States and politicians can agree about on

immigration is that the system is broken.

I think it's gotten more broken, if that's

possible, in the 30 years that I've been working on

the issue.

2023 saw record-breaking numbers of migrant

crossings at the southwestern border, with

Border Patrol reporting nearly 250,000 encounters

in December alone.

They're poisoning the blood of our country.

That's what they've done.

I will not demonize immigrants saying they are

poisoned in the blood of our country.

The migration that we're seeing happening at the

border right now is unsustainable. We are not

managing it, and it is overwhelming our existing

immigration systems.

There's broad consensus that it needs to be fixed.

They just can't agree on what that way might be and

how to think about that question.

So why is the immigration system in the U.S.

so broken and can it ever be fixed?

When people say that the immigration system is

broken, they mean different things.

If you're on the left, you typically mean that

the system does not accommodate as many people

as you would like to be able to come here legally.

And when people use it from the conservative

side, they mean that the system allows in far too

many people who should not be here under any

definition of the law.

The U.S. has more foreign born residents than any

other country, with immigrants accounting for

about 13.7% of the entire population.

But today, less than 1% of those looking to reside

permanently in the U.S.

can do so legally.

We often hear, 'my grandparents came to the

country illegally. Why can't people come

illegally to the country now? And the fact is, when

the grandparents came to the country is much more

possible, especially for European immigrants.

But there's no line to stand in anymore.

In general, there are four pathways to obtaining

legal immigration: the diversity lottery, refugee

program, family sponsorship, and

employment-based sponsorships. Just 0.2% of

applicants for the diversity lottery end up

with a green card.

Incoming refugees face even more daunting odds,

having less than a 0.1% chance of being selected

for resettlement.

Meanwhile, family-sponsored

immigrants are capped at just 226,000 every fiscal

year. That has led to about 8.3 million

relatives of citizens and legal residents waiting

for a family-sponsored visa in 2022.

I don't know if it's a problem to let in a lot of

people based on family relationships. That's a

strong value of the United States and our

immigration system, and a long standing value that

family reunification is important.

At the same time, it does seem like we haven't

accommodated the level of employment-based

immigration that would benefit our country and

our economy.

Almost all employment-based green

cards require a sponsorship from an

employer, but just one out of every 1,500 new

hires in the U.S. receive a green card this way.

I think the limitations that were last updated,

the numbers of annual immigrants, was last

updated in 1990, when our population was smaller,

when the kinds of work that we did in this

country was different.

A big issue is the mismatch between the

current policies and the actual needs of the

workforce.

Most other developed nations in the world have

a much higher percentage of their immigration

system based on economics. Somebody who's

coming for an economic purpose to their country

than we do.

For instance, Canada granted permanent

residency to 255,680 economic immigrants,

compared to just 97,355 sponsored family members

in 2022.

What I would like to see are reforms to make the

majority of people who come here legally as

immigrants come because our economy needs them,

come to do jobs that our economy wants.

Some of this is not just a question of categories,

but a question of the administrative delays and

costs.

The system is under-resourced, so

employers who want to sponsor a worker have to

go through multiple steps.

Some of those steps are quite repetitive.

And then the agencies that have to look at those

applications, the Department of Labor, U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, the

State Department, they all take their time to

process applications because they either

haven't found the efficiencies or don't have

enough staff.

Border control challenges are another indicator of a

broken system.

If your goal is that every person should be allowed

to come here, you will never meet that goal.

The demand is in the hundreds of millions, if

not billions, and the supply is simply not that

high. There's nothing we could do to so-called fix

the system so that it could accommodate 10, 20,

50 million people a year into the United States.

In 2023, encounters at the southwest border saw a

more than 100% increase compared to 2019.

I think we saw so many migrants at the border

last year for a variety of reasons.

One is that our economy is really strong.

A lot of employers are looking for workers.

When the U.S. economy is booming, we know that

immigration tends to be higher.

Complementing that is all of the many, many push

factors all around the world.

We're seeing a lot of migrants coming from

countries like Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua

with repressive governments and really

failed economies.

We're also seeing a lot of migration from parts of

Mexico that have a lot of gang violence.

