Border ‘Crisis’ Defies Compromise

By ART CULLEN

The crush of migrants foretold by cable news, right-wing politicians and other purveyors of fear failed to materialize with the end of COVID-based restrictions on immigration May 11. In fact, the end of Title 42 restrictions saw a 50% drop in apprehensions at the border the following weekend.

The Biden Administration credited a tougher immigration policy that was communicated throughout Latin America: If asylum seekers enter the country illegally, they will be deported and barred for five years from re-entry, and face criminal penalties. They must apply for asylum from a country they are traveling through on their way to the USA, and they are encouraged to use a cellphone application to apply.

The administration also is said to be hunting down “coyotes,” who smuggle refugees, to stanch the flow.

For now, the numbers have dropped. These interim steps will not permanently relieve the pressure as poor people victimized by oppressive governments, cartel violence and famine seek security and freedom in the United States. That’s why the hard work of comprehensive immigration reform is so important.

Plus, we need the people. Iowa’s workforce is aging out. We need immigrants to cut meat, milk cows, build houses and drive trucks. The main problem facing Iowa business is a lack of help. Storm Lake could use the hands, for sure.

Our process is so convoluted that few of us can understand it — much less a struggling mother from Honduras whose husband was kidnapped; Lord help her if she doesn’t have a cellphone with that immigration app.

Refugees want to come here. Good, honest, hard-working people. We need them. Rather than try to make them criminals, why can’t we fashion an immigration system that reflects our values as an immigrant nation?

It’s all politics, pure and simple, all the time. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio, was recently censured by the Texas Republican Party in part for advocating immigration reform and working across the aisle with Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, on bipartisan border solutions.

Immigration solutions do not serve partisanship, which is why they have languished for 30 years.

We should let the children of undocumented immigrants become citizens. Dreamers did not come here on their own volition, and they should not be held in administrative limbo indefinitely. More than 80% of Americans want Dreamers on a path to citizenship. Second, we must rationalize more than 10 million undocumented residents — nearly all of them employed in “essential” industries like food processing — and get them on a legal pathway after paying a fine.

We should respond to the immediate suffering at the border by ramping up the immigration processing regime, from border agents to hearing officers to judges. We should continue to enhance security at the border, but it is not as if you can stroll in from Mexico undetected — the vast majority of immigrants are apprehended. The legal ports of entry are where the help is needed to cut down on human smuggling.

We should determine the number of workers we need, and let them in with an efficient and speedy process. We should embrace people who seek freedom and want to work hard, which is been the pervasive experience in Storm Lake. Immigrants always have been a revitalizing force in rural America.

Attempts have been made at immigration reform by earnest politicians like Gonzales or Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. They never galvanize in the face of the next election. The Biden Administration has to look as tough as the House Freedom Caucus going into 2024. Real attempts at comprehensive reform — Dreamers, undocumented, refugees, worker protection and border stability — are frustrated.

The United States serves as a relief valve for Latin America. We seeded many of the root causes of migration — civil wars in El Salvador and Honduras, insatiable drug demand feeding militarized cartels, and flooding out small campesino farmers with American ag export commodities. We can only stop the flow of migration by addressing the core issues that afflict both sides of the border.

Historically, we have responded by sending troops (Biden sent 1,500 soldiers to the border before Title 42 expired). President Donald Trump wanted to send the Marines into Venezuela. We should be sending agronomists and micro-lenders. We should address opioid addiction on this side of the border — the problem started with US drug companies; the Mexican cartels merely exploited the opening. We need to support what is left of transparent civic institutions in Latin America. In the meantime, we need to show our neighbors some mercy with a system that treats refugees with dignity. We suppose that will have to wait until after the next election.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2023

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