Although Trump ran on building the wall to reduce the chaos, his main immigration achievement was reducing legal immigration, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and his administration shut the system down. Ironically, reducing legal immigration just laid the groundwork for more future illegal immigration.
While illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate than native‐born Americans, and border communities are generally safer than other parts of the United States, border chaos is not, itself, exaggerated. In fact, it’s terrifying.
Obviously, people cross the border illegally because they can’t enter legally. The vast majority of migrants want to work in the U.S. where wages far exceed those in their home countries, and the number of job openings is currently near a record high.
But Congress has not issued a sufficient number of visas (for enough types of migrant workers) that would allow them to enter legally and work, even on a temporary basis.
U.S. firms and consumers demand immigrant labor, but the legal immigration system doesn’t allow them to hire legally. The predictable results are large numbers of illegal border crossers—and the subsequent chaos.
Border chaos doesn’t just increase American concerns about undocumented immigrants, it also spills over into opposition to legal immigration. Most people respond to chaos by supporting harsher enforcement and cracking down on legal pathways. But this is a counterproductive reaction that boosts chaos.
The way to get the border under control is with more visas, as fewer visas will only continue to make things worse.
The U.S. has dealt with this problem before, and solved it by issuing more visas. In the 1950s, there were about 2 million unauthorized and undocumented Mexican workers in the U.S., and the government responded with some more vigorous enforcement, but mainly increased the number of so‐called Bracero guest worker visas available to Mexican workers. This satisfied the labor demand on the employer side.
Historian Ernesto Galarza wrote in his book, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story, “[t]he most skeptical of farm employers could see that the private black market was no longer vital, now that a public one could be created at will.”
Within a few years, the population of illegal immigrants dropped by 90 percent, and border crossings fell by an even higher percentage.
At the time, a U.S. Border Patrol official warned that if the Bracero visa program was ever “repealed or a restriction placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.” That is exactly what happened after Bracero was canceled in 1964.
The U.S. government tried the strategy later with some success. From 2000–2018, a 1 percent increase in the number of H‑2 temporary low‐skilled work visas for Mexicans was associated with a 1.04 percent decline, on average, in the number of Mexicans apprehended.
The U.S. government should increase the number of visas again and streamline the process for Mexicans, Central Americans, Venezuelans, Cubans, and others attempting to cross the border in large numbers.
Border enforcement played an important role in both the 1950s and during the 2000–2018 period, but mainly by channeling would‐be undocumented immigrants onto legal visas. The government can’t regulate an illegal market of unauthorized border crossers, it can only regulate a legal market. More visas are the vital component to making the market legal, regulated, and orderly.
Fortunately, there are many proposals to do this—some even coming from Republicans in Congress. Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. John Curtis have introduced bills that would increase visas for temporary migrant workers and let them be managed by the states. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would also liberalize migration for farm workers.
These are important first steps, but the Biden administration can also do more to deregulate and streamline existing H‑2 visas.
DeSantis’ flight of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard exposed, again, that chaos dominates the debate over immigration in the United States. Yes, chaos is terrifying and needs to be replaced by order. But immigration restrictions make it impossible to impose that order through expanding and creating legal migration pathways.
This immigration catch‐22 creates a negative feedback loop that must be broken for there to be a policy solution. Short of radically increasing domestic unemployment, more legal migration is the only way.
