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The Biden administration is working on plans to bus immigrants from overwhelmed border communities in Texas and dump them in cities and towns hours away, according to several Lone Star State pols.

San Angelo, Texas, about three hours from the US-Mexico border was scouted as a location to bus the immigrants, Republican US Rep. August Pfluger told The Post.

San Angelo is a welcoming community, but the locality has not volunteered for this mission, nor are they responsible for the burdens of the border crisis, said Pfluger, who represents the area in Congress. This situation is a direct result of [the Department of Homeland Securitys] shortsighted policies that encourage more illegal immigration and the agencys failure to establish operational control of the southern border.

Pfluger said he was alerted to the situation by San Angelo law enforcement, who were alarmed about their ability to absorb any amount of immigrants. San Angelo has a population of just over 100,000.

In a letter to DHS, Pfluger demanded to know what plans the department had to drop off immigrants in San Angelo or other Texas cities, whether chosen communities would receive any kind of notice that the people were heading their way and if DHS would provide local leaders background checks on the new arrivals.

Pfluger said that so far, he has only been contacted by officials from Customs and Border Protection and told San Angelo was merely being considering as a possible location but that no plans were set at this time.

You can only assume that theyre looking at other locations or that plans can change in the future, Pfluger told The Post.

Currently, immigrants who cross the border illegally and are seeking asylum are released after being processed by the Border Patrol and ICE. They are usually dropped off at bus stations in border communities such as Del Rio, Texas, where a Stripes gas station doubles as the bus depot. The immigrants then usually head to cities in the interior of the United States and do not plan on staying in border communities. While they wait to get a bus ticket or airfare to their final destination, they usually remain in small border towns, sometimes without a place to sleep.

Yes, it will relieve some of the pressure off of the border communities, but then its going to create a problem in other communities, said Robert Beau Nettleton, a county commissioner in Val Verde County, Texas, of the Biden administrations reported relocation plan. The county has been identified by Texas officials as being one of three hot spots for border crossings.

Were not solving problems. Were just moving people around to different locations to make it look like theres not as many people on the border as we normally see, the commissioner told The Post. Its a political ploy to say, Look, these communities no longer have this problem because we solved it. You solved it for that community, but you didnt solve the problem. You just moved the problem.

An internal DHS document obtained by NBC News shows DHSs plan to bus immigrants to Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Houston, Dallas, and other cities. San Angelo is the first small town without the resources to deal with immigrants that has been named as a possible location, critics say.

Theyre not set up to handle it. They dont have the resources to handle it, they dont have the [non-governmental organizations] to handle it, Nettleton said of San Angelo, adding that he predicts many immigrants will end up on the streets for a time after theyre released.

Its not the first time politicians have turned to bussing immigrants away from the border. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has used state funds and donations to send 65 busloads carrying more than 2,000 people to Washington, DC, since April.

Now, more new American cities and towns away from the border will have to share in the burden border communities have shouldered.

Theres still a lot of people in these bigger cities around the United States that dont really think that theres a border issue because theyre not dealing with it, but when they start dumping thousands of them in their backyard, then maybe they will understand that there is a problem, Nettleton said.

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Feds plan to dump immigrants in cities away from border: officials - New York Post

Editors note: This is the first of a two-part series. Part two will be published next week.

REYNOSA, Mexico We met Osniel at Senda de Vida, a massive migrant shelter situated on the south bank of the Rio Grande across from McAllen, Texas. The slender 23-year-old Cuban didnt give us his last name, but did tell us hed paid a coyote, or smuggler, $11,000 to leave his home country, transit through Central America and Mexico, and cross the border into the United States twice.

Both times he crossed, though, hed been arrested by Border Patrol and quickly sent back to Mexico under Title 42, the pandemic health order that allows U.S. authorities to expel illegal immigrants quickly, with minimal processing. When Osniel left Cuba in early April, Title 42 didnt apply to Cubans. But that changed while he was en route.

