The New Yorker:

The United States does need a more orderly border. It also needs more immigrants, who are critical to the country’s economic strength.

By John Cassidy 

Last week, President Joe Biden announced a crackdown on migrants trying to cross the southern border. The responses from immigrants’-rights groups, civil-rights groups, and some Democratic politicians were instantaneous. Senator Alex Padilla, of California, said that the new policy—which empowers border agents to quickly deport people who cross between ports of entry, by drastically restricting their ability to claim asylum—“undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.”

But at least one economist, who strongly favors liberal immigration policies, was more sympathetic to the White House’s move. “The situation at the southern border has been chaotic,” Giovanni Peri, who directs the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, told me. “It has been hurting the case for immigration because people have only been talking about that, and not talking about all the migrants who have been coming here and working and boosting the economy.”

Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University who is an expert on immigration, said that some of the coverage of the new policy, particularly online, had been misleading. Under certain exceptions enumerated in the plan, at least sixty thousand migrants—with access to parole pending an asylum or other court hearing—are likely to be lawfully admitted to the U.S. each month, about six times as many as under Donald Trump, Clemens said. “This is not a return to Trump,” he told me. “There is no comparison.” Biden’s plan, which went into effect on Wednesday, does limit most asylum claims for migrants crossing between ports of entry, until the daily average of migrant arrests falls and stays below certain thresholds. 

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