Since December, illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down more than 40 percent, and have been relatively stable thus far this year. It’s the first time in seven years that illegal border crossings did not increase from February to March.
In a May 10 interview, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told NPR: “We have also removed or returned an historic number of people more this year than I think in any year since 2011.” Economist Ernie Tedeschi meanwhile in an April report noted that the rise in the immigrant population since 2020 has accounted for about one-fifth of U.S. growth during that period.
Liberal pundits, unsurprisingly, are celebrating these seeming immigration-related victories for the Biden administration given recent historic highs in illegal border crossings. “GOP talking points are out of date. Border crossings have plummeted,” read the title of a May 8 op-ed by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell. “Biden’s ‘border crisis’ is actually an economic success story,” was the title of an April 8 MSNBC op-ed by Zeeshan Aleem. Yet a closer look indicates more of a failure than a success when it comes to current U.S. policies on immigration.
Not Exactly an Immigration Triumph…
“And to be fair, April’s border apprehensions, at around 130,000, remain high by historical standards,” Rampell acknowledges in her WaPo column. Indeed, even the data cited by Rampell quite clearly shows that the number of illegal border crossings from January through April of this year has hovered between 125,000 and 140,000 per
