Making Immigration Illegal Ignored the Real Issues

LAURA WAS AN Ecuadoran painter who sold her colorful pastoral scenes to tourists on the streets of Quito. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the tourists stopped coming. Her livelihood gone, Laura hired smugglers to help her join family in the United States. She arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, shortly after the border wall had been raised in places from 12 to 30 feet, through the efforts of the Trump administration. The smugglers leaned a ladder against the high wall for Laura to climb. Once she reached the top, they took the ladder away. She fell into the U.S., fracturing her spine, pelvis, and both legs. She had arrived, but at terrible cost.

I wrote about Laura [a pseudonym] in Strangers in the Province of Joy, my recent book on migration across the southern border. Her story illustrates a larger point: We cannot solely enforce our way to a functioning immigration system. The $147 million price tag to raise the border wall caused a sharp increase in migrant injuries and deaths, but it did not significantly deter border crossings. And the southern border wall is just one manifestation of decades of increasingly more restrictive policies that have cost billions, killed thousands—and largely failed to curb unauthorized migration.

History’s lesson is clear: We will never fully “secure” the border as long as there are people like Laura who are desperate to enter the country but have no legal way to do so. The way to repair our broken immigration system is not to twist the screws even further on those who enter illegally, but rather to make it easier for them to emigrate legally. Enforcement and expansion of legal pathways are complementary, not contradictory, strategies; they need each other to be effective.

Control issues

TO UNDERSTAND OUR current border dysfunction, it helps to examine how both unauthorized migration and enforcement have coevolved over the years, going back to a time when the southern border was, well, functional. That time is closer than one might think.

“Supporters of the idea of border control often argue that without draconian measures to deter migrants, floods of Mexicans and other Latin Americans would overwhelm the border and the country,” wrote historian Aviva Chomsky in her book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. “They forget, perhaps, that during the many decades in which the border was relatively open, there were no floods.”

Before 1965, the U.S. allowed unlimited immigration from Latin America. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Mexican seasonal workers crossed the border legally without much fuss, cost, or controversy; their migration was integral to the U.S. economy but logistically unremarkable.

Then, in 1965, Congress established “equal” immigration quotas for every country in the world. Legal migration from Mexico was now throttled to just 20,000 visas annually. Paradoxically, however, migration from Mexico increased after 1965. The new restrictions made it more difficult to travel back and forth, so many of the formerly seasonal workers settled in the U.S. permanently—and brought their families with them. From 1969 to 1980, the U.S. undocumented population rose from around 500,000 to more than three million.

“I’m not against people coming here, but they need to wait in line.”

More surveillance

THE MILITARIZED BORDER of today got its start in 1993 and ’94 under the Bush and Clinton administrations, when Border Patrol launched a new enforcement strategy called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” It hired thousands of agents, more than doubling the size of its force. They were deployed en masse near border cities across the American Southwest, along with miles of new fencing, with the goal of shutting down historic migration corridors.

Border Patrol’s increased presence around cities did little to diminish illegal migration. Tragically, however, it did displace migrants to more dangerous routes through remote desert landscapes. The year after the new strategy was implemented, crossing deaths tripled. The ACLU tallied more than 5,600 deaths between 1994 and 2008—likely an undercount, as many people who die in the desert are never found. Meanwhile, the U.S. undocumented population rose steadily from under 4 million in 1994 to 12 million in 2008. “By every measure,” said Ron Sanders, former sector chief of Border Patrol in Tucson, Ariz., “the strategy is a failure. All it’s accomplished is killing people.”

The U.S. doubled down on border militarization after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when immigration was reframed as a “national security” matter. Funding for enforcement increased accordingly, from less than $4 billion before 9/11 to $12.5 billion in 2006.

Since then, spending has spiraled ever upward. In a pair of bills passed in 2025 and 2026, Congress allocated a whopping $246 billion to fund immigration enforcement through 2029. In comparison, the proposed 2026 budget for the entire Justice Department, which includes the FBI, was $35 billion.

‘I am afraid’

THERE’S A SIMPLE explanation for the ultimate ineffectiveness of enforcement. Most undocumented immigrants have urgent reasons for leaving their home countries—reasons that Ruben Garcia, an immigration advocate from El Paso, Texas, has summarized as: “I am afraid, or I am hungry.”

Perversely, enforcement has even increased incentives to migrate: By making it difficult for people to cross without assistance, border militarization has fueled a $13 billion human smuggling industry that preys on migrants, enriches criminal cartels, and further destabilizes the regions of Latin America those cartels control. The deterrent power of U.S. immigration enforcement has failed to outweigh the needs of migrants to escape violence and poverty, and to find security for their families.

Until now, perhaps.

Terror in the interior

IN THE LAST three years, beginning under President Biden, unauthorized border crossings have plummeted. In fiscal year 2025, Border Patrol encountered 238,000 unauthorized migrants at the southern border, a 55-year low. 2026 is on track to be substantially lower. But this apparent success is not primarily the result of new border controls. Instead, it reflects the fact that enforcement in the U.S. interior has created a terror and uncertainty that would-be migrants deem even worse than what they face back home.

