I think the only thing that people in the United States and politicians can agree about on immigration is that the system is broken. I think it's gotten more broken, if that's possible, in the 30 years that I've been working on the issue. 2023 saw record-breaking numbers of migrant crossings at the southwestern border, with Border Patrol reporting nearly 250,000 encounters in December alone.
They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. I will not demonize immigrants saying they are poisoned in the blood of our country.
The migration that we're seeing happening at the border right now is unsustainable. We are not managing it, and it is overwhelming our existing immigration systems. There's broad consensus that it needs to be fixed.
They just can't agree on what that way might be and how to think about that question. So why is the immigration system in the U. S.
so broken and can it ever be fixed? When people say that the immigration system is broken, they mean different things. If you're on the left, you typically mean that the system does not accommodate as many people as you would like to be able to come here legally.
And when people use it from the conservative side, they mean that the system allows in far too many people who should not be here under any definition of the law. The U. S.
has more foreign born residents than any other country, with immigrants accounting for about 13. 7% of the entire population. But today, less than 1% of those looking to reside permanently in the U.
S. can do so legally. We often hear, 'my grandparents came to the country illegally.
Why can't people come illegally to the country now? And the fact is, when the grandparents came to the country is much more possible, especially for European immigrants. But there's no line to stand in anymore.
In general, there are four pathways to obtaining legal immigration: the diversity lottery, refugee program, family sponsorship, and employment-based sponsorships. Just 0. 2% of applicants for the diversity lottery end up with a green card.
Incoming refugees face even more daunting odds, having less than a 0. 1% chance of being selected for resettlement. Meanwhile, family-sponsored immigrants are capped at just 226,000 every fiscal year.
That has led to about 8. 3 million relatives of citizens and legal residents waiting for a family-sponsored visa in 2022. I don't know if it's a problem to let in a lot of people based on family relationships.
That's a strong value of the United States and our immigration system, and a long standing value that family reunification is important. At the same time, it does seem like we haven't accommodated the level of employment-based immigration that would benefit our country and our economy. Almost all employment-based green cards require a sponsorship from an employer, but just one out of every 1,500 new hires in the U.
S. receive a green card this way. I think the limitations that were last updated, the numbers of annual immigrants, was last updated in 1990, when our population was smaller, when the kinds of work that we did in this country was different.
A big issue is the mismatch between the current policies and the actual needs of the workforce. Most other developed nations in the world have a much higher percentage of their immigration system based on economics. Somebody who's coming for an economic purpose to their country than we do.
For instance, Canada granted permanent residency to 255,680 economic immigrants, compared to just 97,355 sponsored family members in 2022. What I would like to see are reforms to make the majority of people who come here legally as immigrants come because our economy needs them, come to do jobs that our economy wants. Some of this is not just a question of categories, but a question of the administrative delays and costs.
The system is under-resourced, so employers who want to sponsor a worker have to go through multiple steps. Some of those steps are quite repetitive. And then the agencies that have to look at those applications, the Department of Labor, U.
S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, they all take their time to process applications because they either haven't found the efficiencies or don't have enough staff. Border control challenges are another indicator of a broken system.
If your goal is that every person should be allowed to come here, you will never meet that goal. The demand is in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, and the supply is simply not that high. There's nothing we could do to so-called fix the system so that it could accommodate 10, 20, 50 million people a year into the United States.
In 2023, encounters at the southwest border saw a more than 100% increase compared to 2019. I think we saw so many migrants at the border last year for a variety of reasons. One is that our economy is really strong.
A lot of employers are looking for workers. When the U. S.
economy is booming, we know that immigration tends to be higher. Complementing that is all of the many, many push factors all around the world. We're seeing a lot of migrants coming from countries like Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua with repressive governments and really failed economies.
We're also seeing a lot of migration from parts of Mexico that have a lot of gang violence. I think there's also a perception that it's a good time to come, that it's fairly easy to come into the United States. In the past, Democrats and Republicans both disagreed about what the law should be, but they agreed that it should be enforced.
The Biden administration essentially decided they would not enforce the law, and they released the majority of people that were encountered illegally crossing into the country. They created parole programs to bring in hundreds of thousands more. And the word got out.
Parole refers to policies that allow certain noncitizens to enter or temporarily remain in the U. S. , usually for urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.