On April 27, the Biden administrationcut a deal with Mexicoto begin expelling up to 100 Cubans and 20 Nicaraguans a day from three border facilities. For Osniel, it was just bad timing he crossed the river on April 29.

Title 42 was active under Donald Trump, and all this time, all this time Cubans were crossing over the river and entering with a humanitarian visa, Osniel told me and a pair of colleagues, Emily Jashinsky and David Agren, who accompanied me recently to migrant shelters in Reynosa and Matamoros. Now, Cubans keep trying to cross the river and they keep getting sent back.

He said he wasnt sure what he was going to do now. Having tried to cross the border twice, he couldnt try again without paying the local cartel, and he had no more money. (Nearly everyone who crosses the Rio Grande in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where Reynosa is situated, has to pay a tax to the cartels, which have been profiting handsomely from the arrangement.)

Early the next morning, around 2 a.m., Osniel called David in a panic. He had swam across the river, he said, but hadnt paid, and now feared he was being pursued by cartel gunmen. He said he was hiding on the north bank of the Rio Grande.

A GPS pin on WhatsApp showed he was just outside the town of Hidalgo, Texas, not far from the international bridge. He wanted David to call the police or Border Patrol to come pick him up before the cartel found him. David got ahold of the local police but they said it was Border Patrols responsibility, and no one picked up the phone at the McAllen Border Patrol station that night.

Osniels last communication, via WhatsApp, was at 5:52 a.m. The GPS pin showed he was on the U.S. side of the border, near the riverbank. We havent heard from him since.

Over the past year, illegal immigration along the southwest border has reached historic highs, with nearly 2.5 million arrestssince last April. U.S. border authorities apprehended on average more than 6,725 illegal immigrantsevery dayin April, the highest number ever recorded. (As of this writing, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has yet to release numbers for May, which will almost certainly be higher than Aprils.)

(UPDATE: CBP released May numbers on Wednesday, June 15, after press time. There were a record 239,416 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southwest border last month, the highest monthly total ever, surpassing Aprils record. So far in the 2022 fiscal year, about 1.5 million illegal immigrants have been arrested by Border Patrol. With four months remaining in FY2022, border arrests are almost certain to surpass 2 million.)

Why are so many coming now? We asked that question to every migrant we spoke to in Mexico and Texas, and nearly every one of them at some point said that they had heard it was a good time to come, that they would be able to get in. Theyre not wrong.

What they find upon arriving in northern Mexico, however, is not what many of them expected. For some, like Osniel, Title 42 still represents a real obstacle (although since Joe Biden took office, fewer and fewer illegal immigrants are being expelled under its authority). All of them, though, are drawn into a vast criminal enterprise run by cartels that have in recent years transformed illegal immigration into an industrialized black market. Elias Rodriguez, director of a migrant shelter run by the Catholic Diocese of Matamoros, told us bluntly that everyone who arrives here has paid.

Indeed, migrants transiting Mexico must not only make sure they have paid whichever cartel controls the area of the border they intend to cross, they often have to pay off Mexican officials en route to the border. More than one person told us how the bus they were on was stopped in Monterrey, or outside Reynosa, and boarded by federal or state officials who asked for everyones papers. Those without papers had to pay.

Setting aside the impossibility of confirming these accounts, the proof of such official corruption on a mass scale is the mere fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive at northern Mexican border cities each month. They are here, and they could have gotten here only by paying their way.

About 1,500 migrants are housed at the Senda de Vida shelter, including many families and small children.

Signs of this illegal immigration black market lurk behind nearly every individual migrants story. We dont know, for example, why Osniel changed his mind about crossing the river. At the shelter, he told us he was going to wait there because it was too dangerous to leave. He said men had tried to assault him when he ventured out into Reynosa at one point, and that it wasnt safe anywhere outside the shelters walls.

Maybe he realized there was no other way into the United States. Maybe he was unwilling to wait any longer at the shelter. Hed told us that he follows the news about U.S. border policy closely, so maybe he saw that a U.S. judge recentlyordered the Biden administration to keep Title 42 in placeinstead of ending it on May 23 as planned.

