The media spent the last couple of weeks relentlessly hyping the end of Title 42 as an apocalypse of epic proportions. Hordes of screaming migrants were supposedly gathered at the border prepared to invade the country on foot like a medieval army and there was nothing we could do about it.
Migrants crossing the border without documentation dropped on Friday, the first day after Title 42 was lifted, two U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped just over 6,200 undocumented migrants on Friday compared with roughly 11,000 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 10,000 on Thursday, the officials said.
These numbers include both migrants who cross illegally between ports of entry — more than 7,000 of them on Friday — and those who present themselves legally at ports of entry without proper entry documents.
The Covid-era restrictions that allowed immigration officials to quickly turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border expired at 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday, ushering in tougher policies for asylum-seekers. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that people who did use a lawful pathway to cross the border would be “presumed ineligible for asylum.”
Title 42 was invoked by former President Donald Trump when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, apparently as a way to slow the spread of Covid, but its implementation allowed the Trump administration to expel migrants more quickly without having to consider them for asylum. It was continued under the Biden administration, which had repeatedly sought to end it but its plans were delayed by legal challenges from Republican states’ attorney generals.
Nobody knows why there has been such a dramatic drop in crossings, but it’s speculated that crossing actually peaked before Trump’s signature anti-immigrant bill expired. That would indicate that there isn’t an endless tsunami of migrants after all.
People are acting as if this is totally unprecedented but it isn’t:
As you can see we have periodically had high numbers of migrants over the past 30 years. As you can also see, they tend to come at periods of low unemployment in the US. This recent one is exacerbated by turmoil in central and South America but the need for workers is a huge draw.
Meanwhile, we have reports of slaughterhouses hiring children and red state Governors are rolling back child labor laws to fill all the open low-skilled jobs. Construction companies are having to shut down projects because they can’t find labor. I think we can all do the math.