The Inconvenient Truth at the Center of the Immigration Debate

Have liberals learned anything from the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to office two years ago? Many have not, if a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union is any indication. The group claims to offer a “way forward” for the country’s asylum system, which has become a back door for economic migrants. But the ACLU instead recycles arguments that immigration advocates have made for decades. Too many progressives fail to understand, or acknowledge, the real reason migrants, including those intending to seek asylum, cross the border illegally: People come when they think they can stay.

I have been working on border and immigration policy for more than 20 years, serving in senior roles at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security as well as Senate staff. I have seen, up close, surges in illegal immigration under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Again and again, the loudest and most extreme voices have set the immigration agenda for each party, to the detriment of the country. Despite Trump’s concession in yesterday’s 60 Minutes interview that his administration’s handling of immigration was “too tough,” his elevation of the anti-immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller as his chief of staff suggests that this trend will continue. Immigration advocates who deplore the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics have an obligation to propose realistic, constructive alternatives.

Yet on the left, the ACLU and other immigration advocates continue to argue that enforcement at the border, including restrictions on asylum eligibility, do not prevent or deter illegal immigration; they simply create pent-up demand and encourage migrants to attempt more dangerous routes. As a result, according to advocacy groups, the only way to stem the tide of illegal immigration is to address the underlying problems that push people to leave their countries, and to provide more legal pathways for these migrants to come to the United States.

[From the November 2026 issue: The babies left behind in America]

In reality, the United States’ inability to promptly remove those who lack a legal basis to remain in the country has been the driving force behind every major surge in illegal immigration since the Obama administration.

The U.S. asylum system, created by Congress at the height of the Cold War, presumes that almost everyone who passes an initial screening deserves legal protection. As a result, more than 80 percent of people who claimed asylum at the border from 2014 to 2019 were released into the country, yet immigration judges ultimately granted asylum in less than a fifth of these cases. This legal process can take years, during which seekers are allowed to apply to work, which makes it easy for economic migrants to game the system. Nobody would spend $15,000 in smuggling fees and experience the mortal dangers of the journey north if they didn’t believe that they could stay and get a job.

Before 2011, only about 2 percent of people who crossed the border illegally claimed asylum. But as word got out that most people who claim asylum at the border are let in, the percentage of undocumented border crossers who claimed asylum steadily increased, to 16 percent in 2013 and then to 59 percent in 2023––far outstripping the U.S. government’s capacity to process applications in a timely manner.

The Obama administration experienced its first surge in migration from Central American families claiming asylum at the border. At the time, advocacy groups persuaded senior officials and key members of Congress to focus on the root causes of illegal immigration—such as violence, corruption, and political instability in other countries—instead of tackling the incentives in the asylum system that encouraged migrants to come here. In 2016, the U.S. invested a record $750 million in aid in projects to create jobs, enhance governance, and improve security in the region. The initiative made modest improvements, but could not fix the problems that were encouraging so many people to flee. What kept illegal border crossings at manageable levels on President Obama’s watch was an increase in border security, a more stringent enforcement of immigration laws within the country, and record-high deportation numbers—for which immigration advocates gave the president the not-so-flattering title of “Deporter-in-Chief.”

At the start of Trump’s first term, the new president’s tough talk about the “invasion” at the border seemed to have deterred some would-be migrants and so further reduced illegal crossings. But migrants soon realized that they could still game America’s asylum system. By 2019 Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border exceeded 850,000, up 115 percent from 2018. Trump’s initial response—to separate the families of asylum seekers at the border—was both ineffective at deterring migration and abhorrent to many Americans. Other restrictions on asylum that his administration introduced in 2019, such as the “Remain in Mexico” program that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases played out in U.S. court, had inhumane consequences but did curb border crossings. Emergency measures during the coronavirus pandemic cut the number of crossings even more. But as the pandemic eased, people began moving north again.

When President Biden took office in January 2021, illegal crossings had already begun to surge, averaging 70,000 a month from October 2020 through his inauguration. Instead of addressing this problem, Biden spent his first days in office fulfilling campaign promises to immigration advocates. He announced a moratorium on deportations and ended Trump’s asylum restrictions, sending a clear message that the U.S. border was going to be open. He also put Vice President Harris in charge of a strategy to invest more than $5.2 billion in private-sector funds to create more economic opportunities in Central America, which once again did not reduce immigration from the region.

