The current back-door immigration negotiations and media around immigration misstate and mistake the real issues and stakes. Some in Congress paint those opposed to the provisions being negotiated as simply liberal concerns that the provisions are cruel and xenophobic. Yet those who have spoken out know what 40 years of experience has taught us: that deterrence-only policies will do nothing but worsen issues of concern at the border.
Too many talking points simply state that the porous southern border is an urgent problem. The real problem is a decades-old quest to “seal the border” while ignoring the need for immigration laws that are fit for the needs of this century, with humanitarian responses and timely adjudications.
Congress has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into quixotic enforcement efforts, from personnel to infrastructure to technology. A 2013 analysis identified $186.8 billion in U.S. immigration enforcement spending between 1986 and 2013; the American Immigration Council reported U.S. spending on immigration enforcement was $333 billion between 2003 and 2019 alone.
The U.S. has more than 50,000 border and interior immigration enforcement officers. Meanwhile, Congress has starved the immigration adjudications infrastructure, leaving 1,500 people nationwide to decide life-or-death asylum claims.
Those who propose even harsher policies than those in place today would continue throwing resources on a failed model of deterrence, while effectively throwing away the fundamental right to seek asylum from persecution. The proposals being negotiated promise to heighten the threshold standard to have an asylum claim even heard — something that will mean vulnerable individuals without counsel are returned to face persecution and torture while still failing to address the reasons people aren’t able to process claims in a more safe and orderly process.
Other provisions would attempt to deter individuals from seeking asylum by creating more arbitrary and prolonged immigration detention — a costly proposal that has been tried and has failed to deliver the order at the border its proponents promise. These proposals threaten to violate U.S. obligations to protect people fleeing harm while also offering no realistic solutions; instead, they reprise policies that have continually failed to address real opportunities for reform.
In support of these harsh policies, many allege migrants falsely claim asylum to allow them to remain in the U.S. for months, if not years, while their case is heard. If backlogs are the concern, common sense would lead to massive investment in an efficient, robust and well-funded adjudications system. But rates of asylum denials are driven by more than unqualified applications.
Our asylum laws have fallen out of line with international standards, most notably by statutorily rendering people who have a well-founded fear of persecution arbitrarily ineligible for asylum if they file for protection more than a year after arriving in the U.S. A failed asylum claim must not be confused with abuse of the asylum system. If bars to asylum in existing law haven’t provided the deterrence some desire, no one should pretend that new bars or heightened standards would do anything more than worsen the crisis. People seeking safety will continue to find ways to do so — creating bars to that safety will simply mean the U.S. sees larger rates of people finding less safe and more irregular means of entry.
Indeed, those concerned about trafficking and the rise of violent crime at the border should listen to experts who have time and again noted that harsher immigration policies drive these crimes. Desperate individuals without a viable means to move safely will become more vulnerable to exploitation.
Michele Garnett McKenzie is the deputy director and Lindsey Greising is staff attorney for advocacy at The Advocates for Human Rights, which has been based in Minnesota for 40 years.
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