why his re-election is partly played out on the Rio Grande – L’Express

The figures are alarming. The number of migrants trying to enter the United States has reached record levels. Border Patrol apprehended more than 300,000 people last December alone, up from 252,000 a year ago. Between 2010 and 2020, there were 400 to 500,000 arrests per year. But since Joe Biden came to power, they have exceeded on average 2 million each year, without counting all those who fall through the cracks.

The immigration problem is not new. But it has gotten worse in recent years for reasons not all of which are within the president’s control. Following various calamities, migration to rich countries has exploded all over the world, encouraged by the rapid circulation of information on social networks and the sophisticated marketing of smugglers. Central American countries are increasingly unstable, plagued by gang violence. Venezuela collapsed, leading to a mass exodus of people. “We think that Covid-19 was a health crisis, but it also turned out to be a huge economic crisis for many countries,” said Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute. At the same time, for years, Congress has shown itself incapable of passing reform. And the measures put in place by Joe Biden gave the impression that it was easier than before to return to the United States.

Donald Trump had imposed severe restrictions, relying in particular on a public health rule, “Title 42”, which allowed the border police, under the guise of fighting Covid, to quickly expel undocumented immigrants. As soon as he arrived at the White House, Joe Biden promised a more humane policy. For a hundred days, he stopped almost all deportations and introduced various programs to increase legal immigration, while discouraging illegal ones. Thus, he blocked asylum to migrants who arrived without first registering on government applications, restarted the construction of the wall in Texas and maintained the restrictions linked to Title 42 for a long time.

But all these efforts were quickly drowned out by the enormous and uninterrupted flow of arrivals of undocumented immigrants. “The challenges at the border are totally different from eight years ago. At that time, it was mainly Mexicans who came looking for work. Today, migrants arrive from all over the world with their families,” confirms Muzaffar Chishti.

This continuing wave has become a major political headache. According to a CBS poll, 68% of Americans, including many Democrats, disapprove of state management of immigration. This rejection is due in part to Republican governors in the South, who skillfully transformed the crisis into a national problem by busing tens of thousands of migrants to Chicago, Washington and New York, Democratic cities. However, most of these undocumented immigrants, lacking a network in the United States, have overwhelmed social services and weighed down municipal budgets.

In response, Joe Biden made a radical shift by proposing a series of important concessions in early December. His reform included a tightening of the asylum application process, rapid expulsions and the closure of the border beyond 5,000 arrests per day. Long-standing priorities for Republicans. The president doesn’t really have a choice. The chaos on the banks of the Rio Grande threatens his re-election. The Republicans rejected the text under pressure from Donald Trump who did not want to play into the hands of his opponent.

And yet, lamented an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, disinclined to leftism, it was not only “a major improvement”, but a rare opportunity, because the Democrats did not demand, in exchange for these restrictions, more naturalizations of undocumented immigrants already present in the country, as they did so in the past. The Republicans “may not have a better chance of reform,” he concluded. In the meantime, the Biden administration is desperate to show progress at the border. But without action from Congress, she doesn’t have many options.