The AFF can’t solve---migrants will continue to take risks and the U.S. economy is an alt cause.

This week’s high-profile visits to the Texas border by President Biden and former President Trump were predictable campaign theater. Both candidates pointed an accusing finger at the other, assigning blame for a problem that deeply concerns many voters. The failure last month of the latest immigration reform package on Capitol Hill further highlights what has become a decades-old policy stalemate.

But the issue isn’t going away, and neither party can afford to ignore the crisis. According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the number of border apprehensions rose from 1.86 million in the 2021 fiscal year to about 2.5 million in 2022 and about the same in 2023. The influx is overwhelming border communities and overstretching the asylum system, and the busing of migrants by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Democrat-run “sanctuary cities” has put pressure on blue states too.

How did we get here? The dominant narrative on the right has compared illegal immigration to an invasion, facilitated by criminal cartels and accepted by “open borders” liberals. On the left, an alternative narrative is that the surge in immigration is essentially driven by poverty, violence and other misery in origin countries, portraying migrants as refugees in need of protection.

But both narratives ignore the real reason for the border crisis: a hypocritical immigration system that refuses to acknowledge the U.S. economy’s persistent need for lower-skilled labor. The rise in illegal immigration is mainly driven by unprecedented labor demand and the absence of legal channels to accommodate it. Tougher enforcement at the border is no solution to this mismatch. In fact, it is a big part of the problem.

The border crisis dates back to policy changes in the late 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was the last major bipartisan immigration reform. It provided amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented, mostly Mexican migrants. But it also fired the opening shot for increasing border surveillance and introduced sanctions for employers hiring undocumented workers.

Since then, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have invested massive resources in ramping up border surveillance and collaborating with countries of transit such as Mexico to deter migration. By 2023, the U.S. border enforcement budget had risen to $25.9 billion—more than double the budget of the FBI.

Yet none of this has stopped people from coming. Migrants are willing to accept the significant costs and risks of the journey because they understand that there are plentiful jobs at much higher wages for them in the U.S. It is an opportunity for them to radically improve the living standards of themselves and their families.

Over the past few decades, a combination of demographic and economic factors in the U.S.— increasing education, an aging population, the rise of double-income families—has fueled a growing demand for migrant workers in sectors such as agriculture, slaughtering and meatpacking, construction, cleaning, child and eldercare, hospitality, warehousing, distribution and transport. Migrants have flocked to such jobs as the supply of local workers willing and able to do them has shrunk.

Ever-more restrictive border enforcement over the past four decades has done little to change this basic economic rationale for migration. But it has had two major perverse effects.

First, it has increasingly driven migration underground while making migrants and asylum seekers more dependent on smugglers (“coyotes”) to cross the border. Smugglers’ core business is to provide migrants with safe passage without getting caught by criminals, police or border-control agents, which is why migrants are willing to pay for their services. Tougher border restrictions have bolstered this business and pushed migrants to take more dangerous and perilous routes, with costs and risks going up.

Second, immigration restrictions have backfired by pushing temporary migrants into permanent settlement. Research shows that, the more difficult it is to come, the more migrants tend to stay.

The sociologist Douglas Massey of Princeton University has conducted yearly surveys since 1982 on both sides of the border, yielding a unique data set with information on the migration experiences of 29,000 households. An analysis by him and his colleagues published in 2016 showed how border militarization transformed undocumented Mexican migration “from a circular flow of male workers” going back and forth, mainly to Texas and California, “into an 11 million person population of settled families living in 50 states.”