I read a lot of right-wing and conservative sites on the web and I often see the authors highlighting the huge number of illegal aliens crossing the southern border. What I rarely see is any of them noting progress, from their viewpoint, when it happens under Biden.
That’s one of many reasons that the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh’s work is so valuable. He does careful empirical work to document what’s happening, On March 29, on Cato’s blog, Alex wrote a piece titled “Biden’s Border Immigration Policy Is Still Reducing Border Crossings and Illegal Immigration.”
An excerpt:
From December 2022 to February 2023, encounters of migrants crossing the southwest (SW) border with Mexico are down 39 percent. President Biden’s immigration and border plan that expanded legal migration to the United States through humanitarian parole should take credit for this decline. Under Biden’s plan, up to 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti (VCNH migrants) are allowed to enter the United States legally each month through humanitarian parole. As a result, more of them are waiting to come legally rather than attempting to cross illegally.
In February 2023, the number of VCNH migrants encountered, found inadmissible by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or apprehended by Border Patrol decreased by 84 percent compared to December 2022. The number of VCNH migrants showing up at the border fell from 91,344 in December to 22,084 in January and then further down to 14,381 in February (see Figure 1).
The picture above is Alex’s Figure 1.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 8 2023 at 12:11pm
I guess that most right-wing critics of Biden would not consider 120,000/mo humanitarianly paroled immigrants as progress. 🙂
And neoliberals would see it as a potentially diversion from the important immigration reform the we need, attracting more highly-skill, highly educated, entrepreneurial immigrants.
Monte
Apr 8 2023 at 7:06pm
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigrations Services, humanitarian parole is a legal process that “allows an individual who may be inadmissible or otherwise ineligible for admission into the United States to be in the United States for a temporary period for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Although Biden usually makes unconstitutional, unethical, or unintelligent decisions, anything he does legally is progress, as far as I’m concerned.
Komori
Apr 9 2023 at 11:23am
Yes. “It’s down from the record high (but still several times higher than average)” is technically progress, but most of us aren’t Bureaucrat Conrad…
Monte
Apr 8 2023 at 3:43pm
In other words, give President Biden credit for creating, or exacerbating, a problem for which he subsequently offers a solution. Isn’t this called “hero syndrome”? And I’m not certain, but as a self-described “radical for open borders”, I suspect Mr. Nowrasteh wasn’t all that upset by the record surge in illegal immigration that occurred under this administration.
Walter Boggs
Apr 13 2023 at 4:26pm
Nowrasteh’s support for open borders doesn’t mean he favors illegal immigration. It means he favors legal immigration.
Monte
Apr 13 2023 at 8:51pm
Nowrasteh claims our legal immigration system is 99.7% compliant and any additional resources spent on legal enforcement is a waste:
So I think it’s fair to say he’s indifferent to illegal immigration.
JFA
Apr 9 2023 at 6:53pm
I guess it depends on your reference point. If they are taking encounters at the border from the last months of Trump’s presidency as the reference point, it still looks like an abject failure from an anti-immigration point of view (even without considering the increased legal immigration). Encounters signal that there’s still a huge influx of illegal immigrants under Biden.
David Henderson
Apr 10 2023 at 11:33am
Good point.
Comments are closed.