“Why didn’t the Biden Administration shut down and seal the border?” The question, posted on my social-media account, came a few days after the 2024 election from an old friend of mine, a diocesan priest. He seemed to imply that if Biden had done so, Kamala Harris might have won the election. My friend was a politically involved Democrat in his youth, but long ago he joined the exodus of Catholic pro-life voters into the GOP. He is a traditional Catholic by temperament, and the Republican Party seemed to suit him. But our polarized politics have left him with limited access to thinking on the other side. I took his question as sincere.
Mass migration is a global phenomenon. According to the United Nations, 281 million people—about 3.5 percent of the world’s population—live in a nation other than where they were born. The sheer volume of migration makes it easier for nationalist populist politicians to exploit it—Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Donald Trump in the United States. But “shutting down the border” is rhetoric; it doesn’t amount to policy or law. Actually “shutting down” the southern border would bring billions of dollars in trade to a halt, strand U.S. and Mexican citizens on either side, and end all family or tourist travel via land. When Trump said he “shut down the border” in 2020 and when Biden claimed to do the same in summer 2024, what both largely did was curtail opportunities for people to make asylum claims. U.S. law allows people who belong to a persecuted group—due to their race, religion, politics, nationality, or other identity markers they cannot simply shake off—to request asylum either at the border or once inside the United States. Unlike most U.S. immigration laws, there are no numerical limits on asylum claims, since asylum is meant to ensure safety and save lives.
In his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to prevent or deter asylum claims at the southern border, through increased use of detention, banning asylum for those who had traveled through a third country without requesting asylum there, and other means. In 2018, his administration referred all migrants at the border for prosecution—the “zero tolerance policy” that separated thousands of children from their parents. At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, Trump invoked Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, which allowed him to deny entry to noncitizens in order to prevent the spread of Covid, effectively closing the border to migrants. Over time these efforts created pent-up demand among prospective immigrants, and after Biden took office, the number of migrants at the border increased, peaking in the hundreds of thousands a month in late 2023.
The rationale for “closing the border” matters as much as these policy details. Many Republicans (and my old friend) cite a spurious connection between immigration and crime. But there is ample evidence that immigration, including illegal immigration, does not lead to increases in violent crime; indeed, during our recent era of higher immigration, crime has been decreasing. The research is clear. In one study of forty cities over four decades, increased immigration was associated with less crime. A 2018 study found that a greater number of undocumented immigrants tends to lower crime rates. A 2020 study from Texas state arrest records found that native-born citizens and legal immigrants have a significantly higher propensity for crime than undocumented immigrants. All of this makes sense. Immigrants, especially those without authorization, wish to avoid entanglements with the law. The reality is that the slim plurality of Americans who voted for Donald Trump have entrusted him with stopping an immigrant crime wave that does not exist.
Of course, none of this stopped Trump, his campaign surrogates, or certain conservative media outlets from pushing this false connection. In other words, they lied. This disinformation (intentionally delivered) turned into misinformation (unintentionally spread), and soon enough you had people like my friend presuming the truth of a lie. Because there is no evidence to confirm a link between immigration and crime, the Trump campaign relied on one lurid story in particular, the murder of a University of Georgia nursing student by a young Venezuelan immigrant. They omitted mention of other recent murders of college students, such as four University of Idaho students in 2022, or six college students shot and killed in mass shootings in 2022 and 2023. All the perpetrators in those cases were native-born U.S. citizens.
Although there is no immigrant crime wave, certain social trends make it easier for people to believe in one. As crime researcher Charles Fain Lehman has shown, people feel that crime has gone up, even when it has not, if they notice more of what Lehman calls public disorder. He is referring to the visibility of certain uncomfortable social problems: street homelessness, uncollected trash, public drug use, graffiti, shoplifting, and fare-beating on public transportation. Some of these aren’t illegal, while others are minor crimes, but as Lehman points out, police sometimes intentionally neglect enforcement in these areas to focus their attention on serious crimes. People nevertheless look at the public disarray and feel uneasy, and this leads to calls for increased enforcement, such as criminalizing sleeping outdoors or increasing penalties for shoplifting.
