We have been living in Arizona for nearly 3 months now and immigration is on everyone’s minds. That doesn’t mean they are thinking about it, but they are complaining about it. The complaints are ubiquitous. Thoughts are mostly absent.

First, one thing nearly everybody agrees on is that border reform is urgently needed. In the spring of last year many feared the US was going to have an unmanageable border crisis at the southern border. The government was about to lose the ability to quickly dispel migrants at the border because of the Title 42 provisions that were implemented by Trump in March of 2020 that allowed the Americans to do that as a pandemic prevention measure. At least Trump referred to the measures that way. By 2023 the pandemic restrictions everywhere were being lifted so really this had to go too.

Biden had a plan. He imposed measures that were designed to deal with the expected problem. He imposed stiff penalties for illegal crossings such as a deportation and a 5-year ban on any re-entry. He also expanded the ways asylum seekers could apply for legal asylum from their home countries. Amazingly, this plan actually worked. Encounters at the border dropped by one third! Numbers dropped from about 7,100 per day to 4,800 per day.

As Fareed Zakaria, someone who actual thinks about what is happening on the border said in a Washington Post article, “It was a welcome case of well-designed policy making a difference.”

 But then the Democrats took their eye off the ball. They thought the problem was solved. Border problems are never solved that easily. As Republicans learned but rarely admitted, their “solutions” did not solve the problems either. Border problems are wicked problems that require long-term hard-fought for solutions.

As Zakaria pointed out

“But this success does not change the fact that the U.S. immigration system is broken. The crush at the southern border might be less than anticipated, but it is still an influx, and its effects are being felt across the nation. Texas, overwhelmed by the numbers, has bused migrants to cities such as Washington and New York. But the truth is that migrants have been crowding into major American cities, including Chicago, on a scale that is breaking those communities’ capacities to respond.”

A major flaw in the American system is that cities where immigrants arrive are required to pay for the costs of dealing with the immigrants. This is absurd, for the cities are the governments least able to deal with those costs, and more importantly, immigration is a national problem not a city problem. The entire country must chip in to design and pay for a better and more rational system.

And one thing I have learned in my 3 months in America, the Americans are much more interested in yelling at “the other side” and wining political points than in solving this vexing problem. That is a problem.