Whatever changed Osniels mind, his plight is shared by tens of thousands of other migrants in Reynosa, Matamoros, and Mexican cities all along the border. They are caught between a black market smuggling industry run by ruthless cartels and a mercurial U.S. immigration bureaucracy that seems to adopt new policies and rules every week.

For a certain segment of the migrant population in Mexico, that means theyre stuck. For those who cant afford to pay the cartels, crossing the river without permission is dangerous. Its unlikely that Osniel was actually pursued across the river by armed men, but he was lucky to slip by them in Reynosa and make it over to the north bank. In Matamoros, we were told of several migrant groups that tried to cross without paying, and cartel members actually went out into the river and forcibly returned them to the Mexican side.

Others simply refuse to cross illegally, even with the aid of cartel-affiliated smugglers. These are mostly Haitian migrants, and they make up the vast majority of those staying at the shelters in Reynosa and Matamoros. Many of them say they will not cross illegally because they fear being arrested and deported to Haiti, a country most of them left many years ago.

The vast majority of Haitian migrants now in Mexico had until recently been living legally in Chile, Brazil, and other countries in South America. Indeed, of the dozens of Haitian migrants we interviewed, not one had recently lived in Haiti, and none wanted to return there.

For these people, being deported back to Haiti as thousands were last fall afterCBP cleared the encampmentnear Del Rio, Texas would be the worst possible outcome. So they wait in Mexican border towns for something to change.

One Haitian man we spoke to, Gerard Estinfils, was among a group of at least a hundred others waiting outside a migrant resource center near the international bridge in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, on a recent weekday morning, hoping to meet with a lawyer about applying for asylum in the United States.

Estinfils told us he has been in Mexico for ten months with his wife and three children, and they have no money left now. But even if they did, he said he would not pay a smuggler or a cartel to help him cross illegally. He says he and his wife have medical problems, and like some of the other Haitian migrants waiting outside the resource center that day, he hopes to get a medical exemption to enter the United States.

He might well end up getting such an exemption. We spoke to people who were recently discharged from CBP custody in Texas who had been admitted that way. But there is only so long people like Estinfils, who had been living for years in Chile before traveling north, can safely wait in these Mexican border towns. (The U.S. State Department issued a do not travel advisory for the entire state of Tamaulipas last June that isstill in effect. It forbids U.S. government employees from traveling between cities in Tamaulipas using interior Mexican highways, citing gun battles, murder, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, forced disappearances, extortion, and sexual assault activity along the northern Mexican border.)

All of which to say: its not safe for Estanfils and his family to be living in these streets, but thats where they are for the simple reason that there are not enough shelters in these cities, and more people are arriving every day.

The day after we met in Matamoros, Estinfils messaged me on WhatsApp. He had seen me and my colleagues at the Sende de Vida shelter in Reynosa, where he had brought his family, hitching a ride from Matamoros from a servant of God. He said they left Matamoros because they had no food and nowhere to stay, and were hoping to get into the shelter.

What they found at Sende de Vida was chaos, confusion, and false hope. When we arrived that same day we saw hundreds of people lined up outside the shelter, waiting to get inside. A mood of confusion and frustration prevailed.

Every person we spoke to had been waiting for days in triple-digit heat. They were under the strong impression that there was a list inside the shelter, and that if you got on that list, you would eventually be bused to the international bridge downtown and be admitted to the United States. For that reason, most of them did not want to leave the immediate vicinity of the shelter, despite a lack of food and water and housing of any kind, for fear of losing their chance to get inside and get on the list.

But it wasnt true. Theres no such list inside the shelter. After we convinced the men guarding the heavy steel door to let us in so we could meet with Pastor Hector Silva, who runs the place, we learned that there is only a waiting list to get into the shelter, not to get into the United States.

