 50%; and ended the long-standing practice that parents of US citizens wouldn’t be deported. Reducing lawful means of immigrating predictably led to a rise in unauthorized entries, which was met with calls for tougher enforcement.”
“Hernandez is one of 5.4 million Venezuelans that the United Nations estimates have fled their country due to violence, insecurity and threats; a collapsed economy; and a lack of food, medicine, and essential services. The International Monetary Fund expects that number to nearly double, to 10 million, by the end of 2023. As of January 2020, more than 1.7 million of those migrants were currently in Colombia.
Colombia will soon be offering migrants a full welcome. Duque’s announcement means Colombia will give nearly 2 million immigrants—almost 5 percent of Colombia’s total population—the ability to work legally and have access to education and health care systems. Those who register with the government will be put on a path to full citizenship.
Colombia’s choice stands in sharp contrast to the United States, where migrants from Central America must wait months on the Southern border in squalid conditions, where mass deportations (even amid a pandemic) are commonplace, and where even immigrants who have lived in the country for 20 years might find themselves ripped away from their families and banished from their new homeland for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Among President Joe Biden’s key campaign promises on immigration was to end Trump-era policies that threatened all undocumented immigrants with deportation and to identify new priorities for enforcement that protect families, workers, and longtime residents. New guidance issued Thursday is a step toward fulfilling that promise, but it still leaves individual immigration enforcement officers with significant decision-making power.
According to a memo from acting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tae Johnson, the agency will now prioritize people who pose a threat to national security or public safety for deportation, as well as recent arrivals. Specifically, that includes those who have engaged in terrorism or espionage or are suspected of doing so, people over the age of 16 who are members of criminal gangs and transnational criminal organizations, and people who arrived in the US after November 1, 2020. People who were apprehended while trying to cross the border without authorization at any point, even before November 1, are also being targeted.
The memo doesn’t make people with criminal records into automatic enforcement targets, but it does prioritize those convicted of certain offenses classified as “aggravated felonies” — which can include filing a false tax return or failing to appear in court. While those crimes might appear relatively minor, the Obama administration’s deportation guidance targeted people with just a single “significant misdemeanor.”
The memo represents a departure from Trump-era policies in which any immigrant — regardless of whether they had committed crimes or how long they had resided in the US — could have been targeted by ICE, sometimes in wide-scale raids. But it’s less clear whether the memo will allow the Biden administration to meaningfully advance from the Obama-era status quo on immigration enforcement, in which “felons, not families” were supposed to be deported as part of reforms that ICE largely ignored.”
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““Despite what some critics may claim, this memo does not block immigration enforcement, but rather makes very clear that ICE officers retain discretion and that no one is completely off limits from apprehension, detention, or removal,””
“There’s the crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving in the U.S., of too few beds to house them and of family separations happening in Mexico. There’s the crisis of an asylum system that’s broken, and that has become, with most other legal routes into the country severely restricted, America’s de facto immigration system. There’s the crisis of overflowing communities on the Mexican border, populated by people expelled from the U.S. There’s the crisis of immigration courts that take too long; of virtually no work visas available for Central Americans; of economies in Honduras and Guatemala that have been ravaged by Covid-19, a recession, and two hurricanes within the past year; of the misconception all this can be solved by better enforcement at the border; of a political system in the U.S. that seems unable to rise to the enormity of the challenge.
Right now, the number of unauthorized immigrants crossing the border is lower than it was in the early 2000s. It’s lower than in 2019”
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“What there is not is a crisis of migrants — at least not yet. There’s not a crisis of large numbers of unauthorized migrants staying in the U.S., as we saw in 2019, 2016 and 2014. There have been periods where the government took people in and released them into the U.S. in large numbers. That’s not happening right now because of the [pandemic-era] public health order, which allows the U.S. to expel people more quickly.”
