Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis by Being too Lax on Enforcement
Particularly since the election, a conventional wisdom has emerged that President Biden caused a border crisis by being lax on enforcement. My Cato Institute colleague David Bier, a leading immigration and border policy expert, has an excellent piece explaining why that conventional wisdom is largely wrong. Here is his summary of his main points:
The main takeaways are:
- Illegal immigration had already increased to a 21-year high by December 2020 before Biden came into office.
- Biden immediately started increasing expulsions from his first day in office.
- Biden tripled interior detention and increased border detention 12-fold.
- Biden increased air removal flights by 55 percent over 2020 levels.
- Biden negotiated broader expulsion deals with foreign countries than Trump.
- Biden got many foreign countries to carry out crackdowns on illegal and legal migration.
- Biden removed or expelled 3.3 million border crossers—3 times as many as Trump.
- Biden even managed to remove a similar percentage of crossers as Trump’s 4 years.
Despite Biden’s historic crackdown:
- Expulsions did not deter migrants, even among demographics universally expelled.
- Evasions of Border Patrol increased as rapidly as Border Patrol arrests, implying that releases did not cause the crisis and that many people did not want Border Patrol to catch them but were undeterred by the threat.
- Releases occurred not because Biden cut removals but because migration grew faster than the administration could increase them.
- As a result, releases only occurred among specific demographic groups and in specific areas where removals were logistically complicated.
- Biden could not easily remove groups to Mexico, like families, children, and immigrants from distant countries who were arrested in record numbers.
The actual causes of the increases in illegal immigration were:
- U
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