Good Thursday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
President Biden's immigration speech last week failed to address the question at the heart of U.S. immigration policy, writes DePaul University professor Tom Mockaitis: "How many immigrants can the United States absorb, not just this year or next, but over the coming decades?"
Mockaitis thinks Biden's new immigration plan will fail to alleviate the immigration crisis because it "treats the current increase of migrants as a discrete crisis instead of seeing it as part of a chronic problem."
Mockaitis, who teaches history, examines the reasons people have historically migrated, then argues that climate change and overpopulation make the current migration challenge even harder to handle.
"Overpopulation has contributed to environmental degradation and increased world hunger, both of which impel people to migrate," Mockaitis writes. Climate change also drives forced migration, but U.S. immigration policy doesn't account for this at all.
The U.S. needs a new approach to immigration, and Mockaitis's plan includes giving aid to countries to address the problems that cause their people to flee abroad and securing the southern border, which he believes could require regime change in places such as Haiti, a failed state from which more than 56,000 migrants reached the U.S. in 2022 alone.
But Mockaitis believes before a detailed plan can be drawn up, U.S. policymakers must address the question of how many immigrants we can absorb "without compromising the standard of living of current residents, their children and grandchildren."
It's a question neither party seems willing to answer. But if we fail to do so, "we will jolt from crisis to crisis with all the attendant human suffering and acrimonious debate."
Read Mockaitis's op-ed here.
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