Another common argument among immigration advocates is that expanding access to legal immigration will take pressure off the border. The problem is that no realistic amount of legal pathways will satisfy global demand to immigrate to the United States. When I was in the Biden administration, we oversaw the largest expansion of lawful pathways for migrants in a generation, explicitly to reduce illegal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. What we found was that illegal crossings dropped only when they triggered clear consequences at the border, such as repatriation of ineligible asylum seekers to Mexico. The United States can and should increase legal pathways for immigrants, but the goal should be to enhance economic growth and reunite families—not to prevent illegal immigration.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, by pushing policies that enable economic migrants to gain entry into the United States via the asylum system, human-rights advocates have encouraged migrants to put their lives at risk on their way to the U.S. border. In 2023, I was part of a delegation to Colombia and Panama to urge those governments to close the Darién Gap—a treacherous and sometimes lethal route between the two countries through which migrants trekked to the United States. From a helicopter, I saw thousands of people streaming out of the jungle after a week-long ordeal. On the ground, we met children who survived the journey but were alarmingly weak from exhaustion and dehydration. We learned that human-rights groups were providing migrants with supplies—including birth control for women, many of whom would be sexually assaulted by smugglers during the illegal crossing. I believe that none of those migrants would have risked these dangers if they didn’t think that the United States would let them stay.

[Read: The problem with shutting down ICE in blue states]

The Biden administration learned the hard way that the only reliable way to deter illegal immigration was to restrict asylum—such as by setting more stringent screening criteria and requiring asylum seekers to set up interview appointments in advance and use a designated port of entry—and increase resources to enforce these laws at the border. In 2023, these curbs on asylum-seeking worked initially, but encounters at the border with Mexico surged when enforcement by Mexican authorities waned, and fell sharply when this enforcement expanded in concert with U.S. efforts in early 2024. By mid-2024, when Biden introduced more asylum restrictions at the border, encounters dropped by roughly 55 percent—from about 120,000 in May to about 56,000 in July.

But by then, the perception that his party couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the border under control had helped doom Democrats’ prospects in the November election. Following the advice of immigration advocates when he took office and waiting too long to change course were among Biden’s biggest mistakes.

At least some progressive leaders seem keen to avoid these mistakes. “I think we’ve learned the lesson,” Michigan Senator-Elect Abdul El-Sayed said about the chaos at the border under Biden in a preelection 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat. “You can humanely enforce the border.”

Voters are plainly tired of the wild swings in policy between permissiveness and cruelty. The Trump administration’s poll numbers on immigration suggest that the president’s merciless approach to migrants—which led to the fatal shootings of people protesting enforcement actions—contributed to his party’s stunning electoral defeat last week. Trump promised a crackdown on the “worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has redeployed federal resources that were once used to address and prevent more serious crimes, such as terrorism, fentanyl smuggling, and child sex trafficking, to deport otherwise law-abiding people in the United States.

The Trump administration has also waged an all-out war on legal immigration, rescinding the lawful status of about 1.8 million immigrants, restricting access to green cards, halting visa processing in mostly nonwhite countries, and cutting naturalizations of new U.S. citizens by 75 percent. This despite the warnings of economists that these policies would measurably harm economic growth. American agricultural producers now say that ICE’s indiscriminate raids are hurting domestic farmers and threaten to raise grocery prices even further.

Like Biden, Trump is listening too closely to the most radical voices in his coalition—and he has paid a political price for it. Every single congressional district on the U.S. border with Mexico is projected to be held by a Democrat next year. But his promotion of Miller, the architect of his cruel and nativist approach to immigration, suggests that he has not learned from this electoral rebuke.

Most Americans hold heterodox views on border and immigration policies: They want strong enforcement at the border, but they want this enforcement to be fair and humane, and for people who have otherwise lawfully contributed to their communities for years to be able to stay. Immigration policy shouldn’t be just the province of ACLU-style progressives and hard-liners such as Miller. Lawmakers should stop pandering to the extremes of their bases and step up to fix America’s broken immigration and asylum system once and for all.