THE IMMIGRANTS AREN'T THE PROBLEM

People won't stop coming to America. That should be a good thing. But right now our broken system and toxic politics add up to a giant missed opportunity.

- JACK HOLMES

WHEN I VISITED MCALLEN, TEXAS, IN 2018, THE STANDoff at the U.S.-Mexico border was starting to feel like DEFCON 1. The Trump administration had imposed a "zero-tolerance policy" and was separating children from their parents. Much of America, and the world, was horrified. And that was kind of the point. The logic of family separation was simple and brutal: Make it terrible to come to this country so that people will stop coming. I saw the human toll of this approach written on the faces of detainees as I peered through the chain-link fences at a Border Patrol processing facility in the Rio Grande Valley.

Tough but effective, the policy's defenders might argue-except the strategy didn't work. Border "encounters," in which authorities detain or expel someone arriving at the southern border, rose for much of 2018 and spiked in 2019.

Fast-forward to January of this year and President Biden's trip to El Paso-a calculated show of strength. The president has been playing defense on immigration for his first two years in office. Family separation formally ended in the summer of 2018 and, with Trump residing at Mar-a-Lago rather than the White House, talk of a "big, beautiful" border wall has faded. But the fearmongering about migrants that Trump unleashed lives on. Some U.S. politicians now speak about people who want to come to this country almost exclusively as hordes of invaders bent on destroying America. The governors of Texas and Florida have taken to busing and flying new migrants to northeast cities to stick it to the libs. Right-wing pundits, meanwhile, have relentlessly accused the Biden administration of enabling a full-blown border crisis.