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“Every time we beef up enforcement, or do something slightly more draconian, it works for a while, and then, sooner or later, people find a way around it. Enforcement works if it pushes people into real legal [immigration] channels. But if there are no legal channels, then people will just keep finding their way around enforcement.”
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“Every two or three years, we get a spike of migrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet we deal with this each time as though it’s a separate incident that can be controlled, rather than looking at the larger forces at play. There’s something long-term here that we should deal with. So maybe it is a crisis, but it’s within a larger crisis that needs to be managed and has been going on for a long time.”
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“the immediate crises. Unaccompanied minors: [The federal government] made the decision to allow them in without yet having the capacity to be able to house all of them. In the immediate term, they just have to figure out bed space—it’s literally that. They can figure that out, they just haven’t yet in ways that meet the needs of a vulnerable population. That’s resolvable. There’s also a really big policy question with long-term play-out: An open-ended policy of taking in any minor and putting them in the long-term process in the U.S. is likely to encourage even larger flows [of unaccompanied minors] in the future.
[The federal government] needs to make sure they can continue to expel newly arriving families and adults to Mexico. Even though the Biden administration doesn’t want to, they need to do it to buy time. There are a lot of things they’d like to be doing on immigration policy that have nothing to do with the border. But as long as there’s a perception that they can’t control the border, they’re not going have the political space to do anything else. They need to be “tough” at the border right now and return adults and families to Mexico in an efficient way.
We need legal pathways for workers, and an asylum system that works, because we know some people are legitimately fleeing from violence. Those two things alone would make an enormous difference.
Our asylum system has become the catchall for everything. Either you can get to the border, convince people you’re being persecuted, and stay in the U.S., or nothing: You stay home, because there’s not a line for you to get into if you’re from Central America and want to come and work. That makes no sense. Asylum shouldn’t be used [to give] labor pathways. Where we should be headed is creating two different paths: one for people who clearly are motivated by the need to leave their home country because of safety, and another for people aspiring to make their lives better by making more money.
The way you fix the asylum system is by taking it out of the hands of the immigration courts and putting it in the hands of asylum officers at the border. Immigration courts are actually quite uneven because they’re political appointments, so their decisions tend to be all over the place depending on which judge you get. Asylum officers can make decisions quickly, tend to be fairly consistent, are efficient, and you can hire them much more easily.”
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“we also need a legal pathway for people who want to come and work. For Mexicans who want to work in the U.S., there’s an actual line to get into. We don’t have that for Central Americans.
One of the reasons why Mexican migration [to the U.S.] went down so much after 2007 is that there are about 260,000 people every year who come from Mexico to work legally in the U.S. and go back home. In 2019, the comparable number [for Central Americans] was 8,000; last year, it was about 5,500. There really is no line for a Central American to get into. But people are coming anyway, so let’s give them a chance to come legally—at least some of them. It’s what we did with Mexico, and that has kept numbers [of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico] low because they’re getting what they need: a chance to make money.”
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“The demand is constantly there for people to leave and come to the U.S., but the huge surges happen when people either have a greater motivation to leave or they think they have a greater opportunity of getting into the United States. In this case, those came together.
Over the past year, there were two hurricanes in Honduras and Guatemala, plus the collapse of fragile economies because of Covid. And that created a huge demand for people to come north to the U.S. There was also an expectation around the transition to the Biden administration that made people believe that they could get in. And—probably more important than that—there is a reality that the U.S. does let some people in, particularly unaccompanied minors and some families.”
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“At the border, our options are either you send people back quickly or you release them into the U.S. for the next two or three years, during which time their case goes through a very slow process in the immigration courts. What ends up happening is that if you’re released into the U.S., you almost certainly never go back [to your home country].
There’s a very reputable study that the [Department of Homeland Security] did where they looked at what happened from 2014 to 2019 with Central American and Mexican migrants. The Mexican migrants mostly got sent back pretty quickly. But 72 percent of the Central Americans who arrived between 2014 and 2019 were admitted into the U.S., and there’s no record of their departure. And if, in fact, you’re being allowed into the U.S. and there is no real process to figure out what happened to you, that’s a lousy system.”
