As 2023 comes to a close, Republicans are asking Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to answer for the crisis at the U.S. southern border, which continued to grow worse throughout the year. Bloomberg News recently pressed Mayorkas on that issue, and asked the secretary for a solution to the influx of undocumented immigrants.
Mayorkas hinted that a mass amnesty might be necessary. President Reagan granted such an amnesty in 1986. Now, almost four decades later, President Biden might need to do so again.
Secretary Mayorkas and multiple U.S. agencies estimate that there are roughly 12,000,000 undocumented immigrants living in the United States, although that number is contested, and it is impossible to know an exact figure. The mass amnesty that Reagan offered in 1986 covered around one-fourth that number.
President Biden had promised new pathways to citizenship during the previous election campaign cycle, but the bill that he sent to Congress in order to fulfill that promise has been stuck there ever since. It’s possible that a new election cycle might re-energize that effort.
House Republicans are blasting the Biden administration for spending so much money on the border crisis — costs which they estimate are at $451 billion per year — while the crisis still continues to become more severe over time. Other right-wing sources, however, calculate the total costs of illegal immigration at $150 billion, just one-third of the number used by the Republican-dominated Committee on Homeland Security.
In either case, as the crisis persists, these expenses only continue to increase. In comparison, Biden’s student loan forgiveness program would cost only $30 billion per year over a 10-year period, and the annual budget of the entire state of California is roughly $310 billion.
The House Committee on Homeland Security’s Nov. 13 report states that border towns and communities along the U.S.-Mexico border are having their emergency resources depleted, and that they face mounting shortages in housing, public school system capacity, and other government services.
Donald Trump made immigration a key talking point in his 2016 campaign. With his decisive lead in the GOP candidate field and the continuing crisis on the border, immigration is likely to become a major topic of debate once again, with Trump and Biden offering two different visions of how to address this crisis.
