Developments at the U.S.-Mexico border are high-priority ones this presidential campaign season, as the visit a few days ago by Vice President Kamala Harris and one by her rival, former President Donald Trump, in August demonstrate. Amid record migrant encounters in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, most of the Biden administration’s policy attention has focused on creating orderly processes at the border. This approach has seen some recent successes, with the number of unauthorized crossings between ports of entry plummeting consistently since January, reaching the lowest point seen since September 2020, before President Joe Biden took office.
But repeating and improving on these results in an effective and sustainable manner requires immigration strategies that go far beyond the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, the recent drop in encounters is a result of a broader regional strategy with partners across the hemisphere rather than just measures implemented at the border itself. Whichever candidate wins the White House should continue to develop it.
Three years in the making, the regional approach reflects a new architecture for managing migration. This architecture is fragile, and it lacks many of the key elements of institutional engineering that are needed to make it work in the long term. Nonetheless, it rests on three elements that are worth highlighting and strengthening.
Creating Earlier and More Orderly Asylum Processes
The first part of the strategy relies on making decisions on humanitarian protection before migrants reach the border and creating a (more) orderly process for asylum at the border itself. The primary way that migrants have gained access to humanitarian protection in the United States from the Western Hemisphere has been through reaching the border and requesting asylum, usually by crossing the border without authorization, usually between legal points of entry. This creates a life-threatening burden on those already suffering persecution in their home countries, who often must make an arduous journey to seek protection. It also generates incentives to migrate for those who might not be eligible for asylum but know that years-long decision times in U.S. immigration courts provide the chance to live and work in the United States for extended periods if they can get across the border.
Under the new regional approach, the goal is to make decisions granting humanitarian protection at Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) closer to migrant home countries and before long, risky journeys. SMOs now exist in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala, permitting applicants to be considered for protection or other pathways in the United States, Canada, and Spain. Separately, migrants who reach Mexico can apply for an appointment to enter the United States at a port of entry through the CBP One app; the range now extends into southern Mexico. In parallel, a series of executive orders intended to discourage spontaneous border arrivals have tightened the criteria to apply for asylum, narrowing eligibility for those who cross without authorization.
So far these measures are imperfect, both from effectiveness and fairness standpoints. But they point in a promising direction: delivering protection closer to where people live, with asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border preserved as a last resort for those who do not have other options. The basic contours of the approach, if expanded and improved successfully over time in practice, could make asylum-seeking more orderly and humanitarian protection more accessible.
Expanding Legal Pathways to Provide Alternatives to Irregular Migration
There has been a significant expansion of lawful ways of entering the United States. The most far-reaching shift here has been the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan (CHNV) program—a special sponsorship program permitting up two years of parole and work authorization in the United States for 30,000 of these nationals monthly if they have a legally present sponsor in the United States and can pay for their own commercial air travel. These four countries suffer from either significant political repression or a generalized breakdown of political order, and three of the governments will generally not accept their return from the United States. Migrants from these four nationalities were an important part of the surge in irregular arrivals at the Southwest border prior to the launch of the CHNV program.
The program has not been without problems. Some critics worry about the ability of smugglers to pose as sponsors, while others worry the process excludes individuals who lack any way of getting a passport. Many others have raised concerns about the temporary and discretionary nature of the parole authority. But the numbers of Haitians and Cubans crossing without authorization have dropped to particularly low levels, usually a few hundred a month, since the CHNV program was first implemented. More recently, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan irregular crossings have fallen to similar levels. The sponsorship element also ensures that those who arrive have an anchor family in a U.S. community who can offer them a place to stay and orientation on how to obtain work, which speeds the self-support process.
In addition to this, the U.S. government has expanded the number of people accessing seasonal employment visas from Mexico and Central America; the number of individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras getting seasonal agricultural and nonagricultural visas has more than quadrupled since 2021, albeit from a low starting base. This primarily represents increased employer demand but also specific set-asides of nonagricultural seasonal visas for Central Americans. Unauthorized encounters of migrants from those countries have dropped also, if not as much as from the CHNV countries.
Increased and Active Collaboration with Other Countries in the Hemisphere
Since much of the migration reaching the United States comes through other countries in the hemisphere, and many of those who were arriving in the 2021-23 period were displaced Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians who had already moved once to another country in Latin America before heading north to the United States, the U.S. government has been trying to work with other partners in the region on migration policy measures. This has included strengthening asylum systems in several countries, in partnership with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and national migration institutions, together with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), to allow migrants to make a safe home elsewhere in the region. U.S. cooperation has also involved hundreds of millions of dollars to assist countries that are hosting large displaced populations, such as Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, which together host roughly 5 million displaced Venezuelans, as well as Costa Rica, which has hundreds of thousands of displaced Nicaraguans.
The U.S. government has also worked with partners in the hemisphere on enforcement, including Mexico’s efforts to dissuade unauthorized migration through its territory, Panama’s recent deportations of some migrants crossing through the Darien Gap, Ecuador’s decision to tighten visa requirements for some countries, and joint efforts across multiple countries to address migrant smuggling. In all of these cases, the partner governments had their own reasons for conducting these activities in order to preserve the integrity of their own immigration processes, but the ability to collaborate between countries was crucial.
Little is known about the specifics of some of these efforts, and, in the end, how these policies are being engineered matters. But the direction of these initiatives—promoting integration for displaced migrants and refugees in other countries, strengthening asylum systems and migration institutions, and coordinating efforts to reduce unauthorized migration—is new and constitutes a vital element of the emerging architecture.
The shared understandings reached by 22 governments across the hemisphere as part of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection in 2022 have been especially crucial to these efforts. The Declaration recognizes that most countries in the hemisphere are facing similar challenges for managing migration and promotes the need to collaborate. Efforts with other partners in the region to ensure a democratic transition in Guatemala, respect for the election results in Venezuela, and attention to development needs in Central America have also been key elements of this collaborative architecture.
A Fragile Architecture, a Necessary Direction
To date, the evidence suggests that this multipronged architecture developed by the U.S. government is reducing the number of unauthorized encounters while expanding a range of legal pathways in a mobile world. It shows that offering humanitarian protection and other lawful pathways early, enabling countries that are already hosting large refugee and migrant populations to continue to do so effectively, and cooperating on border controls across the hemisphere, increase the chances of success in better managing migration.
Multiple polls show that this is what the American public wants. People recognize that immigration is both an important asset for the country and a major challenge. They want legal migration but also orderly and consistent processes for how people come to the United States. This emerging architecture, while far from perfect in design or execution, points in the right direction on how to achieve this.
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