There’s No Such Thing as a Border Czar (2024)

When Laura Flores Godoy arrived at a chaotic border crossing in Zulia, Venezuela, in December, border guards stopped her and demanded a $40 bribe—more than 10 times the monthly income of many Venezuelans, thanks to President Nicolás Maduro’s disastrous handling of the country’s economy. Flores Godoy fought with the guards, she later told me, saying she was going to need every dollar she had to get her 8-year-old daughter to the United States, thousands of miles away, in buses and taxis and on foot. But all around them, she saw other families emptying backpacks and turning out their pockets, apparently willing to give up anything they were carrying in order to flee.

About a quarter of Venezuela’s population has already escaped the regime of its autocratic president, whose seemingly stolen reelection on Sunday has sent scores of protesters into the streets. Even more Venezuelans say they plan to leave if Maduro holds on to power. Like Flores Godoy, many will head for the United States.

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According to Republicans in Congress, Vice President Kamala Harris is to blame for this. They have labeled her the Biden administration’s “border czar,” claiming that she has been in charge of immigration-enforcement policies. (They have also made easily disprovable claims that the number of crossings is higher than it actually is.) But Harris is not a border czar—the position doesn’t exist. The people calling her that are doubling down on a misconception that has persisted ever since Donald Trump brought it into the mainstream: that a single person could stop the largest global migration crisis in history, if only the right hard-liner had the job.

This makes no sense. Trying to cut off migration to the United States by unilaterally changing policies that are carried out in Texas or Arizona would be like trying to stop people from competing in a marathon while standing on the finish line. This approach didn’t work during Trump’s presidency, nor would it now, because it doesn’t take into account the reasons more than 117 million people worldwide—one in every 69 on the planet—are now living on the move as they try to establish a new home.

Harris’s actual assignment in the Biden administration has been to tackle the “root causes” of migration by raising money to help improve the quality of life in countries that are sending the most people to the United States, and by liaising with their governments. Harris raised $5 billion in private-sector funds to create jobs in Central America, and migration from the region has been declining. But it’s increasing elsewhere. No American politician could change this alone, but Harris’s actual record on immigration is what bears scrutinizing.

In Venezuela, grocers stack goods in a single row at the edge of store shelves to disguise their dwindling reserves. More than half of the population lives in “extreme poverty,” and malnutrition has stunted the growth of a generation of children, killing hundreds of them. Hospitals are overcrowded and filthy. Power outages are frequent, and running water inconsistent. Decades ago, Venezuela was the richest country in South America, but an overreliance on oil made it vulnerable to market fluctuations, which have sent its economy into a tailspin over the past decade.

President Nicolás Maduro has also replicated his predecessor Hugo Chávez’s worst impulses to consolidate power and enrich his friends. Maduro has used violence to silence his critics, triggering American sanctions that have strangled the economy even more. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says it continues to document “killings, short-term enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and ill-treatment, and sexual and gender-based violence against opponents of the Maduro government,” part of why 262,739 Venezuelans have entered the U.S. this year.

Ecuador was a peaceful country until about five years ago, when it fell into turmoil. This was in part the result of geographical misfortune: Drug lords throughout Latin America identified the country’s ports as prime locations from which to traffic cocaine to buyers in the United States and Europe. Gangs exploded, forging connections with brutal Mexican drug cartels and orchestrating kidnappings and extortion from inside prisons. The country’s new president, Daniel Noboa, tried to stop them earlier this year by sending gang leaders to a high-security facility. Instead they escaped, and violence surged in the streets. Armed men broke into a television station while it was on the air, demanding that the journalists warn the authorities to back down, and nearly executing some of them before police intervened.

Many Ecuadorans support Noboa’s campaign to defang the gangs by relying on “broken windows” tactics that target random citizens—particularly teenage boys—and in at least some instances torture. Ecuadorans have tried to protect themselves by turning their homes into fortresses, surrounded by metal cages. But more than 112,848 have come to the United States this year alone.

Haitians, too, have taken to barricading themselves inside, hiding out from unrelenting gang violence that has become commonplace since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. The gangs that control the capital of Port-au-Prince killed at least 3,250 people in the first five months of this year. In March, about 4,000 people escaped from Haiti’s two largest prisons. A million and a half people in the country are facing starvation.

This is only the most recent chapter in a long history of instability in Haiti that has often been made worse by outside intervention. Many of the 188,193 Haitians who have arrived at the U.S. border this year actually left Haiti years ago, and first settled in Brazil and Chile, which had eagerly taken them in to do construction work and other low-wage manual labor. The economies of those countries were decimated by the coronavirus pandemic and have not recovered, leaving Haitian immigrants out of work. That and xenophobia, which frequently turns violent, are leading many to travel north seeking a new refuge.

The American immigration debate continues to center on the southern U.S. border, while these global forces driving migration become more complex and entrenched. Smuggling networks run circles around immigration-enforcement authorities in wealthy nations that are trying to stop them.

Countries that are rarely referenced are also sending large numbers of people to the United States. An unprecedented wave of illegal migration from China has brought 62,091 people to the U.S. this year. A man from the eastern province of Anhui, whom I met recently while he was making the journey with three generations of his family, told me that the Chinese government had bulldozed his father’s home to make room for a new road, and he’d had no recourse.

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A similar number of Indians have crossed into the United States this year, 67,391. I interviewed the relatives of a young Sikh man from Punjab who disappeared in the jungle between Colombia and Panama on his way to California. They explained that he had earned an MBA, but was shut out from decent jobs because of his religion, and that Indian police had kidnapped and beaten him because he supported the Sikh independence movement. And Ukrainians continue to flee the war with Russia in large numbers: 54,000 have entered the United States this year, a figure that will likely double by December.

It appears that no amount of concertina wire, or even deportations, will reverse these trends. And of course American diplomatic efforts alone cannot solve instability abroad. But the U.S. contributes to many of these crises—a good reason for our elected officials to pay attention to them. Most of the guns being used to terrorize people in Ecuador and Haiti were manufactured in the United States. American sanctions have worsened the exodus from Venezuela. And people throughout Latin America have become casualties of our insatiable appetite for cocaine and other drugs.

In almost a decade of covering immigration, I’ve come to understand that the decision to migrate usually takes place over the course of years, as people wait to see whether conditions will improve and debate—subconsciously or aloud with their friends and family—what to do if they don’t. I’ve heard countless stories about the factors that people weigh before deciding to leave home. Rarely do these narratives include even a passing reference to American immigration policy. And almost never—it should be noted—do they mention anything resembling an American dream. “Hijo de puta, Maduro!” (“son of a bitch, Maduro!”) is how one Venezuelan I met, while hiking up a brutal mountain in the South American jungle, put her feelings about having to migrate. Most people on the mountain said they wanted to return home as soon as they had saved a little money and their countries had become stable enough to do so.

When Donald Trump was president, his immigration advisers, led by Stephen Miller, ran a wrecking ball through the federal bureaucracy. Miller may have been the closest thing to a border czar that Americans have ever seen. His most aggressive attempt to shut down immigration, in 2017 and 2018, involved separating migrant children from their parents. After, border crossings increased even more, exceeding 1 million the following year.

A more sophisticated view of the United States border that took into account where people come from and why might better serve the interests of Americans who are desperate for a coherent response to the issue from their government. A border czar, by contrast, would do very little.