The following essay was written by Mary Williams Walsh. managing editor of News Items.
The migrants are still coming. The flow of illegal border crossings has shifted away from Texas, where National Guard troops deployed by Governor Greg Abbott have sealed off the border at Eagle Pass with shipping containers and concertina wire. Now the migrants are finding new soft spots and crossing into California and Arizona. The number of crossings has declined since December’s peak, but it’s still in the thousands per day.
It didn’t have to be this way. Late last year a bipartisan team of Senators spent several months doing what elected officials are supposed to do—talk to each other and address the nation’s problems—and came up with a border-security bill. “It will be the most significant shift in border law and enforcement that we’ve had in three decades, easily,” said Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the conservative Southern Baptist minister who represented the Republican side. It would have restricted who can file asylum claims, double deportation flights, and increase staffing for immigration hearings and border patrols. It would have also allowed the passage of funding for Ukraine and Israel.
But before it could come to a vote, Donald Trump went on Truth Social say: “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING. If you want to have a really Secure Border, your ONLY HOPE is to vote for TRUMP2024.”
You know the rest. The bipartisan bill went down in flames, in what has been widely interpreted as congressional bungling, second only to the failed impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Who benefits from the lack of an credible border law is, of course, Trump, who will be able to rail about the immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” from now until election day.
Performance art aside, there is, in fact, something else going on, offstage in the dismal-science realm of the U.S. economy. There’s credible evidence that most of those immigrants—once they reach their destinations and find housing—are doing what immigrants have always done in this country: they’re working and adding value. There’s even a case to be made that 2023’s big wave of illegal border crossings has helped the Fed achieve the vaunted “soft landing” that we hardly dared hope for just one year ago. No one ever seems to talk about this, so I’ll do that here.
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