10 Steps to a Better Border

From improving reporters’ access on the ground to raising patrol agents’ salaries, these ideas will help the Biden administration improve the southern border situation

- BRIAN KAREM

Few issues facing this country are as divisive as immigration. It is also one of the least understood issues.

Emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty is Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus”: “‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

In the past, the United States has unofficially adopted the poem’s welcoming sentiment to describe its immigration policy. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Some of our ancestors arrived here after being forced into slavery. Some fled political persecution; others fled horrifying economic or religious oppression. Some of us descend from the pilgrims and pioneers who displaced the indigenous people already here. But no matter how a person arrived in America, we were all taught that in this country you could make something of yourself. Here we appreciate hard work and the spirit of individuality. Anyone can achieve “the American Dream.”

That dream has always been a tenuous one, and former President Donald Trump, whose thinly veiled racist policies benefited the rich, effectively killed it. He exposed us instead to his dream: Close the doors and limit immigration to the white and the wealthy.