July marked the fifth consecutive month of border crossings dropping, which even accounting for the seasonal drop around summertime is at the lowest level in years. This represents a success of Biden administration efforts, but at a real cost.
Two things can be true at once. This is, from a pure administrative perspective, easier for New York City to deal with fewer arrivals. Our municipal government was not set up to act as a de facto refugee resettlement entity and the lack of support from the state and federal governments meant that it had to try to build these capacities on the fly, at the same time as it was dealing with the newcomers. We have always maintained the city made significant missteps early on, but it was scrambling to compensate for an unexpected hand it was dealt.
Fewer arrivals mean not only that the scramble can slow a bit, but ideally that the migrants that have already shown up can benefit from less split attention and receive better services. It also means the city’s costs — and, as inflated as some of City Hall’s projections might have been, it’s undeniable that some significant expenditures were unavoidable — will come down.
It can also simultaneously be true that the federal border approach that has led to these declines was an extreme measure. We understand that President Biden had to use executive action to do something after the painstakingly-negotiated bipartisan Senate deal collapsed, killed at the last minute by Donald Trump’s insistence that no compromise be made to keep the border a live wedge issue in the presidential campaign.
What Biden didn’t have to do is adopt the posture of his predecessor and try to solve the issue by issuing heavy border restrictions unilaterally, making us turn our backs on our international humanitarian obligations and our own laws, which guarantee the right to seek asylum protections.
These efforts have in the short term succeeded at slowing flows, but in the long-term, the main lesson we’ve drawn from decades of variously restrictive border policies is that they can only affect the decision to come so much. If events abroad push people out, they’ll make the trek.
Where this country has been most effective at dealing with immigration over its nearly two and a half centuries of existence has been in welcoming it and integrating it as an asset. What powered eventual U.S. economic, cultural and political dominance globally wasn’t just industrial might — other countries did that first — or the development of academic systems or artistic and scientific study. It was immigration, which supercharged the power of all these things and launched the country forward.
Yes, times have grown more complicated and the world more interconnected and the bygone era of open migration ended for some good reasons, not least of which that the immigrants generally had to weather a generation or two of exploitation before they could approach full participation in society.
But it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing; people want to keep coming here, and they want to work here and pay into Social Security and have kids and start businesses. We need all of that. Let’s build out pathways for them to do it, and everyone wins.
