The real reason for the border crisis

By Ezekiel Kweku

The surge of immigrants to the southern border is a genuine humanitarian crisis. Underneath the urgent questions of how to build the infrastructure to humanely handle those who make it to the border lie questions about the root causes of unauthorized immigration. If the government can’t identify the underlying causes of this recent surge, it’s hard to imagine how it can design good immigration policy to respond to it.

Why are so many braving the difficult and dangerous journey to the United States?

During his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump infamously claimed that the Mexican government was responsible, writing in a statement: “The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” For its part, the Biden administration has emphasized the factors that are pushing people from Mexico and Central America to try to make it to the United States: poverty, corruption, violence and oppression in their home countries.

But in an Op-Ed this morning, Christopher Landau, ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021, argues that even more important than these push factors is the pull factor: “jobs in the United States readily available at wages unimaginable in these other parts of the world.” I was struck by how similar his diagnosis of the problem was to that of Veronica Escobar, the Democrat who represents the border city of El Paso in the House, and who wrote for us about this issue last week.

Landau places some blame on unscrupulous businesses that are willing to break the law to hire unauthorized immigrants for low wages, but ultimately faults the bipartisan lack of enthusiasm for enforcing the law against employers. This state of affairs, he argues, means that “unauthorized immigrants who ultimately succeed in reaching our territory are consigned to live and work in the shadows without the full protection of our laws.”
The New York Times
Me: Generally immigrants do the sorts of work, nobody else wants to do. Take them away and who gets to do those jobs, if nobody else wants too.