A similar dynamic is at work in the push for immigration enforcement. Most immigrants never cross the southern border, and most of what happens occurs in a strikingly orderly way. People and goods pass through ports of entry. Border Patrol conducts professional inspections. When asylum seekers turn themselves in, they generally do so at pre-approved times and places in a disciplined manner. On occasion, though, the border offers unpleasant images of public disorder: soaking families emerging from the Rio Grande, ragged people led to lonely places by smugglers, trash left on ranches, busloads of passengers disembarking on the streets of major cities.
Yet even when large numbers arrive at once, it is not impossible to imagine the federal government responding with sufficient funds, agents, and infrastructure to handle the influx in an orderly way. President Biden waited too long to ask for more resources, and then Republicans in Congress stalled subsequent attempts to better manage border logistics, correctly guessing that prolonged disorder would benefit them in the 2024 election. Years-long processing backlogs have become legendary. Cities and towns with a large influx of asylum seekers found themselves unable to get any help. President Biden finally managed to reduce the numbers of persons amassing at the border in early 2024, mostly by lobbying the Mexican government to increase enforcement on their side. When a bipartisan bill restricting asylum failed during the election campaign, Biden invoked section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to limit asylum to only the small number of people with appointments arranged using the CBP One app. Numbers dropped precipitously—yet even as the logistical crisis passed, the call for stricter enforcement remained, driven in part by repetition of the false narrative linking immigration and crime.
There are real crises in American life today, from persistent economic inequality to opioid addiction to homelessness, and President-elect Trump’s promise of mass deportation won’t address any of them. But his plan would cause a great deal of human suffering—separating families, hollowing out immigrant neighborhoods, financially ruining millions of mixed-status households, and shipping thousands of young people back to countries they do not remember and whose languages they cannot speak. Some economists worry that a high volume of deportations will trigger inflation as supply chains buckle due to labor shortages. The agriculture, construction, and hospitality industries, which rely on the labor of undocumented immigrants, will be decimated.
An underreported aspect of stricter enforcement is that it often does not work, simply because it does not address the reasons people migrate or the labor markets that rely on immigrants. Enforcement measures can even paradoxically cause more immigration. One economist recently showed that the deportation of gang members after the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 correlated with a dramatic increase in gang activity and homicide in at least one Central American country. Such threats to safety inevitably lead to migration, including to the United States. Indeed, anyone who has visited a migrant shelter in recent years has heard multiple stories of Guatemalans or Hondurans leaving to escape extortion by criminal gangs back home. The two largest gangs—MS-13 and Barrio 18—trace their origins to the United States.
Disinformation has created justification for all the damage to come. Yet as my colleague, journalism professor Rubén Martínez, observes, the antidote to disinformation is not accurate information alone. Fighting disinformation also requires truthful and compelling storytelling. Back during my ministry days, I worked with talented and committed Catholic immigrants who served as lectors and Eucharistic ministers, youth-ministry mentors, religious educators, and leaders of altar societies and prayer groups. Some were in the country without authorization, mostly by overstaying visas, a smaller number by crossing the border. In one small Midwestern city where I studied and served, immigrant workers had revitalized the local economy, and the presence of their families saved the local Catholic school.
Many Catholic leaders—bishops, priests, deacons, and lay leaders—know stories like these, and during the election they could have been talking about how immigrants have contributed to Catholic parishes, ministries, and schools. They could have been sharing personal anecdotes about the good works they have seen. A few spoke up, like Bishop Earl K. Fernandes of Columbus, Ohio, after attacks by Trump and J. D. Vance on Haitian immigrants in his state. But if many bishops were in fact worried by Trump’s campaign promises, as Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso observes, then not many joined Seitz in speaking up. I can’t help but wonder whether my priest friend, who does not work in an immigrant parish, would have seen through the disinformation if he had heard more positive stories about immigrants from his fellow priests.
I hope, as the new government ramps up its deportation efforts, that more Catholic leaders speak honestly and publicly about the contributions immigrants make in their Catholic communities. Recent statements defending immigrant rights from the bishops of New Mexico and the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are promising signs, but they lack the visceral punch of personal stories. I hope to hear a more intimate kind of witness about what immigrants do for our Church. I fear, instead, that what we will get, outside of the scattered prophetic voices, is a resounding silence.
