Cruelty Won’t Control the Border
Deterrence policies aren’t just costly and inhumane—they don’t work.
By Jerusalem Demsas
A black-and-white photo of immigrants in Tijuana, Mexico
Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum
JUNE 21, 2023, 6 AM ET
Everyone expected chaos. Since March 2020, the government had been turning away asylum seekers en masse without processing their claims under Title 42, a pandemic-era public-health policy. On May 11, the policy expired. President Joe Biden warned of coming disorder; Republican Representative Tom McClintock predicted that up to 700,000 illegal migrants would “bum-rush the border”; The New York Times dispatched correspondents to the Southwest in advance of an “anticipated surge.”
That surge never materialized. The Times reported “few signs of disorder” on May 12; “fear and confusion, but not chaos,” NPR wrote, noting that one prediction of more than 150,000 migrants waiting at the border “may have been overblown.” The following week, the Biden administration announced that unauthorized border crossings were down 50 percent.
The consensus prediction was chaos, and the consensus was wrong. About what, exactly? Narrowly, that Title 42 was responsible for holding back large numbers of migrants and that, once it ended, they would come en masse. But this mistake is a symptom of a broader misconception: that harsh border policies are what stand between the U.S. and a crush of migrants.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/deterrence-immigration-us-border-policy/674457/
