10/20/21

By Josh Rubin

People are coming. There are stories in newspapers that tell us, in either solemn tones, or nearly astonished, that we as a country are arresting record numbers of people at the border. Some detail, as Witness at the Border has done for dozens of months, flights that (gasp!) carry migrants around the country.

But mostly, migrants are coming to the southern border, and are being expelled under a health order referred to as Title 42, based on a premise no one believes, having to do with Covid. Title 42 was an “improvement” on a policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), or Remain in Mexico, which allowed people to apply for asylum in our country, but forced them to wait, without resources, on the Mexican side of the border, in dangerous, very dangerous places.

The improvement I refer to, under Title 42, from the government’s perspective, is that the new expulsion protocol manages to sidestep the asylum application altogether. Which frees the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection from the burden of dealing with migrants as people and doing paperwork. Now, they can arrest and expel without distraction, for the most part.

I suppose the one unfortunate side of Title 42 expulsions (from our government’s perspective, again) is that it involves long and costly flights to countries of migrants’ origin. Perhaps that is why the Biden administration is rolling over for a court order that says that our having halted MPP neglected consideration of just how well that policy did to terrify people, and discourage them from migrating out of hope and desperation, to ask for permission to come into our country. Failure to consider the disincentives to migration provided by forcing them to live in squalor, plagued by kidnapping and robbery and rape, made the suspension of the program illegal, the court said.

And so, as you may have heard, MPP is returning. Maybe our government sees the the light at the end of the Covid tunnel, and wants something in its anti-immigration toolbox when it has to stop lying with Title 42.

But to return to today’s flurry of stories reminding us that more and more people are taking the unreasonable step of leaving places where they can no longer live, to go to places that they hope they can, I am struck as always by how the same news can mean different things to people. To some, this news means that our policies are not harsh enough to scare these pests away. To most of us here on these pages, it means that people are more and more desperate, and need to be allowed to solve their problems. In other words, to migrate.

As the world careens toward the twin disasters of inequality and climate disruption, we must hope that the latter attitude prevails, for them, and for our souls.