I think there's also a perception that it's a

good time to come, that it's fairly easy to come

into the United States.

In the past, Democrats and Republicans both disagreed

about what the law should be, but they agreed that

it should be enforced.

The Biden administration essentially decided they

would not enforce the law, and they released the

majority of people that were encountered illegally

crossing into the country. They created

parole programs to bring in hundreds of thousands

more. And the word got out.

Parole refers to policies that allow certain

noncitizens to enter or temporarily remain in the

U.S., usually for urgent humanitarian or

significant public benefit reasons.

The Department of Homeland Security told

CNBC that working within the constraints of

outdated immigration laws, the administration

has implemented an approach that combines the

largest expansion of lawful pathways in years,

with significantly strengthened consequences

for those who cross unlawfully. And for

decades, Republican and Democratic administrations

alike have used parole authority on a

case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian

reasons or significant public benefit.

The number of paroled migrants increased by

nearly four fold between fiscal year 2019 and 2022.

That number has more than doubled again in the first

ten months of fiscal year 2023, to about 301,000

paroled migrants.

In 2024, the Committee on Oversight and

Accountability also reported that Border

Patrol had caught and released over 75% of

undocumented migrants encountered in December

2023, the same month that set a new monthly record

of migrant crossings.

Parole has been part of our immigration system

since the 1950s.

It has been used by every president since Eisenhower

to bring groups of people who otherwise wouldn't be

able to come to the United States.

It was a loophole created just, you know, in case,

just for emergencies.

And never was it envisioned that it would

be used on a mass basis for tens of thousands of

people from multiple countries.

I think the Biden administration is using

this authority to try to address the arrivals any

way he can, because the alternative that a lot of

conservatives are asking for is to detain

everybody. But we don't have the capacity to

detain everybody either.

Congress would have to allocate a whole lot more

money.

In recent years, organizations like the

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responsible

for containing the crisis, have seen millions

of dollars in budget shortfall.

Another system that has been overwhelmed as a

result is the immigration courts.

Our law says you are allowed to ask for asylum

no matter how you enter.

Now, that doesn't mean you get it, but we have to

let you ask, and we have to give you a process to

hear that case and decide.

The immigration court backlog surpassed 3

million as of January 2024, with each

immigration judge handling an average of

4,500 pending cases.

It used to be in the late '90s and early 2000s that

people would come to the border and they would try

to sneak into the United States and live in the

shadows and work under the table.

Now people are coming to the border and they're

asking for humanitarian protection.

Then they're put into removal proceedings in

immigration court. And then that is taking a

long, long time. And the backlog is just building

up and building up as more people come to the

border. We haven't seen the increase in

immigration judges and other immigration court

staffing that would be needed to keep pace with

the rising number of arrivals and people being

put into removal proceedings.

Right now, instead of deterring people from

crossing in, detaining them as the law requires

when they get in, and then deporting them if

they are here illegally or if they fail in their

claim for asylum or other protection.

We are processing them, paroling them, punting

them into this endless backlog where sometimes

they're not even showing up to immigration court

for 5 or 10 years.

Let me be absolutely clear.

We are not going to solve the issues at the border,

the issues with our legal immigration system, unless

Congress enacts legislation.

Political polarization is making any progress

difficult to achieve.

30 years ago, when I started working on

immigration policy, immigration was a very

bipartisan issue.

Over the period of the last 20 years, it's become

much more the Democrats are seen as supporting

immigration, and Republicans are very much

pro enforcement, stiff enforcement.

Even most recently with the presidency of Donald

Trump starting in 2016, he's the president who

expressed a lot of skepticism of legal

immigration as well.

There are so many competing interests that

takes careful negotiation and balance to find some

kind of solution.

With the increasing polarization we're seeing

in the country and the parties moving further and

further away from each other on immigration and

other topics, it just makes it so difficult to

even have the conversations that can

build toward that compromise.

The priorities for the parties are very

different. The priorities for Democrats often are

about legalization of the undocumented population

that's here, including dreamers and others who've

been long-term residents of the United States.

69% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning

independents believed more legal immigration