Biden’s Venezuelan migrant deal won’t fix the border

Eduardo Porter

Has the Biden administration figured out how to stanch the flood of desperate migrants overflowing across the southwestern border?

These are early days, but the deal last month whereby Mexico would take back Venezuelans nabbed trying to enter the US illegally while the US would allow 24,000 Venezuelans into the country for up to two years – as long as they applied online, had a sponsor in the US and came by plane – seems to be doing the job.

The Department of Homeland Security announced that in the new arrangement’s first week of implementation, “irregular entries” of Venezuelans at the southwestern border fell 86%, from 1,131 per day to 154. Mexico, which agreed to accept up to 1,000 per day, has started flying some back to their home country. It has given others permits to stay in the country for 15 days and a bus ride far from the border.

“It’s a new technology,” suggested Tonatiuh Guillén López, who headed Mexico’s National Migration Institute during the first six months of the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and is now a critic of Mexico’s repressive approach to migration. “So far it’s working.”

Opening a legal path to entry while offering no quarter to those caught making their way across the border on their own seems to have produced the right set of incentives to take pressure off a border enforcement infrastructure that cannot cope with the vast number of asylum seekers and economic migrants trying to cross.

If the strategy continues to perform, expect the Biden administration to keep pressing Mexico to take Cubans and Nicaraguans, Brazilians, Colombians and Haitians.

But while these early results will come as a relief to President Biden and the many other Democrats hammered by Republicans wielding stories about a border “out of control,” the arrangement is unlikely to work for long.

You might remember the Remain in Mexico arrangement, renamed as the more humane-sounding Migrant Protection Protocols. Starting in January 2019, they required Mexico to receive Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans seeking asylum in the United States until a judge adjudicated their case.

By July 2020, some 70,000 asylum seekers had been sent to Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican border towns under this deal, Guillén Lopez wrote. Moreover, thousands more were returned to Mexico starting in March 2020, under the guise of pandemic precautions.

None of this convinced Central Americans, thousands of which had joined caravans to seek asylum in the United States, to stay home instead.

In 2019 the border patrol encountered 623,671 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans trying to enter the US illegally, almost three times as many as in 2018. In 2021, following the pandemic lull, they encountered 701,409. This happened despite the deployment of Mexico’s National Guard to catch migrants along its northern and southern borders.

If the Venezuelan deal works, it is largely because Venezuelans differ from other migrant groups in one important respect: They are relative newcomers. There are no uncles or sisters or neighbors from back home already established in the United States. They have no network to receive them.

This set of circumstances presents a unique challenge to the American asylum apparatus: Judges don’t know to whom they should release Venezuelans as their cases wind through the courts. It also allowed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to dupe a few dozen of them and put them on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard. Had they been Salvadorans they would have had friends or family waiting in Boston or LA.

It’s also why tens of thousands of desperate Venezuelans now stranded in Mexico – or in the jungles of the Darien gap between Colombia and Panama – are less likely to do what Mexicans and Hondurans, Guatemalans or Salvadorans surely would: Try to get in a few times, until they succeed.

The US does need to find a way to bring order to its southwestern border. Hundreds of thousands of people are flocking to it each year. In the 2022 fiscal year, DHS reported about 2.38 million “encounters” at the southwest land border (a number that encompasses multiple attempts by some migrants).

They are coming from further afield. Last year, border patrol agents encountered 131,000 Colombians, 225,000 Cubans, and even 18,000 Indians trying to enter the US across the southwestern border. Given climate change, growing economic distress and blooming authoritarianism around the world, these numbers are likely to grow. And the stories peddled by smugglers back home of the Haitians and Cubans, Venezuelans and Colombians successfully making their way into the US will encourage more.

While the agreement with Mexico over Venezuelans won’t work as a broader mechanism to control migration into the US, the basic idea of deploying deterrence to steer migrants toward legal channels, which are safer and cheaper, seems like a reasonable approach to ease the strain on a border infrastructure that just can’t cope.

Similar carrot-and-stick approaches have worked before, to an extent. Andrew Selee, who heads the Migration Policy Institute, points out that the sharp decline in illegal immigration from Mexico in the decade after 2007 was helped by the large number of guestworker visas and other legal pathways made available to Mexicans, combined with criminal prosecutions against people who were expelled once and caught trying again.

—Bloomberg