The Department of Homeland Security told CNBC that working within the constraints of outdated immigration laws, the administration has implemented an approach that combines the largest expansion of lawful pathways in years, with significantly strengthened consequences for those who cross unlawfully. And for decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have used parole authority on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. The number of paroled migrants increased by nearly four fold between fiscal year 2019 and 2022.
That number has more than doubled again in the first ten months of fiscal year 2023, to about 301,000 paroled migrants. In 2024, the Committee on Oversight and Accountability also reported that Border Patrol had caught and released over 75% of undocumented migrants encountered in December 2023, the same month that set a new monthly record of migrant crossings. Parole has been part of our immigration system since the 1950s.
It has been used by every president since Eisenhower to bring groups of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to come to the United States. It was a loophole created just, you know, in case, just for emergencies. And never was it envisioned that it would be used on a mass basis for tens of thousands of people from multiple countries.
I think the Biden administration is using this authority to try to address the arrivals any way he can, because the alternative that a lot of conservatives are asking for is to detain everybody. But we don't have the capacity to detain everybody either. Congress would have to allocate a whole lot more money.
In recent years, organizations like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responsible for containing the crisis, have seen millions of dollars in budget shortfall. Another system that has been overwhelmed as a result is the immigration courts. Our law says you are allowed to ask for asylum no matter how you enter.
Now, that doesn't mean you get it, but we have to let you ask, and we have to give you a process to hear that case and decide. The immigration court backlog surpassed 3 million as of January 2024, with each immigration judge handling an average of 4,500 pending cases. It used to be in the late '90s and early 2000s that people would come to the border and they would try to sneak into the United States and live in the shadows and work under the table.
Now people are coming to the border and they're asking for humanitarian protection. Then they're put into removal proceedings in immigration court. And then that is taking a long, long time.
And the backlog is just building up and building up as more people come to the border. We haven't seen the increase in immigration judges and other immigration court staffing that would be needed to keep pace with the rising number of arrivals and people being put into removal proceedings. Right now, instead of deterring people from crossing in, detaining them as the law requires when they get in, and then deporting them if they are here illegally or if they fail in their claim for asylum or other protection.
We are processing them, paroling them, punting them into this endless backlog where sometimes they're not even showing up to immigration court for 5 or 10 years. Let me be absolutely clear. We are not going to solve the issues at the border, the issues with our legal immigration system, unless Congress enacts legislation.
Political polarization is making any progress difficult to achieve. 30 years ago, when I started working on immigration policy, immigration was a very bipartisan issue. Over the period of the last 20 years, it's become much more the Democrats are seen as supporting immigration, and Republicans are very much pro enforcement, stiff enforcement.
Even most recently with the presidency of Donald Trump starting in 2016, he's the president who expressed a lot of skepticism of legal immigration as well. There are so many competing interests that takes careful negotiation and balance to find some kind of solution. With the increasing polarization we're seeing in the country and the parties moving further and further away from each other on immigration and other topics, it just makes it so difficult to even have the conversations that can build toward that compromise.
The priorities for the parties are very different. The priorities for Democrats often are about legalization of the undocumented population that's here, including dreamers and others who've been long-term residents of the United States. 69% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents believed more legal immigration options could help the crisis at the border, compared to 43% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
The priority for Republicans is on immigration enforcement, particularly at the border, even though a lot of Republicans would be perfectly happy to legalize long-term residents, not without securing the border. 77% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed increasing deportations of illegal immigrants would help the crisis, and 72% supported expanding the wall at the southern border, compared to just 30% and 15% for Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. However, the current state of the immigration system requires more than just one solution.
There's a tendency, especially in worlds of politics, to promise a quick fix, but this is something that took multiple generations to come into being as a problem, and it's going to take long, firm thinking to start to fix it. I get asked a lot, what single thing could we do? There's not a single thing.
There's different problems that have to be tackled. There's the border situation that has to be tackled. There's our legal immigration system that has to be tackled.
There's the status of the undocumented that has to be tackled. They all need solutions. So there's not one problem, so there's not one solution.
Nonetheless, experts emphasize that immigration is a crucial issue that needs immediate attention. Ultimately, every town is a border town and every state is a border state. The future of our country really depends on immigration, given our demographics, given that we're aging and that our population and our young population isn't going to grow without immigration.
Any nation, any country, is really made up of the people who live there. How they make up society. And our broken immigration system is affecting all of us, really.
It's affecting who's in our city and what rights they have, it's affecting our workplaces, it's affecting our economy. Immigrants are just such a big part of our country that what affects immigrants and immigration affects all of us.
