Biden-Trump debate on immigration is pointless

Andres Oppenheimer

President Joe Biden and Republican hopeful Donald Trump are likely to spend much of their time during their first debate Thursday sparring over immigration, but allow me to suggest that — as a new study shows — much of that discussion will be pointless.

First, despite constant claims by Trump that there is an “invasion” of undocumented migrants who are allegedly “poisoning the blood” of this country, the number of illegal crossings has gone down by 40 percent during the first four months of this year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures.

Granted, crossings of undocumented migrants reached a record high in 2023, but they have gone down dramatically since. And illegal crossings may go down further after Biden’s June 4 announcement of an asylum ban that will severely limit the number of people who can seek asylum in the United States every month.

Immigration still ranks high in polls about Americans’ top priority issues for the November elections, but it’s mostly because Trump and Fox News, among other right-wing media, are getting high ratings stoking fears about migrants.

Second, according to a new study by Brown University immigration expert Dany Bahar, it doesn’t really matter what Biden or Trump do to stop people at the border because they will keep coming anyway as long as there is a demand for jobs in the U.S.

In his study for the Center for Global Development, a Washington D.C. think tank, Bahar examined the number of migrant border crossings over the past 25 years and found that “people come whenever there are jobs to be filled in the American economy,” regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in power.

As long as Americans don’t want to work as janitors, maids, or gardeners, foreigners from poorer countries will keep coming to fill those jobs, he said. “The so-called ‘border crisis’ will fix on its own, naturally, as the labor markets cool off,” Bahar told me.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, there are nearly 9 million job openings in the country but only 6.4 million unemployed workers. Florida, for instance, has now only 53 available workers for every 100 open jobs, the Chamber of Commerce figures show.

Third, the solution to unauthorized migration may not lie at the U.S. border, but much farther south, in Mexico or Central America.

In an interview last week, Panama’s President-elect José Raúl Mulino, who takes office July 1, told me he would offer Biden a deal to stop migrants in his country’s Darien jungle and put them on repatriation flights to their home countries if the U.S. government pays for the airlift.

U.S. taxpayers are already paying for deportation flights from the United States. It would cost less to send these flights from Panama than from New York.

More than 500,000 migrants crossed the Darien jungle on Panama’s border with Colombia last year on their way to Mexico and the U.S. border, Mulino said. “Today, the U.S. border is not in Texas, but in Darien,” he told me, referring to the migrants’ route.

Fourth, as America’s population keeps aging, it will need more, not fewer, immigrants. Without immigrants, there will be increasingly fewer workers paying taxes to cover retirees’ social security.

All of this brings me back to my main point: there are many falsehoods surrounding the so-called “immigration crisis,” including Trump’s false claim that undocumented migrants are bringing crime to this country. Studies show that migrants work hard, lie low, and commit fewer violent crimes than U.S.-born Americans.

So don’t fall for Trump’s demagoguery about hordes of violent criminals allegedly “invading” this country. No border walls nor mass deportations will fix this problem as long as there are jobs to be filled in America, and desperate people wanting to flee their countries.

The solution lies, like it always has, in bipartisan immigration reform to fix a broken system, and in forging closer economic ties with America’s southern neighbors to help lift their people out of poverty.