Silva told us that the busloads of migrants who leave his shelter every day for the United States (on average, about 120 a day) are selected by CBP with the aid of immigration lawyers and nonprofits. He says CBP officials text him daily, sometimes multiple times a day, the names of migrants who qualify for admittance under Americas byzantine immigration laws. Silva finds these people in his shelter, tests them for Covid, and lines them up in the courtyard with their possessions before loading them onto a yellow school bus and, at least on the day we were there, drives them to the international bridge himself.

Migrants prepare to board a bus that will take them to an international bridge in Reynosa, where they will enter the United States.

The shelter is a ramshackle compound thats become in effect a walled village, housing about 1,500 people. Children are everywhere, running and playing. The adults loiter in tents and under shaded awnings. Hundreds of tents are packed wall-to-wall in two outdoor courtyards. In Silvas office, a small staff works ceaselessly to identify people who can be bussed out of the shelter and to the bridge, so more people outside can be admitted.

Haitians make up a majority of residents at the shelter, but many other nationalities are present too. In Silvas office, we met a couple from Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Russia. They said they were journalists and fled the country after they spoke out about the war in Ukraine and were threatened by the police. They spoke no English or Spanish (we communicated through Google translate) and appeared to have no plan to get into the United States. Silva said he has had many Russians and Ukrainians come through the shelter since the spring.

The Russians, though, had this in common with nearly everyone at the shelter: none of them knew how they were going to get into the United States. I spoke to a man from Honduras, Hector, who left his home six weeks ago. His wife is already in the United States, he said, in Texas.

Like many others here, he spent what he had to pay smuggler to get him this far, and now he has no money for a lawyer. He told me he plans to stay at the shelter for two more weeks. If nothing happens, hes going to swim across the river.

Everything depends on my luck, Hector says. Am I lucky? Okay. But I dont know. I ask him if hes going to pay anyone if he decides to swim across the river.

No, he says, shrugging. I dont have any money.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Border Dispatch, Part I: 'Everyone Who Arrives Here Has Paid' - The Federalist

President Obama knew it was a momentous occasion when he strode into the Rose Garden 10 years ago Wednesday to announce the DACA program, but he couldnt have predicted how much change it would bring.

After repeatedly saying he didnt have the power to carve entire categories of illegal immigrants out of danger of deportation, he reversed himself during his 2012 reelection campaign and decided that he did, in fact, have the power.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was the result. It granted a stay of deportation and extended work permits to young adult illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, kept a relatively clean rap sheet and completed or were working toward an education.

At the time, it was supposed to be a bridge, granting hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, as they called themselves, a firmer foothold in the country that had become their home. The hope was that it was a forerunner of a broader immigration deal that would grant them, and others among the illegal immigrant population, a full pathway to citizenship while improving border security.

The Dreamers got the foothold and became a political force in their own right unable to vote, but incredibly powerful as a symbol.

A decade later, they are still in legal limbo, Congress remains gridlocked and the border faces unprecedented chaos. Meanwhile, DACA has rewritten the legal landscape and changed the face of politics.

SEE ALSO: Senators demand answers about the extent of work already done by DHS disinformation board

DACA probably got Donald Trump elected, said Andrew Art Arthur, who has been a part of immigration policy for nearly 30 years as a government lawyer, congressional staffer, immigration judge and now resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

He pointed to data from the political analysts at FiveThirtyEight.com who said anger over immigration policy propelled Mr. Trump to the Republican presidential nomination and traced it back to DACA, the first in a series of immigration enforcement shifts that really pissed off the American people.

DACA helped usher in the era of executive action the first of what Mr. Obama came to call his pen-and-phone approach to governing around, rather than with, Congress.

DACA also tracked with the court backlash. States looked to sue to derail administration actions, and judges were increasingly willing to side with the states.

I think in the past the court afforded administrations more leeway in exerting executive power on the immigration system both Democrat and Republican administrations. There was a lot of deference, and I think weve seen in recent years more skepticism, said Laurence Benenson, vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Immigration Forum.