Some Americans may applaud this outcome as an unqualified success. But it has come at great cost to our communities and our democracy. In the 1980s, refugees frequently articulated fears of being “disappeared” by armed government squads in El Salvador and Guatemala. Today in the U.S., people are being seized off the streets by armed, masked men in unmarked vehicles who present neither identification nor warrants, a phenomenon that a federal judge in West Virginia called “an assault on the constitutional order.” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said he was “astounded by the now-routine abuse and denigration of migrants and refugees” in the U.S.

As many as 200,000 children have been separated from their families due to detention of their parents. The immigration detention population has increased by almost 75% under President Trump, though almost two-thirds of those detained have no criminal convictions. A record number of at least 29 people have died in ICE custody since October. Federal immigration agents have shot at least 13 people since September 2025, killing four and critically injuring others. They have arrested immigrants at court hearings, effectively punishing people for complying with the legal process. They have deported hundreds, some with political asylum cases pending, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador where some were tortured. The U.S. has also deported Latin American and Asian immigrants to at least eight “third-party” countries in Africa. And it has dismantled nearly every form of federal humanitarian protection, from the Refugee Admissions Program to Temporary Protected Status to political asylum (though an appeals court just ruled the latter closure illegal).

fontanafeature08262.png

Citizens are not protected

A WORD TO those who believe that U.S. policy need not concern itself with the welfare of noncitizens (a view that major religious authorities explicitly reject): The immigration crackdown has been bad for U.S. citizens, too.

Dozens of spouses of citizens have been detained at their final green card appointments. A punitive new policy from the Trump administration, which has received substantial pushback, would require green card holders to return to their countries of origin while their applications are processed. More than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained, and some 145,000 American children have been separated from their parents. U.S. citizens have suffered significant racial profiling, job losses, bodily harm, and even death.

These are the logical consequences of our fixation on an enforcement-only approach: widespread violence and fear in our communities; thousands of separated families; mass detention of people with no criminal records; pervasive violation of due process; indifference to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers; and deportation of people to places where they are not safe. That’s before we consider the damage to our economy, which depends on immigrants for much of its essential workforce.

What policies work?

FOR CENTURIES, AMERICA has been a land of opportunity that attracted immigrants. Now, it’s a place of such capricious cruelty that they no longer want to come. Is this what we want? Or might we now at last, as a nation, begin to seriously consider alternatives?

Most immigrants who enter the U.S. improperly do so at significant personal risk and expense; if a legal route were open to them, they would take it. The difficult reality is that the majority stand almost no chance of emigrating through legal means. The U.S. generally permits immigration for three reasons—humanitarian protection, family unification, and employment—none of which readily apply in practice to poor workers from low-income countries. The number of jobs available to immigrants in construction, agriculture, and other vital U.S. industries far exceeds the number of available low-wage worker visas. Family-based immigration applications are severely backlogged. And for the moment at least, humanitarian protections for refugees and asylum seekers are all but nonexistent.

There’s a common refrain in debates about undocumented immigrants: “I’m not against people coming here, but they need to wait in line.” To redirect people from unauthorized to authorized immigration pathways, we need to make more lines, and those lines need to move.

Enforcement and expansion of legal pathways are complementary, not contradictory, strategies.

Proposed policy frameworks from the American Immigration Council provide a sampling of humane, common-sense reforms. First, the U.S. must increase admittance of low-wage workers to align with our economy’s need for their labor, and meaningfully engage with the dilemma of how to receive people who are fleeing undeniable persecution, violence, and poverty but who may not strictly qualify for political asylum (a category defined in international agreements some 70 years ago, before the advent of modern perils like transnational criminal gangs and climate change). Second, we need to divert a significant fraction of enforcement’s bloated budget to the processing of legal immigration paperwork and asylum claims. We need to make the lines move.

We know that legal pathways work: In 2023, the Biden administration opened a humanitarian parole program to provide “safe and orderly pathways to the United States” for a certain number of citizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all countries experiencing turmoil. The program immediately reduced unauthorized migration from those countries by 90%.

There is broad support for such reform among faith communities in this country. Specific policy proposals with ecumenical Christian backing include family reunification; pathways to citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents; increasing worker visas and protections; and scaling back detention and border militarization. Even the more conservative Christian denominations generally favor these reforms, pursued in tandem with border security. The goal is an immigration system that, as the Southern Baptist Convention has written, “honors the value and dignity of those seeking a better life for themselves and their families.”

One person, one story

FAITH ALWAYS BRINGS us back to the dignity of each human person. Although much recent rhetoric portrays immigrants as an indistinguishable mass (or a “caravan,” or a “surge”), people of faith are called to see instead individuals, worthy of respect because they are made in the image of God, each with unique but relatable fears, desires, and dreams.

One such individual is Elvis García, another immigrant whom I interviewed. Elvis came alone to the U.S. from Honduras when he was 15 years old and has since earned U.S. citizenship. “I know that a lot of people may feel like the American Dream does not exist,” he told me. “But for many immigrants, the American Dream is just to live in a place where there is security, where they can work, where they can feed their families. ... My American Dream was to find a place where I could be safe, where I could work, where I could contribute to society and be a functioning human being.”

Elvis’ vision of America is now out of reach for many. Restoring it will take a rebalancing of our priorities, and a reassessment of what makes our country secure. It’s not enough to make the thing we don’t want harder. We must also—to paraphrase Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement—create a system where it is easier for people to be good.