“Buried in the news cycle around Biden’s gesture, however, is that the updated guidance does not, in fact, stop family separations. It just tells the state to use discretion.
Prosecutors should not rule out formally charging misdemeanor border crossers but instead “take into account other individualized factors,” wrote Wilkinson, “including personal circumstances and criminal history, the seriousness of the offense, and the probable sentence or other consequences that would result from a conviction.”
It’s certainly an upgrade from a zero tolerance approach, which, true to its name, was without any nuance or mercy. But it still gives the federal government wide latitude in deciding which mothers and fathers get to stay with their children, and expressly does not eliminate the possibility that they could be separated—perhaps forever—simply for crossing a literal line in the sand.”
“the administration has tried to send a message to migrants: don’t come.
The Biden administration has been clear from the outset that the border is “not open” and that migrants should not come in an “irregular fashion.” The US continues to turn away the vast majority of arriving migrants under Title 42 of the Public Health Safety Act, with exceptions for unaccompanied children, some families with young children, and people who were sent back to Mexico to wait for their court hearings in the US.
In recent days, the message has gotten even sharper: “I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over,” Biden said in a recent interview with ABC. “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”
The White House has been amplifying that messaging with more than 17,000 radio ads in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since January 21. The ads have played in Spanish, Portuguese, and six Indigenous languages, reaching an estimated 15 million people. There have also been ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, including one that features a Salvadoran who made the dangerous journey north in 2010 at age 19 and was eventually deported after arriving in Texas”
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“US messaging may play some role in determining whether people migrate, but it’s only one factor among many sources of information.
Migrants typically get information about the conditions on the border from people in their network who have successfully made the journey, rather than from top-down declarations from US officials. Smugglers have also sought to spread misinformation about the Biden administration’s plans to process asylum seekers. Immigrant advocates on the border have reported hearing rumors spreading that migrants staying in certain camps will be processed or that the border would open at midnight.
These rumors have survived on the hopes of people who have long aspired to migrate. Many of the people arriving on the southern border are fleeing dangerous or unlivable conditions and felt they had no choice but to leave their home countries.
They are primarily coming from Central America’s “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which for years have been suffering from gang-related violence, government corruption, frequent extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world.
The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala in particular have only exacerbated those more longstanding problems.”
“The Biden administration is struggling to accommodate an increasing number of unaccompanied children arriving on the border. About 70 percent of them are teenagers, but hundreds are under the age of 12.
As of March 24, more than 5,100 such children, a record number, were in US Customs and Border Protection custody, staying in unsuitable, jail-like facilities, often for longer than the 72-hour legal limit.
Another 11,900 children were in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. Those children are staying either in permanent shelters — state-licensed facilities that are better equipped to administer care but have had to slash capacity amid the pandemic — or in temporary influx facilities that have comparatively little oversight. So far, the Biden administration has opened or is in the processing of opening six of these temporary facilities in Texas and California and is trying to expand space in others.”
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“The increase in arrivals among unaccompanied children is happening even though, for the most part, the border remains closed. Last March, at the outset of the pandemic, Trump invoked Title 42, a section of the Public Health Safety Act that allows the US government to temporarily block noncitizens from entering the US “when doing so is required in the interest of public health.” Since then, more than 514,000 migrants have been expelled, including more than 13,000 children.
Biden has chosen to keep the policy in place. He has carved out some exceptions: In addition to unaccompanied children, the administration has started processing 28,000 people who were sent back to Mexico to await their immigration court hearings in the US under a Trump-era program known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “Remain in Mexico” program.
The administration has also been admitting many families to the US because a change in Mexican law has limited the country’s capacity to detain those with young children. A CBP official told reporters on Friday that agents are encountering about 2,300 parents and children daily and 1,900 are being allowed to stay in the US.”