DACA affected real people in real ways.

SEE ALSO: ICE chief adopts new free speech rules to limit investigations of journalists

On the day of Mr. Obamas announcement, Dreamers held watch parties to see what the president would say. Many were overjoyed. Some who just missed the age cutoff were devastated.

Many lucky enough to make Mr. Obamas cutoff date have treated it like a winning lottery ticket. They have secured jobs, bought cars and homes, and deepened roots in what they consider their home country.

At the start of the pandemic, the Center for American Progress figured that more than 200,000 DACA recipients were working in what could be deemed essential jobs such as health care and food-related services.

Dreamers have also worked on presidential campaigns and as interns on Capitol Hill. Hundreds have served in the U.S. military, and some have won admission to the bar as practicing lawyers.

DACA recipients are in our churches, theyre in our communities, they are at our workplace, they open businesses, theyre consumers. Their children, who are U.S. citizens, are in our schools, said Mr. Benenson. Theyve demonstrated the opportunity afforded by DACA is something Congress has made permanent.

But 10 years in, it hasnt happened.

DACA was never intended to be a 10-year policy. It was intended to be a short stopgap prior to Congress taking steps to pass meaningful immigration reform including protections for Dreamers, Mr. Benenson said.

Mr. Arthur said DACA sapped the impetus for that kind of deal.

For one thing, with the Dreamers no longer in danger of deportation, the most sympathetic cases had been addressed. Perhaps more important, Mr. Obamas move to use executive powers ones he disavowed months earlier to go around Congress soured the conversation on Capitol Hill.

It really broke faith between the Obama executive branch and Congress, Mr. Arthur said. One, you shouldnt be doing this because its not what we said, and two, we cant trust you if we do change the law. Where are you going to find your next magical power from after this?

Mr. Benenson countered that Congress has been close to a deal on Dreamers several times, including a 2013 bill that cleared the Senate and a 2018 proposal by Mr. Trump that would have traded a pathway to citizenship for border wall funding.

I dont think the existence of DACA has been a barrier to getting a Dreamer solution done, Mr. Benenson said.

Support for legalizing Dreamers is overwhelming. Polls show about 3 out of 4 Americans support the idea of giving them more permanent legal status. The trick has been figuring out how many people would qualify and what kinds of border security and enforcement add-ons would be attached.

More than 800,000 people have been through the program and, as of the end of 2021, there were still 611,470 active DACA recipients. Nearly 500,000 of them are from Mexico, with the No. 2 country, El Salvador, far behind at 23,620.

A DACA grant lasts two years but is renewable. That means some people are getting ready to file their sixth application.

One of those is Angie Rodriguez, whose husband, Mario Carrillo, is campaign director at Americas Voice.

As many other families can relate, its difficult living life two years at a time, knowing that the future of DACA has long been in question, Mr. Carrillo wrote in a piece for Americas Voice.

The article contained a note of caution: A federal judge in Texas last year ruled that DACA was created illegally.

Judge Andrew S. Hanen said Mr. Obama skipped too many procedural steps and that the program ran afoul of federal immigration law, though he essentially agreed with Mr. Obamas stance in the years before his 2012 reversal.

I am not a king, the president told Hispanic voters in 2010 as they pressed him for executive action to grant legal status.

Judge Hanen said Mr. Obama had it right the first time. The judge vacated the DACA program but issued a stay of his own ruling, allowing those already protected by DACA to remain under the protections. No new applications are being accepted.

An appeals court will hear oral arguments in the case next month.

The Supreme Court already had one shot at DACA. It ruled in 2020 that Mr. Trumps 2017 attempt to phase out the program cut too many procedural corners and was illegal.

Dissenting justices pointed out the irony that a program created illegally could not also be ended through the same procedural shortcuts.

That left Dreamers in the legal limbo that has characterized their past 10 years.

There should not be a 20th anniversary of DACA without a permanent solution, Mr. Benenson said. This is something that Congress needs to step in and provide a pathway to legalization.

