Doorkeeper
The cold hard fact is this. The “Lamp beside the Golden Door” of the United States was always limited. Not every person who crosses the border legally can stay. We, the American people, pick and choose. Regardless of the political propaganda, there is no “open border”. There never has been.
In history, immigrants came by boat. They were “evaluated” when they disembarked, many in New York or San Francisco. The “Great Migration” of the late 19th century is what most of us remember from eighth grade history class, as ships sailed into New York harbor past the Statue of Liberty herself. The passengers disembarked at Ellis Island, what we now would call a “holding facility”. They were examined, physically, mentally, and legally. Most were then allowed to go “ashore” into the teeming metropolis of New York City. My great-grandparents then moved onto Cincinnati. Some though, were sent back on the boat they came in on.
There were always some who slipped through. The derogatory name for migrants of Italian descent, “Wops”, came from the acronym for “without papers”. But the post-Civil War American economic engine needed all the workers it could get. The steel mills of Pennsylvania, the grain fields of Minnesota, the railroads stretching across the prairies and over the mountains, the meat packing factories of Chicago and Cincinnati, the coal mines of West Virginia – all needed cheap human labor. And many of those workers came “through the golden door”.
Migration Forces
We are not a “hermetically sealed” nation. In the last “normal” year, 2019, over 1 million immigrants gained legal entry into the United States. And there is a “standing” population of around 12 million “illegals” here. So what are the factors driving folks to come to America?
People come to America for the same reasons our ancestors did: for a better life. It’s not just about jobs and money, it’s also about safety and survival. Many countries in Central and South America are dangerous places to live. Gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala, political and economic upheaval in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba; all make life dangerous. It’s so dangerous that migrants are willing to risk the dangers of travel to the US Border, including the fifty mile jungle trail in the deadly Darian Pass in southern Panama. And organized crime controls the passage, extorting the traveler every step of the way.
Climate change created a real impact on Central America. The area is hotter and drier, and for many who depend on agriculture for subsistence, that cropland is gone. In the Dust Bowl era of the 1930’s, the agricultural land of the US Southern plains literally dried up and blew away. People moved to survive. They travelled from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas to find jobs in California’s Central Valley. Now many residents of the Northern Triangle of Central America are faced with the same dilemma. And the combined medical and economic disaster of the world Covid pandemic made life even worse.
The Law
Title Eight of the US Code is the set of laws regulating immigration. To legally immigrate into the United States, a migrant must have legal permission to enter. After gaining that permission, they then can make a case that they should be granted “asylum”; permission to stay. Asylum is granted for political reasons, a return to the home country may well result in injury or death, or because the migrant has a skill needed by the United States. Coming to the US for “a better life” is no longer enough to get permanent entry.
Title Eight also deals with those who cross the border without permission. If a migrant crosses illegally, they have a much higher standard to prove to gain legal asylum. Otherwise, they are returned to their “country of origin”. So getting into the US legally is a two step process. First, get legal permission to cross the border (a visa), then make a case for asylum. Cross the border illegally, and face penalty (a bar from entering the US again for a number of years) and a higher standard for asylum.
The Flood
Our system is set up to grant visas from the “home country”, not at the border crossing. We don’t intend to use The “Ellis Island holding facility” model anymore. However, with so many migrants at the border, we are establishing “Ellis Islands” in the Southwest, trying to process both the illegal and legal migrants asking entry.
And what about the now-expired Title 42 everyone is talking about? Under the emergency of the Covid crisis, illegal migrants were just rounded up, quickly processed, and immediately sent back across the border. No claims of asylum were allowed, and no “bars” on future immigration were placed. It was a temporary short cut to deal with Covid and the migration issue. But it also created a continual flood of migrants, surging back and forth across the border.
The Fix
So the problem is easy to describe: there’s a firehose of migrants coming to the border, and a system set up for a trickle. The bottleneck on both sides of the Southern Border creates a human crisis, with people sleeping in the streets, lacking food and medication, and prey to criminals of all kinds. To solve the problem requires an overhaul of US immigration law by Congress, but also intervention into the causes that are sending migrants on the long, hazardous journey in the first place.
And the US does have the economic need for more labor. The migrants represent the workers we need to “feed” our current economic engine, just like we needed them in the late 19th century. So we have more than just altruistic reasons to fix the problem. It’s not just in the migrants’ interest. A fix is in our National interest as well.
