Shifting Demographics

The migrants arriving in the past few years came from a broader array of countries, including some that either can’t or won’t take them back. In some cases they’ve landed here without established networks of relatives who could support them. Those let in to pursue asylum claims are allowed to stay until their cases are resolved by the woefully backlogged immigration courts, a process that can take years. Many won’t ultimately qualify, but in the meantime they can apply for work permits and for some public benefits. There are now around 3.5 million pending cases in the immigration court system, up from some 400,000 a decade ago.

Former President Barack Obama oversaw the beginning of these major shifts when he took office in 2009. It was the end of a decade when over 90% of the millions arrested trying to illegally cross the border were from Mexico, and most were single adults. His administration actively pursued border crossers at a rate that outraged immigration advocates, who derisively dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.”

In his second term, an increasing number of Central American children and families began coming mostly from a region known as the Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. This was the first sign of the trend in which more people started crossing the border and didn’t attempt to avoid Border Patrol, but instead turned themselves in to ask for asylum. Under U.S. and international laws, they couldn’t be sent back to a place where they could face persecution.

Obama couldn’t easily deport them, but detaining children and families became a losing logistical, humanitarian and political proposition. The numbers of people arriving were at the lowest levels since the 1970s, partly because of the administration’s crackdown on many border crossers and because the country was recovering from a recession, when fewer jobs were available.

Enter Donald Trump, gliding down an escalator to announce his first presidential bid in 2015. The years of low numbers of border crossings didn’t stop him from casting the situation as a crisis and making the construction of a border wall one of the pillars of his campaign platform.

After taking office in 2017, Trump didn’t make much progress on building a wall, but he made strides overhauling the country’s asylum system. He argued that because so many migrants are ultimately found to be ineligible for asylum in court, they were using the process as a loophole to gain entry to the U.S. His administration moved swiftly to enact new restrictions, including forcing tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings and separating parents from their children at the border.

Crossings still rose sharply in 2019, going so high that Trump officials said the system was at a “breaking point” and, in turn, released hundreds of thousands of migrants into the U.S. After the pandemic began in March 2020, the Trump administration used a public health policy known as Title 42 to allow border agents to expel migrants to Mexico without giving them a chance to seek asylum.

Trump’s policy helped usher in another shift in new migration patterns. Mexico initially only agreed to accept expulsions of its own nationals and those from some Central American countries under Title 42. Almost everyone else couldn’t be expelled, and many who hoped to claim asylum were released into the United States. Thanks in part to social media, word got out among migrants in nations that were being convulsed by conflict, political turmoil and natural disasters, and people from other countries began coming to the border in larger numbers.

When Biden took office promising a more humane approach to immigration, that trend exploded. He initially kept his word and quickly overturned many of Trump’s policies. But he left Title 42 in place even after the pandemic began subsiding.

Media reports showed thousands of men, women and children making perilous journeys through the inhospitable jungle region between Colombia and Panama known as the Darien Gap. People from China, India and West Africa were paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars in some cases to fly them to Nicaragua and deliver them to the Southwest border. News stories then showed them illegally crossing the U.S. border by clamoring under razor wire and wading across the Rio Grande but then immediately turning themselves in to officials.

By 2023, when encounters at the Southwest border reached an unprecedented 2.5 million, just 29% were from Mexico, 20% were from northern Central America and the rest came from dozens of nations around the world.

As more Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans arrived, those countries’ poor diplomatic relations with the United States made it difficult to quickly remove them. Haitians also came in large numbers, including many who had already left their country and were living in South America.

Much like what happened in 2019 under Trump, the soaring numbers of families and migrants coming in large groups overwhelmed the border’s infrastructure. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents didn’t have the capacity to either detain or deport the migrants they were apprehending, so they began releasing more of them into the United States.

Legal, but in Limbo

With no clear place to go, migrants gathered on the streets of U.S. border cities. The Republican governor of Texas paid to bus people north to Democratically controlled cities like Chicago, where families ended up sleeping on the floors of police stations.

New York’s laws, which guarantee shelter to everyone, made the city a particularly attractive destination. As the numbers of migrants arriving there swelled beyond the capacity of the shelter system, Mayor Eric Adams sided with Republicans in criticizing his own party’s management of the border.

Recent data shows that more than 200,000 asylum-seekers have accessed the city’s shelter system since 2022. As of August, tens of thousands were Venezuelans, who had a relatively thin network of relatives and friends to help integrate them into the city. Their arrival stands in stark contrast to Chinese immigrants who came to New York in similar numbers as Venezuelans. But, due in part to the city’s large Chinese population, they did not depend anywhere near as much on the city shelter system.

Facing criticism from both parties, the Biden administration tried to deter migrants from risking their lives to cross the border illegally and turn themselves in. Instead, it wanted them to go to a legal port of entry. In May 2023, when Title 42 was lifted, officials implemented a new rule that barred most migrants from requesting asylum unless they made an appointment to approach the border using a government app called CBP One. The app allows only 1,450 slots per day, causing thousands of people to wait in Mexico, where they routinely fall prey to criminal groups.

