‘Higher visibility’: How US immigration dynamics are shifting

The humanitarian crisis on the U.S. southern border is a political crisis for President Joe Biden. Cities receiving migrants, meanwhile, face a crisis of logistics. 

From El Paso to Denver to New York, elected officials are increasingly calling for more federal assistance to help manage a large number of arrivals. “The absence of federal support to significantly defray state and local costs, long waits for migrants to work legally, and large numbers arriving without connections in the country have combined to create an inordinate burden” for several cities, concludes a recent article by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. 

Doris Meissner, director of the institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, recently shared more on the issue in a telephone interview with the Monitor. She has watched the border transform since the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, she served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to immigration agencies now under the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Meissner discussed the context of global migration and a challenging balancing act that has continued to elude Congress – as Border Patrol over the past fiscal year has logged more than 1.8 million encounters along the southern border, nearing the record high set in fiscal year 2022. 

How does the United States remain “open and generous to immigration,” she asks, “but at the same time recognize that there are limits?” This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Americans have increasingly seen the migration crisis expand past the southern border into interior cities, including Democratic strongholds like New York. How has this altered the politics of the nation’s immigration debate?

It’s clearly brought the issue into higher visibility because it has demonstrated the range in nationalities and the growing numbers of people that are trying to come to the United States. 

It really illustrates the challenge that the [Biden] administration is facing, of trying to achieve border control but at the same time trying to have humane enforcement that recognizes that we are a nation of immigrants. And that we, as part of that tradition, have always offered protection to people who are suffering from persecution or are not able to survive where they are. That is now happening, though, increasingly closer to home. That issue of numbers and scale is very new and very complicated to try to manage and find a good balance.

President Joe Biden’s political opponents paint the volume of border crossings as policy failure. How much of this is typical pressure against an incumbent headed into an election year, as opposed to backlash against his own rule-making?

There’s no question that a good part of it is very political and is a reflection of the polarized politics that we have in general in this country, but of which immigration is one of the main hot-button issues. 

Courtesy of Louis Tinsley/Migration Policy Institute

A former federal immigration official, Doris Meissner now directs the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. How does the country remain "open and generous to immigration," she asks, "but at the same time recognize that there are limits?"

Even before the increases in the numbers that we’ve seen in the last year or two, it’s been quite clear that with President Biden’s election, there was going to be not only change in policy from what had been the case in the Trump administration, but that there would also be real controversy. And that Republicans were primed from the outset to keep this issue burning and keep it one that remained unresolved in order to use it as a political issue in campaigns. 

That said, we are very much in new territory. ... That’s not only the case for the United States in this hemisphere, but it’s globally the case that there are more people displaced and in danger of being displaced than we’ve had, really, since probably the Second World War. Those displacements are a result of authoritarianism, of wars, of climate change, of poverty, of the post-pandemic period where many parts of the world have simply not recovered from the economic harms of the pandemic as quickly as the United States. These forces are all converging and leading to very large numbers of people on the move. 

The question for the United States, of course, is, how do we effectively remain a nation that is open and generous to immigration, but at the same time recognize that there are limits, and there have to be limits, and border control is an essential characteristic and responsibility for any government?

Many consider 1986 the last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform. Do you see any indications that members of Congress view this moment as time to renew efforts at federal immigration reform?

Lots of people, of course, remain hopeful that that could be the case. But given what we’re seeing in the Congress, there’s just no – or there’s just so little – willingness to sit down and problem-solve, as compared to point fingers. 

When we look back on our own history, immigration legislation has been infrequent – which is quite interesting, given the fact that immigration is so much a part of our national experience. But real legislative changes have been infrequent. They’ve been decades apart. But when they have occurred, they’ve only occurred through bipartisanship. 

Immigration is one of those issues where on each side of the political spectrum there are extremes. And so in order for there to be progress, there has to be a strong center, and there has to be a willingness across the aisle within both parties to be pragmatic and to find solutions. 

Any issues that could invite bipartisan compromise on immigration policy? 

The issues that could [see] compromise have been around for quite some while, and there hasn’t been any success to show. I think perhaps the most clear example of that is the issue of DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], of young people who are in this country without a legal status, because they came here with their parents but were not born in the United States.

That issue has been really ripe for legislative action for, well, almost two decades. I mean, Sen. [Dick] Durbin [a Democratic senator from Illinois] was the first person to propose tangible legislation to regularize the status of DACA young people [through the never-passed DREAM Act]. At that time, they were called the “Dreamers” – they still are called the “Dreamers.” That was in the early 2000s. So absent legislation, over the course of maybe about 10 years, brought us to 2012 when President [Barack] Obama put an administrative order into place that created DACA, which is an executive action that provides protection from deportation and authorization to work.

But that has been pending now and under challenge in the courts for another 10-plus years and still is not resolved. The latest court action on that again declared that the executive action that President Obama took was outside of the bounds of his authority. 

However, that judge has said that the DACA program can continue for those people who currently hold DACA. Of course, there is a generation coming forward that are no longer eligible for DACA, but also are young people who don’t have a legal status, because they came with their parents when they were young. That is such a compelling example of where legislation is needed.

You oversaw another era of immigration overhaul around the asylum system during the Clinton administration. Which of those policies do you think has most influenced our current challenges around illegal migration and asylum? 

Reforms that we made in the 1990s held for quite a long time. ... We created an entirely new set of offices around the country within the immigration service that handled just asylum claims. We were authorized by the Congress to hire very substantial numbers of asylum officers. ... A whole new infrastructure was put into place for handling asylum claims. ... That system is still in place, but it’s been completely overwhelmed [over the past decade]. And that was not accompanied by commensurate increases in resources and increases in funding support by the Congress. 

What we have now is a system where the asylum claims that are being filed are coming almost entirely across the southwest border. The system prior to that time was not claims that were coming across the southwest border – they were claims that were being filed by people who largely were already [present] in the country, in the United States.