A Compromise on Immigration Is Possible. This Bill Could Make It Happen.

[maestrob]

Oct. 28, 2022

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.


A wave of people seeking better lives has overwhelmed America’s immigration infrastructure. In response, the United States has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking asylum to live and work in the country without any evaluation of the merits of their claims, while summarily expelling hundreds of thousands of others, also without regard to the merits of their claims. A promise to shelter those in need has thus devolved into a Kafkaesque sham.

Immigration is a vitalizing force in the nation’s cultural and economic life, but the United States cannot admit all those who wish to come. The choice of who is allowed to enter must be intentional, not the result of a government that lacks the capacity to enforce its own laws. The shambles of the asylum process is undermining public support for immigration. And that, in turn, jeopardizes the ability of those with legitimate need to obtain refuge.

America’s commitment to offer asylum to people fleeing violence and persecution in their homelands is an essential expression of the nation’s ideals. But the system is broken.

The United States needs to invest the resources necessary to live up to its ideals by building a system that treats asylum seekers with dignity, provides for a fair and efficient adjudication of their claims and ensures that those who do not obtain permission to stay in the country do not remain.

The daily scenes of bedraggled families sloshing across the Rio Grande to reach Texas encapsulate the misery and unfairness of an immigration system that has devolved into a haphazard collection of breaches and barriers. Between October 2021 and June 2022, the first three quarters of the most recent fiscal year, the government accepted asylum applications from more than 150,000 people, mostly from Latin America, many traveling with their families. Often they seek or wait patiently for arrest as soon as they set foot in the United States, knowing that after a few days in federal custody, they will be released. More than 750,000 people are now waiting for the government to review their asylum claims, and the average wait time is more than four years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. In the meantime, they can live in the United States and, after 150 days, apply for permission to work here.

The Government Accountability Office reported last month that the government was struggling to keep track of a significant portion of those released from custody. Between March 2021 and February 2022, Customs and Border Protection released 184,900 migrants seeking asylum. They were instructed to report to immigration offices in their destination cities, but as of March 2022, roughly one in four of those people had failed to do so.

The backlog of asylum claims has swelled even though the government, since March 2020, has used the pretext of a public health emergency to bar asylum claims from some of the nations that historically have numbered among the largest sources of migrants seeking to enter the United States, including Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Between October 2021 and June 2022, the federal government invoked that rule, known as Title 42, to expel migrants 853,000 times along the southern border (although that number includes many people who were caught and expelled more than once). The Biden administration’s efforts to end the use of the rule are currently tied up in federal court.

The capricious nature of the current system was on vivid display earlier this month. After allowing tens of thousands of migrants from Venezuela to enter the country in recent years, the Biden administration added Venezuela to the list of Title 42 countries, effectively barring new claims. That was an abrupt shift from an overly permissive policy to an overly restrictive one.

The basic problem is that the government does not have the resources to act justly. A bill introduced last year, the Bipartisan Border Solutions Act, would provide those resources. The core of the bill would expand the capacity of the immigration system to triage asylum claims. It provides funding for four new processing centers along the southern border where migrants seeking asylum could be detained for up to 72 hours and where they would undergo health screenings, background checks and an initial screening to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution in their countries of origin. Individuals who do not meet the standard could be deported, with a limited right to appeal.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that would help run the new processing centers, has a long and well-documented history of mistreating migrants. Watchdog groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have raised legitimate concerns about any expansion of the authority of an agency that has often behaved as if it is fighting a war against immigration. But there is little sense in creating a new agency to do the work of an existing agency. This legislation presents an opportunity for Congress to clarify the agency’s mission, and it includes provisions for supervision by governmental and nongovernmental watchdogs.

The bill also would fund an expansion of the system for making final asylum decisions, with the aim of expediting those decisions. It would add 150 immigration judges, an increase of more than 25 percent, as well as 300 asylum officers. Under a pilot program that the Biden administration launched this spring, some asylum claims are heard by asylum officers who participate in a five-week training course rather than by immigration judges, who must hold law degrees and have at least seven years of experience. The pilot tries to strike a balance between due process and speed, providing applicants with at least 21 days but no more than 45 days to prepare for their hearing — a reasonable target for all asylum claims.

The bill also instructs the government to prioritize adjudication of new asylum claims during surges in the number of applications. That may delay the processing of existing claims, but it is a sensible strategy to discourage people without valid claims from joining the back of the line in the hope that years will pass before anyone judges the merit of their claim.

The bill is narrowly focused on the mechanics of asylum. It does not address the economic and political problems that propel people to risk the journey to the United States, nor does it offer alternative pathways to enter the United States legally to those who are ineligible for asylum. Those are real flaws, akin to building a dam without a spillway.

The bill also does not address the strain on border communities where migrants are released from federal custody, and on the communities throughout the country where migrants settle.

In the most recent fiscal year, the federal government allocated $150 million to reimburse local governments and nonprofits that provide aid to migrants. That is entirely insufficient; the Texas border city of El Paso alone is on pace to spend $89 million in a year providing services to migrants. California has spent $900 million over the past three years. In a 2016 assessment, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that immigration imposes significant short-term costs on local governments but that the children of immigrants “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population.” Immigration, in other words, is an investment in America’s future, but someone still needs to cover the upfront costs.

California coordinates closely with federal authorities and nonprofits to meet migrants as they are released from custody, providing them with health care and temporary shelter, and helping them to connect with friends and family. Similar efforts are needed in other states, especially Texas, where the number of migrants has been several times greater, and where the state government has provided little aid.

For all the problems that the border protection bill does not address, however, it still provides a framework for substantive progress. And its narrow focus may be a political virtue. Efforts to craft comprehensive overhauls of immigration law have proved unavailing, and the polarizing legacy of the xenophobic rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration has made any progress on immigration difficult.

The Senate sponsors, Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democrats Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, bucked the positions of their own parties by introducing the bill last year. Many Republicans want to make it even harder for anyone to seek asylum; many Democrats insist that any overhaul of immigration rules must include relief for those already in the United States.

Winning broader support will require more compromise and courage. But regardless of the results of the midterm elections, Congress has a real opportunity to begin the critical work of fixing the nation’s immigration system by overhauling the asylum process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/opin ... biden.html