Immigration reform, not crackdowns, would help America thrive | Editorial

Migrants aren’t the only ones dying — more than 5,000 in the last decade — because politics has replaced common sense as a way to solve the human crisis occurring daily at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Seventeen of the more than 10,000 Texas National Guardsmen unnecessarily deployed at the border since March 2021 have died from various causes, including seven suicides, two accidental shootings, two motor vehicle accidents, and the drowning of a guardsman who tried to save migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande.

Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has blamed the guardsmen’s deaths on “the Biden-Harris administration’s dangerous open border policies.” But he’s the one who ordered the guardsmen to the border as part of his Operation Lone Star deployment that has cost Texas taxpayers more than $11 billion since it began nearly four years ago.

Some of that money was spent to stretch razor wire across porous sections of the border. Some was spent to bus migrants — many of them asylum-seekers — to northern cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Abbott’s troop deployments have increased interactions with migrants, but have had no clearly discernible impact on decreased border crossings.

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Federal authorities apprehended 32% fewer people crossing the border without authorization in June, but that was after President Joe Biden issued an executive order that stopped most grants of asylum to migrants. Also playing a role was Mexico’s improved efforts in the past year to apprehend and detain migrants before they reach the border.

The guardsmen’s deaths are hard to accept when one considers the futility of their mission. After years of seeing immigrants risk even their children’s lives to enter this country, it is clear no matter how difficult the journey is, they will not be deterred.

Many migrants have relatives and friends who have lived in this country for years without proper documentation, yet are able to work and send money back home. It’s understandable that they believe all they need to do is get here.

Blame that on the other broken part of America’s immigration system — the part that is supposed to stop employers from exploiting undocumented migrants by paying them low wages to toil in unhealthy conditions that they dare not complain about in fear of being deported.

Since 1996, the federal government has maintained a database that employers may use to verify the legal status of job applicants. But mandating use of the E-Verify system has been left to the states, and most have done a poor job. That’s mainly by choice. Manufacturers and farm businesses that depend on cheap labor have successfully lobbied politicians to limit the system’s use.

Meanwhile, when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials do get tough with companies hiring undocumented immigrants, it is the workers rather than their supposedly unwitting employers who typically bear the brunt of any punishment. Local residents still haven’t gotten over a raid of seven poultry plants near Morton, Miss., five years ago that led to nearly 700 friends, neighbors, and relatives being deported.

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Much worse can be expected if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills a campaign promise to begin mass deportations of anyone without proper authorization to live in the United States. The prohibitive cost of such a project, estimated at from $86 billion to $315 billion a year, may limit what ICE can do, given its current $230 million budget shortfall, but Trump typically does just enough to claim he kept a promise.

Being left out of the conversation is the need to impose higher sanctions not just on employers but other sections of American society that find profit in taking advantage of the undocumented status of migrants. That includes the landlords of substandard housing who rent to people who again dare not complain to public agencies about poor plumbing or no heat in winter months because they don’t want to call attention to themselves.

Migrants’ belief that even those aspects of America are preferable to what they left behind is why many won’t willingly go back. Most are good members of their new communities. They’re not taking anyone else’s jobs. Many are doing work their employers argue otherwise would not get done. And undocumented workers do pay taxes — $35 billion in 2022, according to the latest census data.

Twenty years ago, Congress worked on a commonsense path to citizenship that included fines for breaking immigration laws for those who deserve to remain in this country, but politics got in the way.

Isn’t it time this nation renewed that conversation?