A high-ranking member of both the Obama and Biden White Houses recently highlighted immigration as a pressing issue in the US and around the world.
“It’s a perfect storm right now ... because we are in the throes of the largest wave of global migration since the Second World War,” Tom Perez, senior adviser to the president and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, said at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. “It is not an issue that is unique to the United States. It is an issue across the globe.”
According to the UN , international migration has increased over time: "The total estimated 281 million people living in a country other than their countries of birth in 2020 was 128 million more than in 1990 and over three times the estimated number in 1970."
In the US, the total number of migrant crossings at the southwest border surged to new highs in 2023 before abating after a change in federal immigration policy and enforcement. Nevertheless, immigration remains a heated topic ahead of the 2024 US presidential election.
“The southwest border has been a challenge to manage for every administration since President Obama,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor for the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Yahoo Finance. “I don’t think that any administration, despite what they may tell you, had the answer and solved it.”
'A paradigm shift'
Brown detailed how the surge at the southwest border evolved over time
"When President Obama came into office in 2008, the vast majority of everybody coming to the border were Mexicans,” Cardinal Brown told Yahoo Finance. “They were usually single adults trying to sneak in to work in the United States. He started encountering large numbers of Central Americans in 2014, particularly unaccompanied children and families, and they started turning themselves in to ask for asylum. That was a new dynamic.”
By the time former President Trump came into office in 2017, families from Central America increasingly made up the majority of people at the border, with most seeking asylum.
“That’s a paradigm shift in the kind of migration we’ve seen at the border," Cardinal Brown said.
While the number of border crossings decreased notably under Trump, Cardinal Brown noted that much of it was due to COVID-related border shutdowns.
“When President Biden took office in 2021, numbers were down because of COVID [and were] starting to go up, but still a majority were from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, and we started seeing an uptick in Mexicans, and that has just continued to grow,” Cardinal Brown said. “And then we saw the arrivals of Venezuelans and Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, people from countries that clearly have governance issues and people are fleeing from. We’re still seeing an increased number of families, but then a lot of single adults from Mexico.”
Upon taking office in January 2021, Biden made several immigration-related policy changes, such as halting the construction of Trump’s border wall expansion, reaffirming protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) , and ending Trump’s travel ban for individuals from 14 Muslim-majority countries.
He also kept in place Title 42 , which granted emergency health authority to US officials and allowed them to turn away migrants at the border on the grounds of COVID health restrictions.
“Title 42 was in place longer under President Biden’s tenure than [under] President Trump’s tenure and resulted in a lot of people being sent back to Mexico very quickly,” Cardinal Brown said. “So we had the highest levels of recidivism — people trying multiple times to cross the border. Now we’re seeing arrivals from South America, from Asia. It’s really a huge difference in the kind of migration that we’re seeing at the border. And President Biden has tried to deal with that in a number of different ways, I would say, with mixed success.”
Despite having a slight Democratic majority in the Senate, progress stalled on passing specific legislation to address the surging number of migrants at the southwest border between the US and Mexico.
The closest Congress came was the bipartisan Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024, which would have sent billions in funding to the three main border control agencies in the US and increased their hiring flexibility, raised the bar for asylum claims, and granted the Secretary of Homeland Security new emergency authority to shut down the border if the number of migrant encounters in a given day or a week crossed a certain threshold.
It failed to advance in the Senate by a 43-50 procedural vote, with all Republicans voting against it after Trump described the bill as “a great gift to the Democrats and a death wish for the Republican Party" on social media.
Perez chalked it up to partisanship.
“Why did it fail? Again, no mystery — Donald Trump said, 'Can't give a victory to Joe Biden,'” Perez said. “That was the reason it failed. And so the president most recently has done what he can do, and he believes in balance. And by balance, I mean we must address border security issues, and we must provide those pathways for opportunity."
A boon to the economy
Research has consistently shown that immigration, both legal and undocumented, boosts the strength of the labor markets across US states .
“Immigration reform is the solution,” Perez said. “We know that.”
According to the Brookings Institution , this is because “higher immigration rates mean that employment growth does not need to slow significantly to get the labor market to a sustainable pace. … The uptick can also help to explain the surprising strength in consumer spending and overall economic growth since 2022.”
In 2023, during the migrant surge, Brookings researchers estimated that the labor market could accommodate employment growth of 160,000-230,000 without impacting wages or driving up inflation. The previous projections had been for 60,000-130,000 jobs.
And with the Congressional Budget Office predicting that deaths in the US will exceed births within the next few decades, increased immigration appears to be a possible solution for the population decline, Cardinal Brown asserted.
“Growth is almost the only way that we as a country can maintain our standards of living and can improve them," she said. “The federal coffers can be replenished. These are all very important economic outcomes, and you’re starting to see when people look at that and think about that, the challenge is that our legal immigration system hasn’t been updated since 1990."
Cardinal Brown noted that while there are migrants coming in to the US through "irregular, if not illegal ways," they're still working and contributing to the economy.
"That addition over the last few years at the US-Mexico border is one of the reasons that most economists, including the Federal Reserve, believe that we haven't gone from high inflation to recession as we come out of COVID," she said.
According to Boundless , an immigration tech company, immigrants paid more than $330.7 billion in federal income taxes in the US in 2019 and over $492 billion in total taxes.
“We have to recognize that the border is going to be an issue for whoever is elected president next,” Cardinal Brown said. “And I think it’s a different border than President Trump faced [with] different types of migration. So it’s not clear that his previous solutions, the policies he had tried to put in place, would address what’s happening now."
"We still have to see ... whether Vice President Harris, should she be elected, would continue the Biden policies or try to do something different," Cardinal Brown added. "We don’t know yet. She’s still kind of new to outlining what her own positions on this thing would be, so I think it's a mixed success."
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Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and healthcare policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on X @adrianambells