After @adam_wola noted that Mexico hit historic number of apprehensions in June, it was time to look at the latest figures. Yes, they're historic and have major implications for the strategy the US, Mexico, and the rest of the Hemisphere are pursuing in the next year or so The number of apprehensions in June jumped significantly. It not only marked an increase from the most recent low in April, it marked an increase that superseded the recent past heights we've seen since August 2021 when the Mexican government began apprehending more individuals

Some quick policy comments on the immigration section in #SOTU. Biden actually laid out a clear vision of what he's going to do with immigration, but you won't catch it if you focus on it from a domestic perspective because it's very much a regional engagement strategy with LatAm If you look at last year's speech before Congress, you can see that addressing root causes of migration was the major plank for regional engagement. While the administration has continued forward, tonight's speech showed a significant shift towards border externalization

So I'm going to respond to the last #SOTU2022 I'll be watching from DC for a while, noting if immigration pops up in any way, shape, or form It’s surprising how Trump’s Buy American, Hire American executive order served as one of the principal instruments to restrict immigration and showed where the Public Charge rule would go, something I explored in this 2018 @BPC_Bipartisan report bipartisanpolicy.org/report/restric…

One challenge demanding the admin to end Title 42 is that when it comes to immigration, the "Biden administration" is composed of multiple individuals and teams with diverging views on its immigration goals, stakeholders they prioritize, and the level of power they wield here

https://twitter.com/camiloreports/status/1449842323597271041

After the Trump years where Miller dominated this policy portfolio, this approach is more like the ones we saw in the Obama and Bush years. As a result, there is no "singular voice" among immigration staffers who can make a unilateral decision in response to pressure campaigns

One angle that merits attention is the way this MPP litigation exasperated existing conflicts between the admin and advocates - and within the admin itself - over the state of the US’ border policies. The litigation clearly aimed to hit the admin on its response to the border

https://twitter.com/aflores/status/1449451166191005701

But something I wonder is the extent to which this litigation also aimed to push the admin in a direction where it either lost support from advocacy groups or face a situation where it’s held in contempt of the court if it didn’t sufficiently revive MPP for an antagonistic court

This is why the border and regional migration plans pro-immigration center/center-right groups have released merit attention. They show this political space can produce smart and humane proposals that counter the deterrence-only approach Sargent rightfully lambasts in this piece

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1372293069140328454

Here are a few that are worth reading. I just worked on this @TheBushCenter white paper on smart border policy earlier this year that not only proposes a regional migration management plan, but metrics for assessing its success bushcenter.org/publications/r…

So I will comment on one part of Frum’s piece and then link to a few threads of critiques of Zakaria’s that are relevant. Frum contends that the US needs a messaging strategy to deter future arrivals. But as @BPC_TBrown taught me, messaging doesn’t work as a deterrence What works is developing ways to speed up adjudications with due process protections so the migrant will know whether they can receive asylum or not, a message they send back to their home countries. But that directly cuts against Frum’s opposition to asylum access at the border

One thing that I wonder when reading statements about regional processing of migrants is whether the admin would redo the ACAs but resettle some migrants in legitimately safe third countries like Canada or Costa Rica during larger migration events where it would need help But my wariness about the ACAs remains the same, namely they could be tools for rapid removals of migrants. And the EU-Turkey deal shows relying on other countries to resettle migrants or stop migrant flows is rarely a long-term solution to these issues bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-excep…

I've lambasted defenses of MPP like Zakaria's piece from a migration governance view since other colleagues have addressed their human rights problems. But there is one more line of criticism of these pieces to explore, which is the way MPP and the ACAs operated as black boxes The Trump admin did not release any data during a large stretch of the program's operations. My December 2019 blog post that gathered all the publicly available data at the time found that only @TRACReports - not CBP - systematically gathered this data bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-end-o…

The "Biden immigration agenda is too liberal/is under threat because of the border" story is starting to retread old ground. A more interesting angle is this: does the political investment in agriculture shield the Farm Workforce Modernization Act from other immigration issues?

https://twitter.com/AshleyRParker/status/1370858897918078980

One thing that struck me about the law's prior passage in the House was the way Members' commitments to the agricultural sector, which cover a large number of House districts, increased bipartisan buy-in into the law. Support from growers, UFW, and advocates helped get it passed

One thing that merits reflection when looking at the situation at the border is whether the Trump policy regime would have permanently deterred migrants from arriving at the border. And this is where the EU-Turkey deal, which sought to slow migration to Europe, is instructional

https://twitter.com/KannoYoungs/status/1369813504530800643

The plan slowed down migration to the EU. However, its viability came into question in 2020 as the terms of the deal weren't being implemented - including issues over payments to Turkey to support it - which created significant frustrations for Turkey reuters.com/article/us-syr…

One thing that strikes me in these op-eds is their retconning of the history of 45's border policies. Rather than implementing a clear policy vision, the admin threw policies restricting asylum access against the wall hoping they would survive lawsuits politico.com/news/magazine/… I spoke with someone at PRM while writing about the ACAs and they said that my analysis assumed that the admin crafted the policy through a careful process, which stood at odds with the reality it simply was looking for any route to produce policies that restricted asylum

It's good that @MichelleObama noted the impact of ZTP, but the public discourse around the admin's border policy needs to catch up with its evolution since June 2018. Here's every policy that I've written about at @BPC_Bipartisan so folks at home can keep track of these changes Let's start with my September 2019 overview of what the Trump admin had implemented through that month since the end of ZTP. This included MPP, the Asylum Bans, and Metering, and ending Flores bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-trump…

I've been thinking about why these issues haven't produced a winder backlash and have 2 theories. First, most Americans do not interact with the immigration system - including the adjudicative parts - in the same manner as they do with the health care, education, and tax ones

https://twitter.com/mollymotoole/status/1277317688470233094

As a thought exercise, imagine if the financial problems plaguing USCIS hit the IRS. There's no doubt that the public and Congress would push to address the issue and examine why the agency went into deep debt because it would impact a broader swath of the American public

This memo makes it a lot harder for children to access citizenship through the derivation process by limiting residency to time spent in the U.S. in a dwelling, a population that includes children residing abroad with parents who are U.S. gov't or armed forces employees

https://twitter.com/CramonBPC/status/1166745126447845376

The memo accomplishes this goal in three ways. First it applies the INA’s definition of residency for naturalization, which is an individual’s dwelling, to the process of granting non-citizen children access to citizenship through derivation