Decoder: Can the U.S. immigration system be fixed?

One candidate in the upcoming election vows to deport millions of people. The other wants complicated changes to current laws. Is either solution feasible?

Unanimity is a rare commodity in the deeply divided United States. But there is one issue on which politicians of all stripes agree: the country’s immigration system is broken.

While the United States is host to more immigrants than any other country, how to handle the influx of newcomers has been subject to political debates for decades. They tend to get more heated in the run-up to presidential elections every four years.

The next presidential election is on November 5. Rarely have the Republican and Democratic contenders for the top job been more at odds on what to do with this long-festering problem. On the Republican ticket, former President Donald Trump is trying to get back into the White House after losing the 2020 election, in part by promising mass deportations. In his words, it would be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, says she would push for passage of a bipartisan border bill to stem the flow of immigrants across the border. The bill was the result of weeks of negotiations by senators led by a staunch conservative, Republican James Lankford from the state of Oklahoma. 

Bowing to pressure from Trump, who wanted to use a crisis at the border as a campaign issue to paint Democrats as weak on border security, Republican senators killed the bill. It would have provided some of the biggest changes in immigration law in decades and weakened Republican charges that Democrats favour open borders and thus encouraged chaos.

A top election issue

According to a mid-August poll by the Economist news organisation and British market research firm YouGov, immigration is one of the three most important issues for more than half of the voters in the United States, along with inflation and the economy.

Most U.S. voters associate the term “immigration” with the situation along the Mexican border that runs along the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Trump and conservative media portray it as a gateway for drugs, criminals and terrorists. 

Since President Joe Biden assumed office in 2021, record numbers of migrants have been detained at that border. Government statistics show that in the initial processing of millions of “encounters,” more people have been expelled (2.8 million) than have been released into the United States (2.5 million).

Last month, and just one month after Biden ended his re-election campaign, Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination and promised to ensure security at the border — as the prosecutor she once was — without abandoning America’s values.

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in August. She stressed that she wanted to create both a secure border and pathway to citizenship.

Clearing the path to citizenship

Harris’ approach relies on easing the obstacles on the way to legal immigration. This used to be labeled “comprehensive immigration reform” and has proved an elusive goal. Whether Harris, if she were to win the presidency, could succeed where a series of presidents failed remains to be seen.

In contrast, former President Donald Trump, running on the Republican ticket, is promising to deport millions of people.

It is a standard line in his campaign speeches but It looks a safe bet that there is no way he could actually carry out that plan if he returned to the White House next year. 

Consider the logistics: One of Trump’s closest advisers, Stephen Miller, has suggested holding the undocumented in “large scale staging grounds,” a euphemistic term for internment camps. Filling them with the more than 11 million undocumented people would be the equivalent of five medium-sized cities.

Flying them out would require more than 58,000 flights in fully-loaded Boeing 737s, according to Eduardo Porter, an immigration writer at the Washington Post. The mass deportation project brings to mind the “big beautiful wall” Trump pledged to build along the more than 3,100-kilometer-long Mexican border when he ran for office in 2016. 

Building a wall around the country

When he left office in 2021, less than a quarter of the border wall had been built, and most of that replaced existing fences. Trump had campaigned on the idea that he could get Mexico to pay for the wall. That proved wishful thinking.

Advocates for comprehensive reform say that U.S. politicians tend to sidestep the difficulties of working out genuine changes by saying there is a “right” and “wrong” way to immigrate to the United States and that the right way is easy. Jorge Loweree of the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, says that argument makes solving the broken immigration system seem simple.

Under that line of thought, the United States just needs more law-abiding people to get in the right line. “The reality is that there is no line to get into for the majority of people who wish to come to the United States,” Loweree said. “If the government is serious about securing the border, we have to make it easier for people to come through legal channels.”

One of the examples the American Immigration Council cites to document the difficulties: 32 million people began the application process for legal immigration in 2021. How many were actually allowed to enter? Nine-hundred thousand. 

The last immigration reform designed to be comprehensive dates back to 1986 in the administration of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, tightened border security and provided for sanctions against employers who “knowingly” hired illegal workers.

The problem with keeping people out

Reagan’s reforms were supposed to halt the influx of such workers but it failed, largely because employers in need of cheap labour used flexible interpretations of the word “knowingly” and insisted that it wasn’t their responsibility to enforce immigration laws. 

Since Biden took office, his administration has often been accused of neglecting the border problem and failing to make enough of a distinction between economic migrants and those who have a right to apply for asylum under international laws developed in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust when countries pledged to welcome people who had legitimate fears for their lives.

The DHS defines it this way: “An individual will be found to have a credible fear of persecution if he or she establishes that there is a ‘significant possibility’ … that he or she has been persecuted or has a well-founded fear or persecution or harm on account of her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” 

The decision to grant asylum is left to an immigration judge. Because of a shortage of judges, The process can take years. According to the Department of Justice, there are only 700 of these judges for 3.7 million cases. 

That works out to 5,300 cases per judge. The Congressional Research Service has estimated that it would take about 1,000 more judges to tackle the current backlog by 2032. 

Whether that vast gap between judges and applicants will shrink depends on who wins in November. By late August, polls showed Harris with a slight lead in national counts but neck-and-neck with Trump in the key states that will decide the elections. 

Questions to consider:

1. Can you think of another industrialised, developed country that has a border with a developing country such as the United States and Mexico?
2. Why do countries like the United States limit the number of people who can become citizens?
3. Do you think that anyone should be able to emigrate to any country? What kind of limitations on immigration do you think are fair?

Bernd Debusmann is a former columnist for Reuters who has worked as a correspondent, bureau chief and editor in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and United States. He has reported from more than 100 countries and lived in nine. He was shot twice in the course of his work – once covering a night battle in the center of Beirut and once in an assassination attempt prompted by his reporting on Syria.