Expanding Legal Immigration Reduced Border Chaos

In January 2023, President Biden created a humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians that allowed Americans to sponsor up to 30,000 citizens of those countries a month. According to Customs and Border Protection, 494,799 people legally arrived in the U.S. under this program by the end of June 2024, diverting many of them from making the perilous and chaotic journey to the U.S.-Mexico border to instead legally flying here.

There were many good reasons for CVNH, such as living up to America's historic mission as a refuge for those fleeing socialist dictatorships and turbulent kleptocracies, and for those who want a better and freer life. However, the main reason the Biden administration created the CVNH program was to reduce the number of unlawful entries along the U.S.-Mexico border, which had risen precipitously from 75,316 in January 2021 to 200,658 in July. Border chaos was out of control, and the political problems for the Biden administration were so severe that they finally considered a liberalization of rules under CVNH parole after trying everything else.

The results were striking, as we had anticipated. The number of Border Patrol encounters of illegal migrants from CVNH countries plunged by 86 percent in the first month, while they only fell 15 percent for migrants from other countries. By the end of July 2024, the number of CVNH migrants apprehended that month was down 99 percent from December 2022 compared to 60 percent from others. To be sure, other factors affect unlawful border flows such as U.S. labor demand, economic conditions in sending countries, political turmoil, and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico and other Latin American countries, but CVNH had an undeniably large effect.

This is further evidence that expanding legal immigration reduces illegal immigration and undermines chaos. Already, reporters who made a living posting similar images of border chaos every day are struggling to find other beats.

I want migrants to respect American immigration laws, but the laws themselves must be respectable to earn compliance. The current immigration laws are a restrictive mess second in complexity to the income tax code. CVNH offered a partial liberalization of those rules for a few migrants from countries sending about 40 percent of all illegal immigrants in December 2022, or 84,198 out of 222,018 in that month. Humanitarian parole reduced the CVNH share to about 2 percent in July 2024, or 1189 out of 56,408. Chaos reduced, mission accomplished.

Not quite. Unfortunately, the Biden administration recently suspended CVNH because of overblown fraud concerns . . . right as Venezuela is undergoing another serious political and economic crisis. If total encounters along the border continue to fall, the administration may not reinstate CVNH, but they’ll reconsider if Venezuelans start to arrive in larger numbers. CVNH should be continued regardless (with some reforms) in the interest of reducing border chaos, liberalizing immigration, and providing a refuge for those fleeing the horrors of socialism.