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DACA changed everything in immigration law and politics - Washington Times

President Joe Bidens job approval is lower than Barack Obamas or Donald Trumps at this point in their presidencies. Each of those predecessors saw his party lose control of the House of Representatives in his second year in office.

Midterm elections typically go badly for the party in power. Its opponents are aggrieved, its supporters disappointed at worst or complacent at best. But the Democrats are facing an additional challenge this year: an issue environment that accentuates their weaknesses.

Inflation is unquestionably the top issue for American voters right now. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 50% of voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on handling it, while only 31% had more faith in the Democrats. Its a big advantage, and its not a fluke.

Inflation has been dormant for a long time in the U.S.: ABC News had not conducted a poll on which party was most trusted on dealing with the problem since the George H. W. Bush administration. It turns out that the Republicans had roughly the same advantage 30 years ago, too.

It may be, then, that Democrats arent just suffering because inflation has been high on their watch or even because Biden (like the Federal Reserve and many economists) clearly underestimated how long it would stay high. The public could just be primed to trust Republicans on the issue, the way its primed to trust Democrats on, say, Medicare.

Democrats are trying to build their own reputation as inflation-fighters presumably that is a key reason Biden wrote an op-ed about the subject for the Wall Street Journal but also want to get voters to put a higher priority on other issues that are more favorable to their party. Abortion and gun violence top that list.

The same ABC/Post poll found the Democrats with a 10-point advantage on abortion, and many polls suggest they are in sync with public opinion in seeking stricter regulation of guns. On both issues, however, intensity has often been on the side of conservatives.

Democrats are also eager to make a campaign issue out of former President Donald Trump, and his disgraceful effort to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. But this tactic failed last year in Virginia, where Trump is less popular than he is nationally. It seems unlikely that it is going to move voters more this fall.

Republicans, of course, can also try to elevate other issues. They have been blaming progressive prosecutors for rising rates of violent crime and for public disorder, and think San Franciscos recent recall of its district attorney illustrates the potency of this issue. (The ABC/Post poll found that Republicans have a 12-point advantage on crime.) They have also laid the groundwork to attack Bidens immigration policies if conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border get visibly worse.

The issues Republicans want to highlight inflation, crime, and illegal immigration all fit into a larger conservative story about government. Each of them involves a failure by the government at a core task: maintaining the value of the currency, suppressing violence, regulating the border.

They thus reinforce public suspicions about the competence of government and, therefore, about ambitious proposals for government-directed social change. They threaten the publics sense of stability, order and control the very things conservative politicians specialize in offering, if they can avoid coming across as radicals themselves.

Democrats spent several months trying to enact a Build Back Better agenda with high-flown rhetoric about a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact transformational policies that lift up peoples lives. With voters upset about prices at the gas pump, that kind of talk now seems laughable. So, increasingly, does the prospect that Democrats will keep their majority in the U.S. House.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Ramesh Ponnuru: The Republicans three-pronged strategy to win back the House - St. Paul Pioneer Press

President Joe Biden speaks during opening ceremony of the the 9th Summit of the Americas at the Los ... [+] Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2022. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

In a declaration at the Ninth Summit of the Americas, the Biden administration proposed to expand legal pathways to discourage illegal immigration to the United States. The declaration and accompanying policy statements recognize that attempting to end illegal entry through enforcement alone has failed for half a century.

The Declaration: On June 10, 2022, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and more than a dozen other nations issued the The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration.

The leaders of the countries at the summit stated in the declaration: We . . . reiterate our will to strengthen national, regional, and hemispheric efforts to create the conditions for safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration and to strengthen frameworks for international protection and cooperation. . . .

We affirm that regular pathways, including circular and seasonal labor migration opportunities, family reunification, temporary migration mechanisms, and regularization programs promote safer and more orderly migration. We intend to strengthen fair labor migration opportunities in the region, integrating robust safeguards to ensure ethical recruitment and employment free of exploitation, violence, and discrimination, consistent with respect for human rights and with a gender perspective. . . .

