The 304,000 encounters is the equivalent of a Newark, NJ or Saint Paul, MN attempting to enter illegally every month - and that does not count so-called "gottaways" who evade detection. As Congress determines how to fund the government's implementation of immigration policy, the need to reform border strategy has become more apparent and urgent.
Milton Friedman once wrote “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” While evidence of this truism abounds, one of the greatest examples is Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Biden Administration just announced a massive expansion of TPS for Venezuela that the government estimates extends protection from removal and employment authorization documents (EADs) to 472,000 additional aliens present in the country.
Much has been made of how surge in illegal immigration into cities as far from the border as Chicago and New York threaten the fiscal resilience of the receiving cities (Mayor Adams says the migrant crisis will "destroy New York City"), and the impact on resilience doesn't end there.
When it comes to debates over immigration, one of the common errors is distinguishing between aliens who enter legally as opposed to illegally. Often, we are told that legal immigration is beneficial, but illegal immigration is harmful. A recent Washington Times article highlights an extreme example of this by calling for admission of a million H-1B aliens while deporting the illegal alien population.
Southern District of Texas District Court Judge Hanen finally ruled against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after years of legal back-and-forth. The short (by judicial standards) 40-page opinion is a bit anticlimactic, largely because the Federal government put up very little fight. In fact, if you examine the history of DACA closely, it never seemed like the Democrats who created it cared all that much.
Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the Senate companion to H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act. The legislation was passed by the House of Representatives in May and would require all employers to use E-Verify, close asylum loopholes, and end the Biden Administration's abuse of parole for illegal aliens, among other things. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), JD Vance (R-Ohio), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), and John Kennedy (R-La.) are original cosponsors.
The polarization of both the House and Senate has made it largely impossible to pass legislative overhauls without some parliamentary chicanery. Obamacare, Trump’s tax cuts, and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act were all passed under the budget reconciliation process which allows a simple majority in the Senate to bypass the legislative filibuster. For anyone serious about stopping the border crisis that is engulfing the nation in a state of emergency, it is time to use the coming spending fight to force broad reform of the immigration system.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has a new report examining the free-fall in Department of Labor (DOL) investigations into farmworker abuse, which dropped to a record low of 879. 879 closed cases when hundreds of thousands of H-2A employees are working every year. This continues the trend of “see no evil, hear no evil” of the Trump Administration, when only 1,036 cases were closed annually.
A federal judge has ruled that a New Jersey law, which effectively banned detention of illegal aliens, is unconstitutional.
Andrea Flores, an immigration policy advisor under both Presidents Obama and Biden, is going to tell us how to fix the immigration system. Apparently, letting everyone enter the country with employment authorization is the correct answer to driving down the illegal entries.