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Particularly since the election, a conventional wisdom has emerged that President Biden caused a border crisis by being lax on enforcement. My Cato Institute colleague David Bier, a leading immigration and border policy expert, has an excellent piece<\/a> explaining why that conventional wisdom is largely wrong. Here is his summary of his main points:<\/p>\n The main takeaways are:<\/p>\n Despite Biden’s historic crackdown:<\/p>\n The actual causes of the increases in illegal immigration were:<\/p>\n The rest of the article substantiates these points in detail. I agree with almost everything David says. As he and I explained in a November 2023 USA Today<\/em> article<\/a>, the best way to address border issues is to make legal migration easier. Unfortunately, as we described in the same piece, the Biden administration undermined its own otherwise laudable efforts to do just that, because of bureaucratic constraints and arbitrary numerical limits on parole programs that expand legal migration.<\/p>\n I would add two points to David’s analysis. First, in addition to the “pull” factor of the hot US labor market (emphasized by Bier), there was also the “push” provided by intensifying poverty, violence, and repression in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti. Both played a role in increasing illegal migration over the last several years.<\/p>\n Second, it is notable that Biden’s many restrictionist measures – documented by Bier – did little to increase his popularity. At the very least, this weakens the claim that such policies are obvious political winners for Democrats. I would not go to the opposite extreme of saying that the policy I prefer – near-total open borders – would be popular, either. But, as Bier and I have long argued<\/a>, making legal migration easier can reduce chaos at the border, and thereby reduce the political backlash such chaos creates.<\/p>\n For those who care, Bier and I were both highly critical of Biden’s use of Title 42 restrictions<\/a> (which extended a policy first adopted by Trump) and “Trump-lite” asylum policies<\/a> at the time. These policies were legally dubious, caused great harm, and largely failed even to achieve Biden’s political goals. Sometimes, harmful, counterproductive, and unjust policies can boost politicians’ popularity. In this instance, they failed even to do that.<\/p>\n In a previous post<\/a> on this issue, I commented on a related piece<\/a> by Alex Nowrasteh, who also works on immigration policy at Cato.<\/p>\n The post Biden Didn't Cause the Border Crisis by Being too Lax on Enforcement<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" David Bier has an excellent analysis on this point. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-110025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-policy","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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