Strengthen and expand temporary labor migration pathways, as feasible, that benefit countries across the region, including through new programs promoting connections between employers and migrant workers, robust safeguards for ethical recruitment, and legal protections for workers rights.

The Biden administration framing the migration issue (correctly) as regional has encouraged other countries, including Spain and Canada, to assist in offering solutions, including by providing visas to more workers.

U.S. Policies: A White House Fact Sheet detailed new U.S. policies in conjunction with the declaration. In some cases, the policies are not new but restore or supplement recent or existing measures. These include adding to current U.S. visa categories and admitting individuals as refugees or via parole.

The White House Fact Sheet states:

More Workers or More Restrictions on Hiring Workers?: Admitting more temporary workers would reduce the number of people who choose to enter the United States unlawfully. National Foundation for American Policy research found admitting more Mexican farmworkers via the Bracero program reduced illegal entry (apprehensions) at the border by 95% between 1953 and 1959.

The summit declaration and White House fact sheet advocate admitting more workers. However, other Biden administration policies appear to make it more complex or expensive to employ temporary workers, which could result in fewer workers being admitted to the United States.

U.S. employers view the H-2A category for agricultural workers as problematic and are unhappy with a proposed Biden administration H-2A regulation. The U.S. Apple Association criticized the rule: US Apple believes this rule is misguided and will create additional administrative burden and cost to an already costly program. . . . If this rulemaking does go forward it will triple or quadruple the filings the Department receives annually . . . while costing growers more in application costs and providing very little benefit to a shrinking U.S. agricultural workforce. This program is critical to the apple industry with more and more growers entering the program each year. However, it is expensive, bureaucratic and out of touch with the realities of todays production agriculture.

For those who think the problem is that H-2A workers are underpaid, note that on December 9, 2021, the Department of Labor announced it fined a Florida beekeeping company after it paid H-2A workers more than U.S. workers: Big River Honey of Gulf County paid $7,265 in civil money penalties after the division cited several violations, including: Advertising multiple requirements for U.S. workers, but not applying the same conditions to the H-2A workers. Paying H-2A workers a higher rate than corresponding U.S. workers doing the same jobs. (Emphasis added.)

The best reforms for H-2A, H-2B (nonagricultural seasonal workers) and any new visa category are to increase portability for workers and accessibility for employers. That would provide better recourse and more options for workers in difficult employment situations. Forcing immigrant workers to be without legal status, which happens when legal visas are unavailable, is the least likely way to improve the well-being of U.S. or foreign workers.

Analysts note legal visa categories should not be judged against an unattainable state of perfection, but against the alternative of the hundreds of men, women and children who cross the U.S. border and die each year because legal options are unavailable.

Anti-Smuggling Efforts: The White House Fact Sheet announced new anti-smuggling enforcement efforts: The President will announce a first of its kind campaign, unprecedented in scale, to disrupt and dismantle smuggling networks in Latin America.

A recent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis should temper expectations a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) anti-smuggling initiative will produce lasting results. The low barrier to entry to become a human smuggler is a reason for pessimism that U.S. law enforcement could ever succeed in ending or significantly curtailing human smuggling, according to the NFAP review of the academic and law enforcement literature on human smuggling. It takes few assets to become a smuggler, and some prominent smugglers are even teenagers. The low barrier to entry for human smuggling is a global phenomenon.

DHS notes stricter immigration enforcement has increased human smuggling. Today, approximately 95% of unlawful border crossers employ smugglers compared to 40% to 50% in the 1970s.

The Biden administration deserves credit for giving a central role to legal pathways for work and humanitarian migration to relieve misery and reduce illegal immigration. However, reducing illegal entry by a significant amount will require a larger number of visas, including for nonagricultural workers, and more refugee slots to assist those fleeing persecution and dangerous conditions.

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Biden Advocates More Legal Pathways To Reduce Illegal Immigration - Forbes