Hold on Tight
Two sides, both insisting they’ve got it right when neither gets it at all. One wants to ethnically cleanse our country, the other wants those doing the scouring to take off their masks and wear body cams. The bigger picture goes unseen.
Barely two years ago, the side favoring cleansing had substantial public support, with Americans seeing border security and immigration control as the country’s single biggest need.
We were promised aggressive but targeted immigration enforcement, zeroing in on violent criminals—the “worst of the worst”—who lack legal grounds to be in the country. Instead we got indiscriminate raids by rogue agents trampling on constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, wantonly using excessive force. Most of those rounded up have no criminal convictions, many are U.S. citizens, among them children, even Native Americans.
Communities have been terrorized and traumatized, with tragic consequences. Migrant families have been captured and held without cause, in unsafe and unsanitary facilities, truly nightmarish conditions including widespread use of solitary confinement.
These cruel and unusual practices quickly turned public backing into strong disapproval. Support for legal immigration hit an all-time high. Demands to rein in agents met with public sympathy. The agency at the forefront of the immigration raids finds itself on thin ice, with more Americans now wanting to do away with it altogether than keep it operating.
Sudden national mood swings like this flash out a warning of the citizenry’s frustration with a broken system incapable of facilitating orderly legal immigration and equally incapable of enforcing the law effectively, constitutionally and humanely.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill pay no attention to the heart of the matter. What passes for debate in Congress on immigration is an impoverished discussion indeed. Still, the peripheral spat over how agents conduct themselves during raids has created enough preoccupation to preempt the far more important task of rethinking America’s approach to immigration and overhauling our country’s deeply flawed and dysfunctional system.
This broken system’s inertia has us looking away from a fundamental truth: We can either have a workable system facilitating orderly legal entry and residence in the country or large masses of people who continue to see unauthorized migration as their best chance or only hope.
The train wreck we’ve allowed American immigration policy to become is bad for immigrants wishing for a chance at citizenship and willing to follow all the rules, bad for the standing of law enforcement officials in the communities they serve, bad for America’s reputation abroad, bad for business, bad for U.S. taxpayers.
When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, then-President George W. Bush promised that the new department would “improve efficiency without growing government.” DHS grew like a weed, its budget more than tripling, nearly quadrupling, in just over two decades, going from $18 billion in 2002 to $64 billion by 2026. The bureaucracy mushroomed, from 157,000 employees in 2003 to more than 260,000 now. From the get-go, DHS has been rife with mismanagement, plagued by repeated scandals, chronically low staff morale and a toxic culture.
Bush also promised that DHS’s formation would cut out “duplicative and redundant activities that drain critical homeland security resources.” Duplication and redundancy abound in the labyrinth of operational components under DHS’s umbrella. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) each has a multi-billion-dollar budget to carry out overlapping missions with lawful immigration, trade and travel as well as border security at their core. Their enforcement actions have usurped the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role and conflicted with state and local law enforcement operations.
ICE, CBP and USBP could and should be consolidated into a single, coherent entity with orders to operate as a partner to the FBI and state and local authorities, not a competitor and certainly not a master. The DHS umbrella could and should be folded and stored away, replaced by a new streamlined department operating in keeping with core American values reflected in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty and embodied in the Constitution and all its amendments.
Having a sensible federal immigration system is not too much to ask. One carried out by a reengineered agency standing watch over the border, uniting families and helping to keep them together, providing a safe harbor for those fleeing violence or persecution, making the path to citizenship clear-cut and expeditious rather than a years-long ordeal.
Better hurry. Immigrants have traditionally journeyed to the U.S. in pursuit of economic opportunity or to escape religious or political persecution. A new motivation—fleeing climate-related disasters making homelands uninhabitable—is well on its way to reaching gale force.
Those concerned about immigration should be far more concerned about the effects of climate change than they are, because it will drive ever-intensifying climate migration. Between 2008 and 2016, an average of 21.5 million people globally were forcibly displaced each year by weather-related events. Displacements reached a record 32.6 million in 2022. We ain’t seen nothing yet. The number of climate refugees is predicted to surge in coming years to 1.2 billion by 2050.
Many will land on our shores. When they do, their arrival will not only put greater stress than ever on our nation’s immigration system but also will strain democratic institutions to the breaking point and beyond by giving rise to new, more virulent fascist movements.
Better have a firm grip on that torch, Lady Liberty.