Wayne O'Leary

The Immigration Mess

In 1883, poet Emma Lazarus provided the famous inscription for the Statue of Liberty that most every American has heard. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” it begins, going on to refer to the “wretched,” “tempest-tossed” arrivals at America’s “golden door.” That’s where the trouble started, you might say.

This country has been trying to live up to the Lazarus creed on immigration ever since — to mixed results. Today, the tempest-tossed no longer arrive by ship; they come by plane, bus, automobile, or on foot in ever increasing numbers, and they’re often far from wretched. The golden door, furthermore, no longer opens to a yellow brick road leading to heaven on Earth, but to a troubled nation divided in its aspirations and unwilling in large degree to face reality as regards its national immigration policy.

A steady, manageable human influx of several generations’ duration has surged in recent decades, turning a relative trickle into a flood. The numbers are astounding. Legal immigration to the US, 265,000 in 1960, expanded exponentially following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which lifted a 40-year ceiling on lawful immigration and removed an associated national-origins quota system. Annual entries quadrupled to one million a year by century’s end and remained at that level through 2016, when Trump administration restrictions temporarily stemmed the flow, reducing it to 600,000 a year by 2019. But it’s since resumed its implacable upward trajectory. Furthermore, those figures apply only to legal immigration, which can be adjusted up or down, depending on federal quota policy.

The real problem facing Washington policymakers is illegal immigration, especially at the southern border; it’s the dilemma that keeps government officials awake at night. Various estimates made over the last two decades suggest annual unauthorized entries into this country have ranged from 700,000 to 1.5 million — at least as many as for documented arrivals. Figures for the past two years confirm those estimates. In fiscal 2021, border officials turned back 1.7 million migrants attempting to cross from Mexico illegally, some having unsuccessfully tried several times. Numerous attempts did succeed; the Biden administration acknowledges that 389,000 undocumented migrants evaded capture and entered the US between October 2020 and September 2021.

The problem will only get worse; it’s driven by factors both unique to our time and endemic to Latin America in particular: extreme weather and natural disasters, the coronavirus pandemic, food shortages, domestic gang violence, government oppression, revolution and civil war. And there’s always the perennial, overriding incentive of economic hardship and the desire for a better life. Whatever the specific motivation, it resulted in the US Border Patrol intercepting 179,000 persons representing 160 countries crossing the southern border in April of 2021 alone, the largest one-month total in 20 years. Two-thirds were from Mexico and Central America, but one-third were from places as far afield as India, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and Venezuela — in effect, the entire world.

Unauthorized immigration takes two forms in the current context, formal asylum-seekers, or refugees, and persons simply trying surreptitiously to gain entry by avoiding authorities. There’s an element of frenzied desperation involved, especially on the part of refugees. Included in this category are the highly publicized minors, unaccompanied children sent by their families in hopes of them reaching relatives in the US. They arrive at the border in waves (11,000 in May 2019, 9,400 in February 2021), a social problem with no obvious solution; all told, 29,700 sought entry in 2020-21. Then, there are the famous caravans, as many as 6,000 individuals at a time collected in groups, steadily making their way north on foot.

Those of some means use another expedient: professional smugglers. Until circa 2019, small-scale human trafficking at the border was handled by independent “coyotes.” Since then, Latin America’s drug cartels have taken over the trade, employing organizational techniques that include use of logistics specialists, stash houses, surveillance teams, and financial accountants; they run a $13 billion industry, collecting fees ranging from $4,000 per head for migrants departing Latin America to $20,000 for those traveling from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia.

The bottom line is that the world wants to come to America, one way or another. And why not? As dysfunctional as things are here, they’re better than in most migrants’ homelands. One result: Nearly 14% of our population is now foreign-born, the most since 1910.

Naturally, this being the US, the situation has found expression in our polarized politics. Most recently, the right has been on the offensive, blaming Joe Biden for not solving the problem Donald Trump failed to solve. Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, who have no answers, have chosen to exploit migrants for political gain, using their cynical refugee shuttle to Northern sanctuary cities to please their nativist base and run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, take a more nuanced, but no less political, approach. Theirs is a pro-immigration party with a frankly open-borders wing that demands an accelerated liberalizing of migration policy. Further, they operate within an ideological framework where immigrant-rights groups have proliferated and immigrant advocacy constitutes a cottage industry of sorts.

Democrats, who clearly remain equivocal on the issue, nevertheless are moving in the direction of lifting immigration restrictions based on health, age or family status, legalizing most categories of undocumented immigrants already here, increasing the number of refugees or asylum-seekers accepted, expanding federal, state and local immigrant-aid budgets (already in the billions of dollars), and making it easier for American companies to hire workers from abroad (a demand of US corporations).

Those initiatives will necessarily swell the ranks of newcomers and strain the country’s capacity to assimilate them. This is a nation, remember, that contained 50 million people when Emma Lazarus penned her famous lines; it now contains six times as many — 332 million and counting — all competing for shrinking resources in an overpopulated, climate-change environment.

There are, of course, positive ways to address the immigration conundrum: more foreign aid to problematic Central American countries to ease their internal emigration pressures, for example, or an updated and expanded Bracero (temporary guest worker) program to defuse American employer demands for permanent immigrant labor. These, however, would require imagination and will, which we presently don’t have.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2022

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