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“They are primarily coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which for years have been suffering from gang-related violence, government corruption, frequent extortion, and some of the highest rates of poverty and violent crime in the world.
The pandemic-related economic downturn and a pair of hurricanes late last year that devastated Honduras and Guatemala in particular have only exacerbated those more longstanding problems. Many people are hoping to apply for asylum or other humanitarian protections, and the US is obligated by federal law and international human rights agreements to give them that chance.
The majority of unaccompanied children arriving on the border also have family in the US, so they’re aiming to reunite with their relatives.”
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“Single adults still account for the vast majority of people who are arriving (about 71 percent), but the number of unaccompanied children arriving on the border is unprecedented. There are more than 17,000 currently in government custody and an average of 466 arriving daily as of March 24. By comparison, CBP apprehended 11,475 unaccompanied children in May 2019, the last time that migration levels spiked.”
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“Though Biden administration officials have warned that the US could encounter more migrants on the southern border than they have in 20 years, experts have cautioned against calling the current flow of migrants a “surge” for several reasons.
Migration levels tend to fluctuate based on the season. The number of migrants arriving on the border has historically increased in the warmer months between about February and June when the journey is less treacherous than it would be in the hot summer sun.
What we’re observing on the border is in part a “predictable seasonal shift,” as Tom K. Wong, an associate professor at the University of California San Diego, and his co-authors write in the Washington Post.
“When the numbers drop again in June and July, policymakers may be tempted to claim that their deterrence policies succeeded. But that will just be the usual seasonal drop,” they write.
There was also an almost 50 percent drop in migration at the border following the implementation of the pandemic-era border restrictions last March, rather than a typical seasonal increase. It’s likely that those restrictions “delayed prospective migrants rather than deterred them — and they’re arriving now,” they add.”
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“There’s also reason to believe the number of migrants encountered by Border Patrol overall is inflated. Title 42 created perverse incentives for single adults to attempt to cross the border multiple times. Before the pandemic, they might have been dissuaded from trying again for fear of facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry and disqualifying themselves from legal migration pathways, such as asylum. But under the pandemic-era process, they are merely fingerprinted, processed, and dropped off in Mexico without consequence.”
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“On top of the factors pushing people out of their home countries, four years of Trump’s policies have created pent-up demand. Migrants correctly perceive that Biden is seeking to take a more humane approach than his predecessor and see an opportunity to seek refuge in the US where they did not before.”
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“Smugglers have sought to capitalize on that desperation by spreading misinformation about the Biden administration’s plans to process asylum seekers.”
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“Title 42 has also created an incentive for families to choose to separate. Parents have sent their children to the border alone, knowing that they would be accepted by US authorities, while they await a chance to cross either in Mexico or their home countries. That has been the case since last fall, when a court forced the Trump administration to begin accepting unaccompanied children.”
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“Republicans have been eager to call this a “Biden border crisis.” Migration levels were already rising in the months before he took office, but because Trump was expelling nearly all migrants arriving on the border, they were largely invisible”
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“Trump’s policies, which promised to deter migrants from attempting to cross the southern border, were ultimately unsuccessful, instead creating pent-up demand that is only beginning to become evident now. And the Trump administration did nothing to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle that were driving people to flee, even revoking some $4 billion in aid.”
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“Republicans have criticized Biden for not being strong enough in telling migrants they’re not welcome. But his administration has been clear that the border is “not open” and that they should not come in an “irregular fashion.” As political pressure has ramped up, he has been even more strict, telling migrants in a recent interview with ABC “don’t come,” “don’t leave your town or city or community,” and that they would soon be able to “apply for asylum in place.”
The White House has been amplifying that messaging with more than 17,000 radio ads in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras since January 21, playing in Spanish, Portuguese, and six Indigenous languages and reaching an estimated 15 million people. There have also been ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter”