The Supreme Court decision allowing Texas to enforce its new immigration law, allowing state officials to detain migrants who enter Texas without authorization, is clearly an important ruling that is to be applauded nationwide. As a response, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that "we fundamentally disagree" with the ruling.
Under his immigration proposal of January 20, 2021, Biden would create an eight-year path to citizenship for the nation's estimated tens of millions of unauthorized immigrants. Perhaps that explains why no Senate Democrats voted for Senator Bill Hagerty's (R-Tenn.) Equal Representation Act, a piece of legislation intended to ensure that only legal citizens are counted when tabulating the size of congressional districts and the Electoral College map that determines presidential elections. It is hard not to see the political agenda behind the three years of silence from the White House on the millions of migrants coming through our southern border, an issue that will be crucial to deciding the 2024 elections.
All this was unimaginable just a few years ago. Another Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally was charged with the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student found dead on the campus of the University of Georgia last month. A Guatemalan illegal alien was convicted of sexually assaulting a child and rearrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after he was released by a Massachusetts Court. Last December, another "undocumented male subject" murdered a Texas high school cheerleader. An illegal immigrant from Mexico killed a Washington state patrol trooper earlier this month. And the list goes on and on.
To be clear, the U.S. needs more immigrants—legal immigrants, especially high-skilled foreign workers. Our annual H-1B visas account for roughly 22 percent of all temporary visas, at 65,000 visas approved each year and an extra 20,000 for the cap. These numbers should increase. Typically, over 200,000 applicants seek H-1B visas every year. Under the current annual quota, only about 40 percent are accepted, so foreign-born skilled workers may give up applying and seek other countries to work in and contribute to. We are at risk of losing the international brainpower that will help ensure our country continues to lead technological progress globally. We need to expand legal immigration, yet we allow millions to enter the country illegally, most of whom are barely skilled and some of whom have criminal records and should not be permitted under any circumstances.
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services needs more funding to cope with processing legal immigrants, including working permit applicants. Diverting funds to process illegal migrants while hundreds of thousands of applicants wait for their papers to be processed in our daunting, years-long (and pretty much broken) immigration process is not only unfair, but unacceptable. Some people, like the man who murdered Laken Riley, simply should not be here. Period.
Reinstituting the "Remain in Mexico" policy is one action the administration should take immediately to stop the flow of illegals. The intended purpose of asylum—protection from arrest and extradition given especially to political refugees—must be a guiding policy for all asylum seekers. People living in Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado—states far from the southern border—are now identifying illegal migration as a key issue for the 2024 election. And with heinous crime raising throughout our nation, rightly so.
Dr. Sasha Toperich is senior executive vice president of the Transatlantic Leadership Network. From 2013 to 2018, he was a senior fellow and director of the Mediterranean Basin, Middle East, and Gulf initiative at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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