The Biden administration has bypassed the immigrant and nonimmigrant visa provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), choosing instead to catch and release most of the illegal crossers the Border Patrol apprehended.
When the number of illegal crossings got too high, it offered lawful pathways as an alternative, expecting the availability of lawful pathways to reduce illegal crossings. It didn’t work. Illegal crossings dropped from 183,921 in April 2023 to 99,538 in June, but they rose back to 181,059 in August and were at 218,763 in September.
The administration’s admission policies are increasing our immigrant population, and we do need more immigrants. It isn’t enough, however, just to increase the immigrant population — the additional immigrants have to be able to meet America’s needs.
The visa system does this by issuing employment-based and family-based visas, and it includes safeguards to ensure that visas aren’t given to migrants who will become a financial burden to state or local governments.
This administration isn’t basing its admissions on America’s needs, and it isn’t ensuring that the migrants it admits will be able to take care of their financial needs without relying on government assistance.
Many of the administration’s migrants were released into the country for an asylum hearing, but the administration has overwhelmed the asylum system by admitting too many people. The immigration court has a backlog of 2,930,934 cases, and the administration is not making any progress on reducing it.
According to the Congressional Research Service, even if the size of the immigration court were to be increased from approximately 600 judges to 1,349 judges, it would still take 10 years to clear the backlog.
Visa safeguards
Immigrant visas are issued to foreign nationals who intend to live and work permanently in the United States. They are inadmissible if they are likely to become a public charge.
Nonimmigrant visas are issued to foreign nationals seeking to enter the United States on a temporary basis for a specific purpose, such as tourism, business or specified types of temporary work. They have to establish that they will not need to work while they are here unless their visas are employment-based.
All visa applicants are screened when they apply for a visa and again when they appear at a port of entry seeking admission to the United States; some of the visas have numerical limitations. Notwithstanding these restrictions, the United States issued 1,018,349 immigrant visas and 6,815,120 nonimmigrant visas in fiscal 2022.
Few safeguards
The Border Patrol has apprehended 5,815,600 illegal crossers since the beginning of Biden’s presidency, from 160 countries. This has severely reduced the time available to screen individual migrants. Notwithstanding this problem, the Border Patrol released more than 2 million illegal crossers.
The main legal pathway is the CBP One mobile application program, which permits migrants without visas to schedule an appointment to present themselves for inspection at a designated port of entry. The extraordinarily high CBP One admission rate indicates that CBP isn’t doing meaningful screening in this program either. From January 2023, which is when the interviews started, through September, CBP admitted 99.7 percent of the 225,000 undocumented immigrants it interviewed.
Burden
The tsunami of migrant admissions has been especially hard on border towns.
Since spring 2022, New York City, with a population of 8.3 million, has received 118,000 migrants. Chicago, with a population of 2.6 million, accepted around 15,000. The mayors of these cities have complained bitterly about the burdens this imposes.
But Eagle Pass and Del Rio, Texas, with combined populations of 63,433, have received a total of 347,572 illegal crossers in the first 11 months of fiscal 2023. The officials from these cities say they have exhausted their resources trying to meet the migrant demands for social services, food and housing.
Eagle Pass has one small hospital with 101 beds, and it has to bear $100,000 a month in uncompensated migrant care that the federal government won’t reimburse. The Eagle Pass mayor issued an emergency declaration to get state resources and funding to handle these expenses.
El Paso, Texas, is receiving approximately 2,000 migrants per day. Mayor Oscar Leeser has warned that, “We have come to what we look at [as] a breaking point right now.”
Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of migrants walk across private property along the California-Mexico border every day. The border town of Jacumba, Calif., has a population of 600 people, and it is providing a camp for more than 300 recently arrived migrants.
Trash
It has been estimated that each illegal crosser leaves behind 6 to 8 pounds of trash on the U.S. side of the border. This includes such things as backpacks, plastics, clothing, human waste, medical supplies, food and chemicals.
Fox News captured drone footage of trash and clothing discarded along a common crossing point near Normandy, Texas. Thousands of migrants have streamed across the border there, leaving behind discarded trash and clothing. Similar scenes can be observed at the Eagle Pass border.
John Rourke went to Brownsville, Texas, to clean up trash that had been left behind by migrants. He found piles of debris such as wet clothing, plastic trash bags, paper, discarded pills and identification cards.
In Arizona, roughly 2,000 tons of trash are discarded every year along the state’s borderlands.
If the administration is going to continue admitting millions of migrants without visas, it should at least make an effort to ensure that they will meet American employment and family unification needs, and that they will not have to depend on government financial assistance. It also should do something about the trash they are leaving in their wake.
Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an Executive Branch Immigration Law Expert for three years. He subsequently served as an immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years. Follow him at: https://nolanrappaport.blogspot.com