Trump Rethinks Immigration Stance as Country Faces Shortage of Essential Migrant Workers
President Trump’s chief campaign promise to reduce immigration has largely been successful. Although his border wall has yet to be built in his over 3 years in office, the pace of immigration (both legal and illegal), has plummeted with his aggressive no-tolerance immigration policy and efforts to curb even lawful visas.
As countries restrict movement to combat the Coronavirus, immigration to the United States has slowed even further to a trickle. On March 21, the U.C. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) issued an emergency order enacting strict border restrictions, causing border crossings to slow significantly. This order was made in conjunction with a general ban on most non-essential travel with Canada and Mexico. Since the new border restrictions took effect, about 600 people have crossed the border a day. This is about half the pace reported in January and February, according to acting CBP commissioner Mark Morgan said. Earlier this month, fewer than 100 people were under the agency's custody, a 97% fall from the average of 3,000.
Aside from the U.S.’s strict border control measures, immigration has plunged because many countries across Latin America have shut their borders in an attempt to stop the disease.
“There’s no movement, because of the illness,” says David Reyes, a human smuggler, or coyote, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reyes, who works in a remote region of Guatemala and charges close to $10,000 a head to move people into the U.S., said he hasn’t moved any migrants up through Mexico for the past three weeks.
Borders are closed in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, countries that have produced the most undocumented immigrants to the U.S. in recent years. They have each instituted draconian lockdown regulations that prohibit almost all movement, especially transportation by bus between cities that is a necessary component of the immigration circuit. As we wrote in a prior article, this trend is occurring across the entire Hemisphere, including by halting the mass migration out of Venezuela resulting from the dire economic situation of that country.
As the economy enters recession and increasingly relies on essential workers like farmers and healthcare workers, President Trump is finally recognizing the importance of immigrants and has begun to take measures to ease restrictions. Last month, he acknowledged the importance of agricultural visas in a White House press conference. “We want them to come in,” he said. “We're not closing the border so that we can’t get any of those people to come in. They've been there for years and years, and I've given the commitment to the farmers: They're going to continue to come. Or we're not going to have any farmers.”
In a world where everything seems upside down, these comments are in stark contrast to his harsh rhetoric since before he took office. Interestingly, despite his rhetoric and harsh policies in other aspects of immigration, the number of immigrants with temporary visas has steadily increased during his presidency, reaching 925,000 in 2018, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
The Department of Homeland Security is now easing requirements for immigrants to get jobs as farm workers, landscapers and crab pickers, aware that industries like those necessary for our food supply could be hurt if they couldn’t hire foreign employees.
Despite heavy criticism from Trump’s base about these measures, his changing approach is being met with relief by the business community that has long touted more liberal immigration policy. “Many immigrant workers are currently helping our nation fight the spread of Covid-19,” said Jon Baselice, the United States Chamber of Commerce’s executive director of immigration policy. “Their contributions to our national well-being are critically important to our safety and security until we flatten the curve on this pandemic.”
Even before the pandemic really hit the United States, the Department of Homeland Security announced in early March that it planned to allow an additional 35,000 workers into the country on non-agricultural seasonal worker visas as it tried “to strike a careful balance that benefits American businesses and American workers."
These H-2B Visas are generally used for landscaping, housekeeping and construction industries, and had been capped at 66,000. DHS has added additional visas in that category for the past three years. Unfortunately, due to the criticism from Trump’s base, the DHS has reversed course twice, and has now placed its determination on hold. In a Tweet, the DHS announced that its “rule on the H-2B cap is on hold pending review due to present economic circumstances.”
Although the administration’s recent changes to immigration policy offer some hope for a more sensible approach to immigration, the inconsistent measures make it difficult to predict whether the country’s policy will be more immigrant-friendly after the crisis settles. Throughout his term, Trump has mostly given priority to his base while disregarding the globalized and diverse reality of our society and the importance that immigrants have always played since the country’s founding. Perhaps the silver lining to the chaos is more guest workers and less deportations for the foreseeable future until the country can think hard about its immigration stance and work towards a sustainable solution.
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