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Biden has signed an Executive Order "that will temporarily shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily encounters tops 2,500." Given that the current number of asylum requests far exceeds this figure, the border is effectively shut down now.
On one level, this vindicated conservative commentators and legislators who argued that Congress didn't need to pass any bills to shut down the border. Biden apparently agrees!
On the other level, does this take away some steam from Republicans seeking re-election? That's probably what the Democrats are hoping. "See? We care about border security too! Ignore our behavior for the last 40 months." But is it actually going to be effective? And will they just turn on the spigot once the election is over?
Going back to the bill, was there anything on the bill that would have been allowed Biden to accomplish this executive order better? Does the DHS and Border Patrol need more funds to enact this Executive Order? Or is this something well within their existing abilities?
It also appears that this Executive Order contains some gaping holes. It does not apply to the obvious categories (US Citizens, lawful immigrants who make appointments ahead of time) as well as:
Does this render this toothless and just good PR? Or are Border Patrol Agents likely to be very restrictive in their interpretation of the order?
I continue to believe that very close to zero people coming to the Southern border are even close to meeting any ordinary standard of asylum. The entire crisis isn't just self-inflicted, it was created deliberately by people that just don't want there to be any immigration standards at all and found a stupid loophole where they could just encourage migrants to concoct ridiculous stories that meet an arbitrarily low standard of "asylum". Now that this is locked in as the formal policy, migrant-friendly courts will treat these "asylum seekers" as having rights to asylum per international treaties and changing that course is quite difficult.
So, yeah, I am not inclined to think that the people that cooked up this whole ridiculous scheme that has added an enormous number of people to the United States have suddenly had an epiphany any more than I'm inclined to believe that the Senate bill was a good-faith effort to control immigration. The Republicans in the House passed H.R. 2 in 2023, it's a good and reasonable bill that actually controls the border, and it was rejected by Democrats because they're opposed to controlling the border. It's pretty hard to treat the executive branch as differing from that when they literally went to the Supreme Court because they were so mad at Texas for trying to control the border.
They typically can meet the as-written standards of Asylum law, the problem is that those standards were written with a very different intent. The goal of asylum law was largely to protect specific individuals who had specific threats against their lives, like dissidents from Authoritarian regimes. The nature of dissidents is such that there will never be that many of them. At most, the authors thought that Asylum might be granted to small national minorities seeking protection from genocide. There weren't that many Jews in Germany in 1932, and the whole period of Nazi-ism only lasted twelve years.
Asylum law was never intended to apply loosely to the entire population of a country, and certainly not for any length of time. A world where Salvadorans can claim, collectively for decades, credible fear of harm from gangs makes a mockery of Asylum as a concept. The idea needs to be abolished, or reworked from the ground up.
I say this despite being pro-immigration as a broad concept.
I appreciate the straightforward explanation here of how policy and intent creep occurs.
Taken at face value, the logical (though extreme) conclusion of the open boarders set is to import all of the less fortunate of the world no questions ask. As "pure" as the intent may be, this is, on its face, a non-viable option to any informed audience. So that argument isn't made ... but it sure as hell gets reflected in the policy-enforcement system.
I believe this is one of the core unsolvable problems in American politics; there are, at least, three "versions" of any given policy - the intent stated by candidates publicly, the letter of the law as literally recorded in U.S. code, and then the execution thereof by the executive branch. When Americans vote for a candidate, they often are voting for just one of those concepts, or are switching between them in their heads. The appreciation of the process is non-existent and so constant dissatisfaction is constant.
The core problem of restricting immigration is having a government willing to do the things necessary to actually restrict immigration.
Republicans are never willing to punish employers, despite these being the obvious targets for enforcement as they have names/addresses/Tax-ID where punishment can be executed.
Democrats aren't willing to end up with anything that looks like "Camps full of racial minorities."
We've generally been willing to abolish the Constitutions for Hispanic-looking folks near the border, but there's a line that can't be crossed there either.
We want to restrict immigration, but don't want to pay more for farm products or to abolish NAFTA and reduce border crossings.
I was listening to a Reason Interview podcast recently with Kat Murti, she said that working towards legalizing marijuana was becoming difficult, because people are under the impression it already has been legalized. I think immigration policy has a similar problem: a lot of people who want to build a wall don't think of all the things we haven't tried yet.
I was pleasantly surprised to see mandatory e-Verify in HR2, but of course HR2 is mostly performative trolling designed to embarrass Biden and derail the Senate border deal. I do not know if even the current MAGA Republican party would put mandatory e-Verify into a bill they were expecting to pass.
The answer to this question, regardless of the antecedents, is determined by 'how many exceptions does mandatory e-verify have' and 'how strict is enforcement'. The American economy has key and politically influential sectors utterly dependent on illegal labor and often getting sweetheart regulatory deals anyways; e-verify for nonfarm hourly workers(and it doesn't apply to slaughterhouses) only, and contractors are exempt, is a fairly toothless law but one that could probably pass.
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