Unlawful border crossings have long been a problem along the southwest border of the United States, but the nature of the problem has evolved over time. Compared to 20 years ago, the number of immigrants evading U.S. Border Patrol to enter the country surreptitiously is down. At the same time, the number of individuals apprehended along the border has gone up substantially since the end of the Obama administration and especially since 2020.
What’s different about the border now is that immigrants from a wide variety of countries are turning themselves in to Border Patrol and petitioning for asylum. The border enforcement apparatus was primarily designed to apprehend Mexican immigrants trying to enter without detection. It is ill-suited to address this new challenge. Resolving the border chaos of today requires different policies than those used in the recent past, such as hiring more border agents, increasing barriers and high-tech surveillance, or defaulting to returning migrants to the Mexican side of the border.
For those would-be immigrants without close relatives already in America or without high levels of education, the United States’ outdated legal immigration system offers virtually no options other than simply showing up at the border. The result is an overwhelmed Border Patrol and a backlog of asylum cases approaching 800,000. The resulting chaos dominates every conversation about badly needed comprehensive reform and even derails discussions of the most minor tweaks to the immigration system. Addressing the large number of asylum-seekers at the border is a first and necessary component of moving past the deadlock.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s humanitarian parole plan is a good start. It represents a bold departure from the enforcement-only actions of the recent past that have failed to get control over the border. The administration’s plan to admit 30,000 immigrants monthly from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela offers an alternative, orderly way to process migrants who would otherwise come to the border. Even for those migrants not sponsored through the program, the mere existence of a humanitarian parole option may deter some from attempting border entry.
When the program was rolled out for Venezuelan asylum-seekers starting in October 2022, border encounters dropped by 40 percent. A majority are now entering lawfully.
The decline in Ukrainian border crossers fleeing Russia’s invasion after implementation of the Uniting for Ukraine program was even more dramatic. Beginning in late April 2022, Ukrainians could come directly from abroad after finding American sponsors. The number of Ukrainians showing up at the U.S. southwest border dropped from 20,118 people in April to 375 people in May—a remarkable 98 percent decline.
As it turns out, legal migration pathways that allow migrants to get entry permission before coming to the border reduces the number of people who cross between points of entry and turn themselves in to Border Patrol.
The success of these programs shows that it is possible to reduce unlawful border crossings by increasing legal migration. If Biden wants to take further pressure off the U.S.-Mexico border, the administration should go even further.
The first reform option is to expand the number of countries (and people) eligible for humanitarian parole under the Biden plan. The Biden administration could start by adding Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru. Border agents stopped border crossers from each of these Latin American countries at least 10,000 times in December 2022. Together, there were 72,951 encounters of border crossers from those five countries last December. Conservatively estimating that the flow of migrants falls by 75 percent per month for each country granted humanitarian parole and using December 2022 as a baseline, extending parole to those five additional countries would reduce the number of total encounters from all countries to about 130,000 per month.
That number is still historically high but only slightly higher than the number of encounters in February 2021—the lowest monthly number of the Biden administration. Assuming the program remains successful, an expansion along these lines might justify raising the soft monthly cap of 30,000 parolees to avoid discouraging potential applicants.
The second proposed reform is to allow humanitarian parolees to work immediately and start paying taxes. Currently, they must apply for an Employment Authorization Document (EAD) from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—a process with a yearlong backlog. Biden could order that all humanitarian parolees have automatic work authorization without having to apply for an EAD, making an EAD “incident to status” in legal terms. This wouldn’t be unprecedented: In fact, it is how the Uniting for Ukraine parole program works now.
The third reform is to increase the amount of time a migrant can reside on humanitarian parole from the current maximum of two years to at least seven years. Many migrants who receive humanitarian parole will apply for asylum, so they should be able to legally stay at least until the asylum courts can hear their claims. There are almost 800,000 asylum cases before the courts, with an estimated wait time of about five years—an optimistic estimate that will only worsen. Humanitarian parole that lasts for seven years will greatly increase the chances that current parolees can lawfully remain in the country until the courts adjudicate their claims. And a longer time frame will give Congress more opportunity to address long-standing issues in the migration system.
The last reform is to reinstitute the $575 filing fee for humanitarian parole. Processing humanitarian parole applications imposes a cost on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a fully fees-funded government agency. If USCIS can’t charge for humanitarian parole, it will increase fees for other visas—as it’s already proposing. So instead of making other immigrants and their families bear some of the cost of humanitarian parole, the parolees and their U.S.-based sponsors should pay. This should be well within their means, as U.S. sponsors must have incomes high enough to help support parolees, and many migrants would otherwise pay up to $15,000 to be smuggled to the border.
Some immigration advocates have voiced opposition to the plan, mainly because it is linked to harsher treatment of those at the border and increases the use of Title 42, the program that allows the United States to turn asylum-seekers away at the border on public health grounds. But despite these legitimate humanitarian concerns at the border, the benefits of parole should not be overlooked. If successful, there will be far fewer border encounters. From a humanitarian perspective, it is far safer and cheaper for migrants to be able to apply from abroad and fly directly to the United States rather than to pay smugglers to ferry them to the border—all while trying to avoid cartels, other criminals, and corrupt officials along the way.
This program is not a long-term solution to all of the problems plaguing U.S. immigration policy, which needs deep and comprehensive changes. But until that arrives, humanitarian parole could help divert migrants from the border, reduce chaos, and pave the way for a serious conversation about broader reform.
