On the U.S.-Mexico border, as in the never-ending debate over U.S. immigration policy, every day is Groundhog Day.
Our immigration dialogue is stalled. Unlike debates over the death penalty or same-sex marriage, it never seems to evolve or take on fresh nuance. It’s more like the shouting matches about abortion or gun control, where people are cemented in their position and make the same arguments over and over again.
While what’s happening now is, in fact, uniquely intense, Americans aren’t seeing anything on the U.S.-Mexico border that they haven’t seen before or that we won’t see again—and that second point at least came through loud and clear Thursday in President Joe Biden’s first news conference.
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Many of the questions had to do with the current border crisis. Tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors—most of them from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—are fleeing chaos, instability and violence and showing up unannounced at the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re doing all that because they hope to qualify for asylum. A lot of presidents spend their first appearance before the White House press corps simply saying what the media would like to hear, or what the public wants to hear. Biden deserves credit for doing something more valuable. He seized the opportunity to say what needed to be said.
Like this, in responding to a question about how far he’ll go, as president, in tackling a number of challenges his administration is facing:
“The other problems we’re talking about, from immigration to guns and the other things you mentioned, are long-term problems; they’ve been around a long time.”
And this, about how Biden plans to resolve the “tension” between telling would-be refugees not to come to the United States, and the fact that many of those who have already left claim that they’re coming because they see Biden “as a moral, decent man” who will let them in the door—or at least give them a fair hearing as to why they have “credible fear” that prevents them from returning to their home countries:
“Nothing has changed. As many people came: 28-percent increase in children to the border in my administration; 31 percent in the last year of... in 2019, before the pandemic, in the Trump administration. It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”
Biden is correct that the challenge posed by immigration—and the related issue of asylum—dates back a long time.
The question of how Americans should deal with unexpected guests left big footprints on the 20th century. The Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to keep out Asians, Italians, Greeks, Eastern European Jews and others. The Truman Directive of 1945 was an executive order by the 33rd president to allow Jewish refugees to seek safe haven in the United States, albeit one that came a decade too late to save millions of Jews killed by the Nazis. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened up the immigration system by eliminating the national origins quota system established in the 1920s to benefit the English, Irish, and Germans. And more than 20 years later, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.
But, personally, as the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who came here as a boy from Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution—legally because there were not yet laws to keep him out—I would dispute the suggestion that immigration is a “problem.” It’s more like a blessing and the special sauce that, time and again, makes America great.
While Biden was half-right about that part, he was fully wrong on at least three other points.
First, the president implied that what’s going on right now at the border is anything approaching normal. Think tanks, the media, and immigration authorities disagree. They say the projected surge for this year will be larger than ever and that unaccompanied minors are arriving at the border at rates that far outpace the administration’s ability to provide the resources to care for them. In fact, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said recently that U.S. officials are on-pace to encounter more people at the border "than we have in the last 20 years."
Second, Biden was also off-base when he said that this “happens every single, solitary year.” A surge happened in 2014 and 2019, but it didn’t happen to any measurable degree in the five years in between or in the two years since. Sure, immigration from Mexico happens “every single, solitary year” as people looking for work migrate north for greater economic opportunities. But what’s happening at the border is not that. The arrivals are asylum-seekers being pushed out of Central America, not immigrants from Mexico being pulled into the United States by the promise of a job.
Finally, while Biden didn’t use the exact word “seasonal” in describing the surges, that’s what he implied when he said they tend to happen “in the winter months of January, February, March.” In fact, both the 2014 and 2019 surges began in the spring and peaked in the summer. When the house is on fire, you jump out a window immediately. You don’t wait until the weather improves.
Still, thanks to Biden, many Americans may now have a better understanding about the paradox at the heart of the current border crisis. It’s the same, but it’s also different.
Setting aside the ugly tendency to refer to migrants as some sort of plague or tide, this is like a global pandemic in the sense that every day is “Blursday” because it’s the same and monotonous. And yet given that the health crisis is a once-in-a-century event, there are going to be aspects of it that are totally unique and different from anything we’ve seen before.
Whether Americans are hollering about immigration, or debating refugee policy, it all has such a familiar ring. It feels like we’ve heard all the arguments before, and we’re repeating ourselves. Even the counter-arguments have a déjà vu quality. Nothing gets through. No one is persuaded to look at the issue in a different way. And so nothing changes.
The question of how we treat the stranger is too important, and much too urgent, for reruns and retreads. We need a fresh look, one that starts with being honest about what’s happening and how we got here and a consensus about where we want to go. That’s not just for the good of the thousands of people who are coming to our door. It’s also for the good of a country that—as places go—is just remarkable enough for them to risk their lives for a chance to call it their own.