Beyond those migrants released into the country at the border through CBP One, around 828,000 have been allowed to enter through new temporary humanitarian parole programs. Most of those people applied from abroad and have a U.S. sponsor.

In June, the Biden administration took the restrictions further. It barred most people from requesting asylum at the border when crossings reached a certain threshold, but it set that limit so low it essentially made the ban permanent. In addition, Mexico agreed to work with the Biden administration to keep migrants from reaching the border by stepping up its own enforcement. The administration says the efforts have allowed the government to vastly speed up screenings and deportations and have reduced releases, while allowing exceptions for unaccompanied children and trafficking victims. Advocates for immigrants slammed the rule as mirroring measures put in place by Trump and said it is putting people with legitimate claims at risk. But the measures have had an impact. The number of people crossing illegally in July and August, after the rule went into effect, dropped to the lowest levels in four years.

Demand for Workers

Whether they cross the border undetected, turn themselves in and ask for asylum or are granted parole, migrants are drawn to our southern border by the opportunity to work. When businesses across the country were shuttered in early 2020 by the pandemic, border encounters briefly plummeted. In the recovery, American companies created more jobs than there were unemployed people to fill them.

“There’s the elephant in the room: There’s just a lot of jobs, and people want to come,” said Dany Bahar, an economist at the Washington-based Center for Global Development who has researched border crossings and labor market tightness. He said that as the U.S. population ages, the need for workers from elsewhere is only going to grow. “I haven’t seen any politician talk about this, neither Democrats or Republicans.”

Only a limited number of temporary visas and green cards are made available each year for those wanting to migrate to the U.S. legally for work, while refugee admissions — which can lead to U.S. citizenship — are also capped. “Those numbers are ridiculous when considered alongside the size of our economy and U.S. workforce,” said Leon Rodriguez, who directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Obama administration.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, said the unemployment rate — which has remained low despite the increase in recent immigrant arrivals — did not account for the millions of disaffected and disabled American workers who had dropped out of the labor force because they couldn’t compete with migrants who were willing to accept “below-the-table wages.”

But what Vance didn’t say was that Republicans and conservative groups have opposed efforts to significantly raise the federal minimum wage. Meanwhile both campaigns offer many more proposals for expanding border security than they do realistic ones to address our country’s dependence on migrant labor. Nor do they talk about plans for cracking down on employers who exploit immigrant workers.

In Houma, Louisiana, a shipbuilding company with millions in federal contracts embodies the debate. Campaign finance records indicate that the company’s chief was giving tens of thousands of dollars in contributions to politicians who call for shutting down illegal immigration even as the shipbuilder struggled to deal with a nationwide shortage of welders. Through a contractor, it employed a young, undocumented man from Guatemala, according to his family, to do the dangerous work of helping to build one of the country’s most sophisticated ships. After he died on the job, the worker’s family said, the company gave them nothing, nor is it required by law.

The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Hardening Attitudes

Going into this election, recent Gallup polls have shown that across party lines, a growing number of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe immigration levels should be decreased. Another recent poll found a majority of Americans support some form of mass deportation.

Mike Madrid, a Republican pollster, said immigration is an emotional issue for voters rather than a rational one. He said it “literally defines who we are as a people,” adding, “It’s how we perceive the world through our racial and national identity and, at the same time, plays to our worst fears as human beings when people who are not like us end up in our neighborhoods and communities.”

It’s no surprise that the findings of those polls are reflected in the presidential campaigns. Just like he did when he ran against Hillary Clinton, Trump makes every effort to keep the issue high on voters’ minds, resorting to nativist rhetoric when talking about immigrants and their impact on the country. The Biden administration has imposed restrictions on asylum much like Trump’s, and Harris makes clear that she will embrace them. At every opportunity that she has to speak about the issue, Harris promises that if she’s elected president she will push for the passage of a bipartisan border deal that includes enforcement provisions demanded by Republicans.

It’s unclear whether she’d be successful. Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive immigration reform package in decades, and Republicans aren’t likely to give Harris such an important political victory.

Trump’s sweeping campaign promises revolve largely around using executive authority to “seal the border” and forcibly remove masses of undocumented immigrants from the country. It’s highly likely that those actions would be challenged in court, much like many measures were in his first term.

What isn’t being talked about on the campaign trail is how all the changes in the past decade are affecting communities like Whitewater today. While we won’t have a complete picture of the impact of the post-pandemic spike in border crossings until next year, census data shows that — even with all the people who crossed the border in the first years of the Biden administration — the foreign-born share of the U.S. population only increased from 13.7% in 2019 to 14.3% in 2023.

The chief of police in Whitewater wasn’t asking for the border to shut down, or for all the Nicaraguans who worked in local factories to be deported. But with so many new Nicaraguan drivers on the roads without licenses, he just hoped the federal government might kick in some money so he could hire more staff to help manage the added workload. His concerns are more typical of how people are experiencing the new effects of immigration today. And if you’re looking to make sense of the issue before you cast your ballot, then you need to hear from them.