Taking Care of Refugees, the Economy, and the Border

Keeping the US Safe and the Golden Door Open

Comprehensive immigration reform requires Congress to respect the legitimacy of different interests.  These include our moral and legal obligations to those fleeing persecution, the practical needs of our economy, and the need for a secure border.  With the Senate holding up aid for Israel and Ukraine until the Biden Administration agrees to border policy changes, a window has opened to address the problem.  Looking at the dysfunction of our current immigration system shows many areas where we may find agreement.

Emma Lazarus’s Poem on the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of the National Park Service

An immigrant is simply anyone from outside a country who comes into it.  The US has approximately 45.4 million immigrants out of a total population of 331.9 million.  A refugee is someone who flees their home country out of a reasonable fear of persecution there.  In legal terms, refugees seek protection in the US while outside it.  The President sets an annual quota for refugees who generally come into the US after receiving refugee status by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and being screened by US for security concerns.  The US has about 3 million refugees currently and admits about 125,000 per year, making them about 7% of the immigrant population and just under 1% of the total population.  

An asylee or asylum-seeker is someone inside the US who seeks protection because of a fear of persecution in their home country.  Traditionally, the US receives about 80,000 applications for asylum every year and typically grants under 20,000.  In recent years, applications have jumped to about 250,000 per year, leading to an average wait time of over 4 years for asylum claims to receive a hearing.  Some asylees are present in the US on temporary visas, while others arrive for the first time at US ports of entry and request asylum, and yet more from people who are apprehended in the US by immigration authorities and are facing deportation back to a country they no longer feel safe in. 

When I was in the military, we would occasionally have foreign military students, recently Afghans and Turks, on visas who sought asylum after political violence in their own countries.  At the University of Oregon, I have also known students who could no longer safely return home.  Few people seem to have a problem with these folks receiving fair consideration in the immigration system, as they seem to have “followed the rules” and merely been victims of unforeseen circumstances.  

Asylum claimants who arrive at ports of entry after transiting safe third countries or who seek to avoid deportation by defensively claiming asylum quite reasonably have drawn more scrutiny and concern.  The delays and limited detention capacity built into our asylum system mean that most asylum claimants only receive a very basic level of screening before being released, largely unsupervised, for the years it takes for their cases to reach a hearing.  While most immigrants are even less likely than native born Americans to commit crimes, some are gang-involved, either willingly or through working with them to get to the US. 

Courtesy of Syracuse University.

Others have achieved safety somewhere else, but simply want to access greater economic opportunities in the US.  In a recent conversation with a humanitarian worker in Mexico, she related the story of a Venezuelan woman who found safety and self-sufficiency in Chile for 6 years, then decided to seek asylum in the US because she felt like she would have greater opportunities here.  While she did not have a criminal history, neither does she fit under the traditional definition of a refugee as someone seeking a place of refuge.  She already had a refuge; she just wanted a better one.  Similarly, many Asian asylees take advantage of visa-free travel to Venezuela and Ecuador, then attempt the long trip north through Central America to the US border.  They may indeed be fleeing persecution, but the US certainly isn’t the only destination for them.  Both these people are using an asylum system designed to provide safety to seek opportunity, something better addressed by the formal immigration system.

Often left unspoken is the reality that the US also has a significantly greater demand for immigrant-employees than we allow through the front door of the formal immigration system.  The US allows about 4 million people every year into the US on temporary work-related visas.  However, we employ 30 million immigrants in our economy, far more than are admitted through work visas, and still have labor shortages.  Immigrants have higher workforce participation rates and are more likely to be essential worker than native-born citizens, but the current work visa system does not use immigration effectively as a tool to meet our workforce needs.

Wall prototypes, courtesy of CBP.

Thus, the challenges at the southern border are driven by three factors – a supply of people who want to come to the US, an economic demand for their labor, and a system that cannot evaluate the legitimacy of asylum claims quickly enough.  A comprehensive solution to the border challenge requires us to address each of these problems.  First, one way to divert people from the asylum system would be for the US to bear its share of refugee burden.  Of an estimated 104 million refugees and internally displaced people worldwide, the US hosts only about 3 million.  If we used a ratio of our population to world population to inform our quota system, we would host 4.4 million, about 50 percent more.  If we used our economic output to world economic output, our share would be 16.1 million.  In the words of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, we should open the “golden door” wide enough to at least meet our moral responsibility proportionally for refugees.  Implementing this would require working more closely with UNHCR to quickly and effectively vet refugees and funding refugee resettlement services.  In fairness, it could also mean offsetting the total number of refugees we pledge to accept by number of asylum petitions we grant annually. 

Second, Congress should open the “front door” of economic migration adequately to meet our workforce needs.  We currently operate under an antiquated system the arbitrarily allocates quotas to different countries and does not provide enough weight to the economic needs of our country.  Contrary to widespread belief, immigrants do not drive down US wages.  Instead, they contribute significantly to our own economic prosperity and often do the jobs that native-born Americans won’t do for any wage.  Implementing this system requires Congress to reevaluate the numbers and criteria for front door admissions and increased funding to the State Department and US Citizenship and Immigration Services to handle the bandwidth.  Even if we were completely cold-hearted and denied any responsibility for people fleeing persecution, it would not change the reality that we desperately need immigrants of all kinds to support our economy. 

Finally, a functional asylum system that can adjudicate claims quickly and fairly would significantly aid in border enforcement.  Right now, the Border Patrol is overwhelmed by the numbers of people seeking to enter.  The Biden border security proposal actually includes more money for the asylum system than it does for new border patrol positions.  It also requires a collective commitment to assisting those countries and UNHCR with the legitimate costs of hosting refugees.  Columbia, Turkey, and Kenya have legitimate complaints that the rest of the world wants them to bear the whole cost of hosting, respectively, Syrian, Venezuelan, and Somali refugees.  Looking at the discrepancy between our current share of the refugee population to our share of world economic output suggests that we should provide economic support to those bearing the economic burden of providing for refugees. 

In return, some of the demands of Republican senators could also be part of the solution.  These include a presumption that a person who transited a safe third country to come to our border should be returned to that first safe country for processing as a refugee by UNHCR, rather than being paroled in the US under the asylum system.  And, while a wall is not a particularly smart or effective means of securing the border, we do need greater investment in security measures at the border to meet even a reduced demand.  These aren’t cruelty, just an acknowledgement that, in meeting our legal and moral duties to refugees and immigrants, we can also insist that our borders are secure.

Safe Third Country agreements require refugees to apply for status in the first safe country they enter.

In sum, the problem at the border is not new, but rather arose because of supply, demand, and structural limitations in the immigration, refugee, and asylum system.  By setting realistic and proportional goals for economic and safety-based immigration, fixing the asylum system, and building a functional system for border security, we can reduce the pressure at the border and provide greater.  These goals are in tension, but rather complementary parts of a comprehensive response to the challenge. 

Now, we only need the politicians to look beyond their belief that the opposing party does not just have different priorities, but is actually evil, to make some progress.  If you’ve got a solution for that, I’m all ears.

One measure of political polarization, courtesy of USC.