The Biden administration is facing the dual challenge of both deterring migrants from entering the US illegally and doing so without resorting to draconian enforcement measures. Today, we consider the options using the current enforcement-based (volume-limited) policy.
Under the current system, the US government sets the number of visas, H2's in this case, and then attempts to enforce the border around that quantity. For example, the cap count for FY 2021 for H2-B visas was set at 66,000. Because these visas are issued far below their economic value, supply is artificially low and demand vastly exceeds supply. As a consequence, the overwhelming majority of those who would like to work in the US have no realistic chance of ever obtaining a visa.
And that yields the picture below.
This photo from earlier this year depicts a caravan of Honduran migrants clashing with police in Guatemala. It is easy to see the picture as simple chaos, a mob without meaning. But that's not the case. To understand the dynamics, we can imagine ourselves in the Hondurans' shoes and consider their goals, motivations, and values. Clearly, these migrants want to go work in the US. They are not tramping up Central America because they love the Dodgers or want to visit Disney World. These migrants are enduring at best great discomfort, and at worst, risking not only their own lives, but those of their spouses and children. We might reasonably characterize them as 'highly motivated'. They are on the road to change the very course of their lives.
What is their belief about their chances to enter the US legally? It must be effectively zero. Why would anyone walk a thousand miles if they thought they could simply apply for and receive an H2 visa? They wouldn't. Rather, these people do not believe they have a shot at any H2 visa at all. Ever.
As a result, their downside is limited to the journey's discomfort and the risk of injury, crime victimization and death. If they succeed in entering the US interior, they are better off; if they fail, their losses are limited to the trek itself. Because these migrants have no hope of legal entry into the US, the prospect of apprehension at the US border is not a meaningful deterrent. In an enforcement-based framework, therefore, the US is short of both carrots and sticks to influence migrant behavior. The US cannot extend the reasonable expectation of obtaining a legal visa, and therefore the prospect of apprehension at the border and losing visa eligibility is not a meaningful deterrent. Instead, the administration is reduced to pleading: "Don’t come over," President Biden said during an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”
Clearly, migrants weren't listening. It is naive and insulting to think that they would. Just look at the photograph. For these migrants, the decision is existential. They will make their choices based upon conditions on the ground, not based on pronouncements, laws, exhortations or niceties. No one is going to walk weeks to the US border and then concede to Border Patrol that they are really 21 when they have the prospect of entry if they claim to be only 17 years old. Migrants will work the system as it exists. If those ahead of them report that they were able to enter the United States, the following migrants will continue to push on.
So what policy options does the US have? First, all options are subject to political constraints. As I have elsewhere noted, the political limit for southwest border apprehensions is a maximum of about 40,000 / month. Above this level, the press will be talking of a crisis, and an administration will be bleeding political capital. That limits the scope for humane policies, and by and large, any given US administration -- be that of Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden -- will be forced back into volume constraints. Those Guatemalan police on the photo above are a volume constraint, as are migrant camps in Mexico or deportation from the US. They all seek to reduce the number of migrants entering the US interior.
This enforcement-based approach has delivered political and policy failure for every administration since Nixon. It does not work, and it never has. And it never will. Why would it? Any reasonable economic or market analysis will show it doomed to failure. (So why do Niskanen and Rand continue to promote it?) As a result, today's policy framework dictates that the Biden administration will be reduced to measures the left will consider mean and inhumane -- unless the administration is willing to invest its political capital in levels of apprehensions too high for the political tolerances of prior administrations, both Republican and Democrat.