Down On The Border In The Meantime

Down On The Border In The Meantime

By Joe Guzzardi


For the last two months, the roiling immigration debate has centered around President Trump’s Executive Orders that slowed some legal migration and suspended until the end of 2020 most employment-based visas. During the period, President Trump scored a major victory over H-1B globalists when he forced Tennessee Valley Authority executives to turn back their outsourcing commitment that would cost high-skilled American workers their jobs.

Meantime, however, down on the still-porous Southwest border, illegal immigration – the contentious issue that propelled President Trump into the White House in 2016 – is worsening. Since April, and despite President Trump’s efforts to curb illegal immigration in light of the coronavirus pandemic, unlawful entry arrests have, according to Customs and Border Protection, soared 237 percent.

Down On The Border In The Meantime

In March, pursuant to the urging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, border officials turned back migrants including those who claimed asylum. For more than 90 percent of the migrants, the normal timeline for returning unlawful border crossers dropped from a period of several weeks to a mere hour and a half. The White House relied on the Public Health Safety Act’s Title 42 that permits temporarily barring the entry of persons into the United States “when doing so is required in the interest of the public health.”

In his compelling documentary, “They Come to America: the Politics of Immigration,” filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch, in interviews with experts, gives an overview of the challenges that decades-long ineffective methods of slowing illegal entry present to the nation. Among them are drug smuggling, national security, environmental degradation and population growth.

But Lynch also focuses on illegal immigration as a labor variable that is especially harmful to low-skilled U.S. workers who have less than a college education. CBP acting Commissioner Mark A. Morgan acknowledged that, during the spring-time, surge jobs are illegal immigration’s biggest pull factor. Morgan said that “Single adult Mexican nationals, who are generally seeking economic opportunities, accounted for almost 80 percent of the encounters.” Based on the latest available federal statistics, Pew Researchestimated that 8 million illegal immigrants are in the labor force, mostly employed in agriculture but also in sectors that would present hiring possibilities for America’s under-employed like construction, hospitality, business services and manufacturing.

While there’s been much fanfare, both positive and negative, about President Trump’s “big beautiful wall,” Lynch makes clear that no structure can protect the nation’s waterways from illegal entrants. As an example, Lynch cites the CBP’s Miami sector that’s assigned to cover Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The Miami sector consists of approximately 187,000 square miles and has 1,203 miles of Florida’s coastal borders along the Atlantic and Gulf shores. In his statement, Morgan advocated for President Trump’s wall. But as Lynch pointed out, a wall is meaningless with such a vast expanse of unprotected shores and waterways that migrant smugglers can easily penetrate. At the time Lynch’s documentary went into production, a mere 111 CBP agents, and only two with boats, were assigned to the Miami sector.

President Trump’s wall-blustering is empty talk. Even if a wall were erected, the effect of deterring illegal immigration would be, at best, minor, and a flat zero for water arrivals. While talking about migrants in search of “economic opportunities,” Morgan missed a chance to promote E-Verify which, since the program confirms individuals’ lawful authorization to work, is a proven illegal immigration deterrent.

U.S. ineptitude at immigration enforcement is known to prospective migrants worldwide. Lynch’s documentary featured a local CBS broadcaster who reported that the Miami sector alone had apprehended aliens from 64 nations.

Labor Day will mark the official kickoff for the 2020 presidential campaign. Voters will be subjected to a nearly unbearable torrent of speeches that promise more jobs for Americans. But just as reporters asked Democratic primary candidates if they supported open borders and Medicare for illegal immigrants, President Trump and challenger Joe Biden should face an equally probing question: Would you, if elected, demand that Congress pass mandatory E-Verify?


Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Down On The Border In The Meantime

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