The latest episode of The President’s Inbox is live. Jim sat down with Dara Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, to discuss U.S. immigration policy and the unprecedented number of migrants and asylum seekers entering the United States through the southern border.

Here are seven highlights from their conversation:

1.) Migrants and asylum seekers are crossing the U.S. southern border in record numbers. The number of people apprehended at the border without documentation hit a new high in 2023. More than 2.4 million people were apprehended at the U.S. southern border last fiscal year, which is four times greater than the average number of apprehensions per year over the prior decade.

2.) The number of apprehensions at the U.S. southern border shouldn’t itself determine how we think of security at the border. Dara noted how counting the number of apprehensions leads to the belief that more people being placed in custody equates to a less secure border. She put it this way, “that means that even in a situation where everybody is getting immediately apprehended and deported, it would still appear that the U.S. government isn't doing enough.” That said, both the Biden administration and its critics recognize that the number of people crossing the U.S. southern border is creating a crisis.

3.) The terms “migrant,” “immigrant,” “asylum seeker,” and “refugee” are often used interchangeably, but they have different legal implications. Dara said that the term “migrant” has been used historically to refer to people who come to the United States seeking jobs. However, she finds it helpful to use migrant as “an appropriate umbrella term” because “asylee and refugee both refer to specific legal processes in U.S. law and in international law.” She pointed to the “tremendously diverse population of people coming in,” which she noted experts refer to as “mixed migration.”

4.) The time between when people cross the southern border and when their cases are resolved by the U.S. immigration system is lengthy. Immigration officials are overwhelmed with the number of cases they’re seeing, and subsequently, the case backlogs are substantial. To move cases quickly, the U.S. government sometimes skips the initial screening process to determine whether someone is an asylum seeker or not, instead putting them on track to be heard as an asylum case. Deciding who merits asylum can be difficult. Dara noted that sometimes a “teacher from Venezuela…says that the reason she left Venezuela is that she couldn't get a job, but then when you drill down on it, she had to leave her job because she was engaging in anti-government protests, which means that she is, in fact, under U.S. law, a conventional asylum case.”

5.) There isn’t a consistent standard applied across asylum cases in the United States. The standard that asylum seekers need to meet depends on where they file their case. “In the fifth circuit in Texas, you're going to have a much harder time making an asylum claim,” Dara noted, “than you are in the ninth Circuit in California.” Some judges are tougher than others. “It’s not surprising that you get really creaky and inconsistent results out of it,” Dara added, “with a lot of people just either evading or falling out of the process before it's finally resolved.”

6.) The crisis at the U.S. southern border reflects a multitude of causes. Dara noted that the information that circulates on social media about entering the United States is often divorced from the reality of U.S. policy. Human smugglers spread misinformation about U.S. immigration policy to encourage people to head north. The end of Covid-era policies restricting the flow of people has also led more people to seek to enter the United States. Title 42—a U.S. federal public health code that was used to turn away migrants and asylum seekers at the border—ended last May. The Donald Trump administration invoked Title 42, a rarely used provision in U.S. law, to override provisions in U.S. immigration law that allowed people to enter the country. What that meant, Dara said, was that the U.S. government “did not have to screen [asylum seekers] for asylum, which is what immigration law requires.”

7.) With Congress unlikely to enact a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. immigration system, it should focus on smaller steps that could ease the crisis. Dara argued that such “low hanging fruit” could include having the government try to steer people to different cities once they are released from custody and awaiting their court dates. Right now, the government rarely informs cities when large groups of people are headed their way. Dara added that the government could “help them understand that there are some communities that really want new workers and might be willing to put people up for a while if what they get at the end is an expanded labor force.”

If you’re looking to read more of Dara’s work on immigration, check out her piece for Immigration Impact which analyzed the Senate negotiations on the immigration bill that collapsed earlier this year.