As school children, many of us were taught Emma Lazarus’s poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty. She wrote, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This aspirational vision has not been America’s immigration policy for over a century for some very practical reasons. As David Leonhardt recently wrote in The Atlantic, “Once a country has established borders, it must confront the unavoidable thorny issue of which outsiders it should admit and which it should not.”
After a period of relatively liberal immigration, the United States enacted a quota system in 1921 to regulate the flow of migrants. It assigned immigration quotas based on the portion of nationalities reflected in the U.S. Census. As a result, 82 percent of the quota was allocated to Western and Northern Europe, 14 percent to Eastern and Southern Europe, and 4 percent for the remaining Eastern Hemisphere. This had a dampening impact on immigration to the United States. The Cato Institute reported that the annual immigrant inflow in 1924 equaled 0.63 percent of the U.S. population; dropping to 0.05 percent in 1940.
In 1965, Congress replaced the national origins quota system with immigration laws designed to unite immigrant families and attract skilled workers. According to The Center for Immigration Studies, under the new law most of the applicants for immigration visas started coming from Asia and Latin America, and the number of immigrants tripled from about 320,000 in the 1960s to over a million in 2000.
In 2017 the Customs and Border Protection encountered about 527,000 migrants trying to enter the United States without legal authorization. By 2023 custom officials encountered over 3.2 million.
Nevertheless, illegal immigration has surged in this century. This resulted from a confluence of conditions. There was a breakdown in the rule of law coupled with economic hardships in several Latin American nations. Smugglers began advising migrant asylum seekers how to game the American asylum system. Finally, the Biden Administration has exhibited a lackadaisical approach to controlling the southern border. The Liberal Patriot reported that in 2017 the Customs and Border Protection encountered about 527,000 migrants trying to enter the United States without legal authorization. By 2023 custom officials encountered over 3.2 million.
John Judis a co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone wrote in the Liberal Patriot, “What’s novel about the Biden years has been the vastly expanded use of parole and asylum in boosting immigration by those who could not hope to get through normal legal channels.”
Traditionally refugees were eligible for asylum in the United States if they had a well-founded “fear of persecution” resulting from their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. President Biden broadened the meaning of “fear of persecution” to encompass domestic violence, police brutality, sexual discrimination, and gang violence. It is reported that his Administration even considered including the threat of climate change.
The first step to restore a sustainable and common-sense approach to control illegal immigration would be to raise the bar on what constitutes “fear of persecution.” The standard should not be the current one of “a significant possibility,” but rather one premised on whether an individual is “more likely than not” being subject to persecution. As Steven Rattner and Maureen White recently opined in the New York Times, “we should raise the legal standard for consideration for asylum from a ‘significant possibility’ that asylum would be granted to something closer to the standard used for final decisions in immigration court.”
In 2019 about 35,000 migrants were paroled into the country. In 2023, the number exceeded 300,000. Tough choices need to be made because it is unsustainable for America to take every refugee from every failed nation.
In addition, asylum seekers should be mandated to apply either in Mexico or their home country, and adequate resources must be afforded to U.S. immigration courts and officials. Historically migrants without papers can be admitted into the United States through a parole process on a case-by-case -basis for humanitarian reasons. This provision was intended to permit the Attorney General to act only in emergent, individual, and isolated situations.
President Biden, however, liberalized the use of parole by applying it to selected countries. In 2019 about 35,000 migrants were paroled into the country. In 2023, the number exceeded 300,000. Tough choices need to be made because it is unsustainable for America to take every refugee from every failed nation.
Democratic mayors and Republicans agree that President Biden has demonstrated an inability to control illegal immigration at our southern border. This failure has caused unprecedented security, economic, and social challenges.
Republicans have an opportunity to show how their policies can fix the problem which could pay huge dividends for the country and party in 2024.
Gary Sasse served as Director of the Rhode Island Departments of Administration and Revenue, and Executive Director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC).