Given the Green Light: Open Border Policies and Threats to Law Enforcement

My name is David Bier. I am the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research organization here in Washington, D.C.¹

For nearly half a century, the Cato Institute has produced original research showing that a freer, more orderly, and more lawful immigration system makes the United States a wealthier, freer, and safer place to live. Our view is inspired by America’s founding principles: in a free society, people, regardless of their background, ancestry, or birthplace, are directed toward activities that benefit mankind. In the words of the late great economist Julian Simon, people are the ultimate resource because it is only people’s creativity and work ethic that turn natural resources into human resources.

Nearly all immigrants come to America seeking the freedom to improve their lives through hard work in their new country. As one recent immigrant said, “You have to come here to work. To work hard, long days, to work harder than you’ve ever been used to working.”² The primary reason for the surge in immigration since 2021 was that Americans demanded more workers than were available domestically, leading job openings to surge to unprecedented levels. Recent immigrants went to states with more open jobs and are already employed at higher rates than the US-born population.³

The new immigrants have prevented the decline in the US labor force, helped stabilize the economy as we recovered from the pandemic, and are contributing $1 trillion more in federal taxes than they are receiving in benefits.⁴ They provide essential services in health care, elder care, childcare, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and much else.⁵ America is fortunate to have so many people who want to join us and contribute to this great country.

Immigration Does Not Threaten Law Enforcement

Immigrants are coming to work and contributing to US society, making the country safer. Murders surged in 2020 when immigration inflows were lower than at any point in a generation, and the recent surge in immigration inflows has coincided with the fastest decline in murders on record. With respect to law enforcement threats specifically, the evidence shows:

1) noncitizens are less likely to murder police than US citizens;
2) noncitizens commit fewer serious crimes, reducing risks to police;
3) noncitizens impose lower per capita fiscal costs on law enforcement; and
4) noncitizens work with police to stop crimes, convict criminals, and protect police.

Noncitizen crime could be even lower if the US immigration system explicitly focused on the exclusion and removal of public safety threats rather than peaceful people seeking safety, work, or family reunification. Mass deportation would not make the country safer. Not only would it remove people who are making the country safer, it would divert substantial resources away from tackling serious threats to the public.

The Cato Institute reviewed records related to each individual arrested for shooting and killing a police officer as recorded on the Officer Down Memorial Page in 2024.⁶ From January 1, 2024, to November 29, 2024, 45 officers were shot and killed in the line of duty. This review did not identify any illegal immigrant perpetrators.

Separately, the Cato Institute also reviewed records related to each officer of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) killed in duty from 2014 to 2024, and it also identified no illegal immigrant cop killers.⁷ This implies that illegal immigrants are significantly less likely to murder police officers in New York and nationally than U.S. citizens. Appendix Table A contains the list of officers killed in New York (2014–24) and nationwide (2024). Meanwhile, multiple slain members of NYPD were immigrants themselves. Immigrants were more likely to be killed as NYPD officers than they were to kill NYPD officers.

Of course, there have certainly been tragic instances in US history where immigrants have killed police officers. The purpose of this systemic review was to provide evidence regarding whether illegal immigrants elevate the risk of violent deaths for law enforcement comparedto the US-born population. They do not. Illegal immigration is adding a population less threatening to law enforcement than US-born Americans, reducing the risk that the average officer faces on the job.

Immigrants Commit Fewer Serious Crimes

These conclusions about crimes against officers are not surprising given that a substantial body of evidence indicates that immigrants are less likely to commit murder and other serious crimes than US-born people. The following datasets that contain direct information on immigrants demonstrate immigrants’ lower rates of criminality:

– U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey;
– National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97);
– National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health;
– General Social Survey;⁸
– Texas’s Department of Public Safety arrest and conviction records; and
– The Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT)

The best evidence concerning murder comes from the state of Texas, which is the only state that records both citizenship and immigration status for each arrest, as determined by investigations by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Texas.

The Cato Institute’s analysis of this dataset shows that from 2013 to 2022, illegal immigrants were 26 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide in Texas, and legal immigrants were 61 percent less likely (Figure 1). In 2022, homicide conviction rates for illegal immigrants and legal immigrants were 35.6 percent and 62.3 percent, respectively, below those of native-born Americans. It is important to emphasize that the estimate of the number of total illegal immigrants is more uncertain than the number of illegal immigrants convicted of murder. If the number of illegal immigrants in Texas was higher than the Census Bureau data indicate—which is possible, especially given Texas’s location near the border—the murder rate for illegal immigrants would be lower.

Cato’s findings are also remarkable because they do not control for age, education, income, race, ethnicity, or any other variables correlated with higher crime rates. If such controls were introduced, which are common in criminology research, then the gap between illegal immigrant and native-born American homicide conviction rates would be even greater because illegal immigrants are more likely to be younger, less well-educated, poorer, and be members of racial and ethnic groups who have higher criminal conviction rates on average.

The second important source for information on major crimes comes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), which surveys prisoners and supplements responses with administrative records on citizenship status.⁹

The Cato Institute identified illegal immigrant prisoners in the Census ACS data, using a statistical technique that rules out likely legal noncitizens. The results indicate that legal and illegal immigrants were significantly less likely to have committed an offense serious enough to be incarcerated in the United States every year from 2010 to 2023. In 2023, illegal immigrants were 50 percent less likely to have committed an offense serious enough to be incarcerated, while legal immigrants were 74 percent less likely. As Figure 1 shows, the rate of incarceration has fallen for all groups since 2019 but has fallen much faster for illegal immigrants than for others.

Although the data still indicate higher rates of incarceration for illegal immigrants than legal immigrants, many illegal immigrants are incarcerated solely for lacking legal status or crossing the border illegally. These are offenses that U.S. citizens and legal immigrants cannot commit. Removing these offenses would nearly eliminate the gap between legal and illegal immigrants. Moreover, the incarcerated illegal population is much easier to determine than the illegal population generally. If the Census ACS data understates the overall illegal population, the illegal immigrant incarceration rate would be even lower than it appears.

A variety of other datasets and surveys confirm the findings that criminality is lower among immigrants, including among young immigrants and children.¹⁰ A Cato Institute analysis of IDENT records showed that DACA applicants are about 85 percent less likely than the general public to have been arrested.¹¹ By contrast, about 30 percent of Americans have been arrested,¹² and about 5 percent will be imprisoned for a crime.¹³

Immigrants’ lower crime rate has been considered a surprising “paradox” because immigrants have various demographic characteristics that correlate with higher crime rates.¹⁴ They have lower levels of education, lower incomes, younger ages, and reside more frequently in higher-crime urban areas. However, immigrants also have a variety of characteristics that make them less likely to commit crimes, including higher rates of fertility, marriage, employment, business creation, and church attendance.¹⁵

Because immigrants commit fewer crimes, they lower the crime rate. When Americans victimize immigrants in their communities, the mere presence of immigrants can prevent an American from becoming a victim. For instance, an Afghan immigrant was killed during a botched carjacking in D.C. last year.¹⁶ There is every reason to believe that had the immigrant not been there, an American would have been killed instead.

Immigration Reduces Crime

Another way to determine whether immigrants are causing more crime is to look at the overall crime rate. The rapid increase in the immigrant population in the 1990s and 2000s—legal and illegal—coincided with a rapid decline in violent crime in the United States. The homicide rate halved from 1990 to 2010, while the immigrant share of the population nearly doubled. In many U.S. cities, the increase was even more significant.

Immigration contributed to the great crime decline. Cities with larger increases in immigrants saw bigger declines in crime in the 1990s.¹⁷ New York City, for instance, saw its homicide rate fall 69 percent from 1990 to 2010.¹⁸ More than a dozen studies have confirmed this negative association between immigration and crime¹⁹ Research on more recent periods has also found an association between higher levels of immigration and lower homicide rates.²⁰

Following the 1990s, the homicide rate remained low until the summer of 2020, when it spiked at a time when immigration—legal and illegal—was at a historic low. The murder rate has fallen since peaking in the second half of 2020. From 2020 to 2024, the immigrant share of the US population increased faster than at any time on record, and homicides fell at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2023. Data from a large subset of cities shows that 2024 has continued the precipitous downward trend in homicides.²¹

To extend this analysis further, I reviewed the number of homicides in 72 major cities where the vast majority of notices to appear in immigration court have been filed for illegal immigrants entering from 2021 to 2024. The figure below compares the number of new immigrants as a share of the city population to the change in homicides in those cities, using the new Real Crime Index that collects data on crime rates directly from local governments.

From January 2021 to June 2024, 83 percent of the 72 cities saw a drop in the city’s homicides measured over the prior six months (which makes sense since the 2020 spike started in mid-2020). Cities with more new immigrants saw somewhat larger declines in homicides, though the relationship is not statistically significant.

Nonetheless, nine of the top 10 cities with the most new immigrants saw declines in murders, and eight of ten saw above-average declines. Salt Lake City was the top city with immigration court filings equaling 16 percent of its population, and its murders fell 53 percent—twice as fast as the national average. Newark and San Bernardino were the next two, with illegal immigrant population increases of more than 10 percent of their populations and murder declines of 35 percent and 76 percent, respectively. Murders in Boston (#10) fell the farthest, 85 percent, from January 2021 to June 2024.

Immigrants also lower the crime rate indirectly. Research published in the Journal of Criminal Justice has shown that just filling abandoned buildings makes residents less likely to commit crimes,²² and immigration is associated with fewer vacancies.²³ Research by economist Jacob Vigdor has shown that immigrants seek out areas where real estate prices are low or falling, which prevents community decay.²⁴ For example, over the last two decades, refugees and asylum seekers entered Buffalo's lower-cost and higher-crime West Side. They took over vacant lots and businesses, and crime fell by 70 percent.²⁵ This pattern has been observed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities.²⁶

Immigrants also bring more businesses to these areas as both consumers and entrepreneurs. Immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than the U.S.-born population,²⁷ and they make up a disproportionate 28 percent of brick-and-mortar “main street” businesses nationwide.²⁸ Immigrants account for about half of all main street businesses in many major metropolitan areas.

Immigrants Help Law Enforcement to Stop Crimes

Immigrants can also stop crimes by helping law enforcement bring criminals to justice. Immigrants are generally more likely to report crimes to police than the US-born population.²⁹ This may be because they trust US institutions more than other US residents.³⁰ A significant source of funding for local police comes from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program. Byrne was a New York City officer killed guarding a Guyanese immigrant who had repeatedly reported criminal activity in New York.³¹ The immigrant then again risked his life to testify against Byrne’s killers.

There are numerous examples of immigrants helping law enforcement stop criminals or prevent crimes. Two international students stopped a sexual assault at Stanford, testifying against the rapist at trial.³² Another immigrant (Patricio Salazar) lost his life stopping a rape in Virginia.³³ A video filmed on the phone of Feidin Santana, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was the basis of a homicide conviction in South Carolina.³⁴  William Ramirez, a Colombian immigrant working boat maintenance in Miami in 2015, drove his van between an officer and an active shooter, saving the officer’s life.³⁵

In New York, two recent asylum seekers from Venezuela stopped a stabbing and held the perpetrator until the NYPD could arrive.³⁶ An illegal immigrant acting as a convenience store nightwatchman stopped a burglary in Texas.³⁷ Another in New Mexico chased down a child abductor, returning a 6-year-old girl to her parents.³⁸ This type of aid is not uncommon. About 100,000 illegal immigrants have obtained legal status through their cooperation with law enforcement over the last decade,³⁹ and local agencies have about 355,000 requests pending for illegal immigrants to receive legal status based on their cooperation with them right now.⁴⁰

Many jurisdictions have created special programs to make it easier for immigrants to report crimes. Nassau County, New York has an Office of Immigrant Affairs that helps immigrant witnesses and victims.⁴¹ Immigrants to New Jersey helped turn around South Paterson, an area once beset by crime and corruption. The Paterson police commissioner pointed to the willingness of immigrant business owners to work with police as one major reason why its crime rate fell.⁴²

Immigrants can also affect the crime rate by becoming members of law enforcement. Over 80,000 immigrants served as detectives and police officers in 2021, and about 350,000 immigrants in protective service roles, including corrections officers, bailiffs, private security, firefighters, and other similar positions.⁴³ Training more police officers is a proven way to reduce crime,⁴⁴ yet many cities find it difficult to fill open jobs. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, for instance, there are 160 officer jobs unfilled.⁴⁵ In 2015, Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson convinced legislators in Tennessee to open police recruitment to noncitizens with military service to help address the shortage, and other departments are opening to immigrants as well.⁴⁶

Because of their lower crime rate, immigrants are less costly to police than the US-born population. Looking at the cost of incarceration, felony courts, and felony policing, noncitizen immigrants impose law enforcement costs per capita of about $350 compared to $528—34 percent lower.⁴⁷ This compares with tax revenues of $8,147 per person. The average noncitizen contributed about $80 billion more in taxes than they imposed in state and local costs in 2023.

Mass Deportation Will Not Increase Security.

A policy of mass deportation would undermine public safety in three ways:

1. Mass deportation would remove a population less likely to commit serious crimes, increasing crime and victimization rates for the US population.
2. Mass deportation would undermine collaboration between immigrants and law enforcement in targeting serious criminals.⁴⁸
3. Mass deportation would deprioritize serious noncitizen offenders for removal by not requiring agents to target nonserious offenders.

Immigrants have just as much of a stake in safe communities as Americans. Immigrants do not want thieves, rapists, and murderers free in their neighborhoods. When immigrants do commit crimes, their victims are usually other immigrants.⁴⁹ When people say, “If mass deportation was carried out, this crime would never have happened,” it is usually wrong. The crime would have just happened in their home country because mass deportation would deport both the victim and the perpetrator.⁵⁰ Mass deportation means deporting victims of crimes.

Policies that indiscriminately target reduce the already higher-than-average cooperation among immigrants with police.⁵¹ If we want to root out the bad apples, we should want to create policies that make it easier for immigrants to cooperate with law enforcement. That means providing a path to legal status for law-abiding immigrants and assuring that future immigrants can legally enter and reside in this country.

One negative side effect of attempting mass deportation is that it encourages cities with large immigrant populations to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. In 2017, for instance, New York City responded to the Trump administration’s mass deportation promises by banning any communication between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.⁵² Other cities adopted similarly extreme policies.

Throughout the last four years, the Biden administration has attempted to restore trust between those cities and ICE⁵³ and has had several successes. Baltimore and Montgomery County in Maryland now notify ICE before releasing serious criminals who are in the country illegally.⁵⁴ The New York City mayor has also come out in favor of reversing the categorical ban on communication.⁵⁵

Mass Deportation Deprioritizes Serious Offenders

On his first week in office in 2017, President Trump removed requirements for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target only recent border crossers and public safety threats. In response, ICE doubled arrests of noncriminals, including pizza delivery drivers, domestic violence victims, and spouses of U.S. citizens.⁵⁶

President Biden reversed this decision to deprioritize criminals. As the figure below shows, the Trump administration released more than twice as many convicted criminals from custody as the Biden administration. These releases included numerous individuals convicted of violent felonies.⁵⁷ The Biden administration has also reduced the percentage of criminals released. Matt Elliston, Director of ICE's Baltimore Field Office, told CBS News this year that “it doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that [with no criminal history] when we have other felons to go out and get today. We use immigration law to enhance public safety.”⁵⁸

At the border, Border Patrol officials under President Trump separated children from their parents by targeting prosecutions against parents. They only ever prosecuted 32 percent of crossers at most, allowing numerous adults without children to avoid prosecution to prioritize locking up parents.⁵⁹ They deliberately targeted children. The courts found this policy of targeting children to be unconstitutional.⁶⁰ Worse still, U.S. attorneys reported that “sex offenders were released” to make room for prosecuting parents with children.⁶¹ The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General explained:

Because DHS had no way to track separated children, it could not reunite them with their parents after prosecution.⁶³ It wasted enormous resources undertaking the tedious process of identifying separated family units under court order. As it separated families for crossing illegally, it blocked asylum-seeking families from entering legally, imposing more work on the entire agency.⁶⁴ The policy also failed in its goal of ending the release of asylum-seeking families into the United States.⁶⁵

ICE ultimately replaced family separation with the Title 42 expulsion to Mexico policy in 2020. Although justified as a public health measure, the actual purpose of the Title 42 policy was to ban asylum and mass expel all crossers to Mexico. This meant that Border Patrol no longer singled out criminals for prosecution, detention, and deportation to their home cities, instead returning them immediately to the other side of the border with asylum-seeking families. This policy deterred families from crossing, but not criminals. Instead, it reversed a decade of progress in deterring criminals from crossing, causing an eightfold increase in criminal arrests from February 2020 to December 2020.⁶⁶

During Title 42, criminals who were crossing illegally could hide amongst many other people who would have turned themselves in to seek asylum but instead had to try to sneak in. As a result, Title 42 led to a sixfold increase in “known gotaways” or successful evasions of Border Patrol recorded through border surveillance. When President Biden ended the Title 42 policy, gotaways fell by 80 percent.⁶⁷ Biden’s action was the most significant improvement in border security in decades.

Immigrants aren’t responsible for fentanyl deaths.

Immigrants are also not responsible for fentanyl trafficking. Fentanyl consumers fund fentanyl trafficking, and nearly 99 percent of the users are U.S. citizens.⁶⁸ It is not surprising that research has shown that “increases in immigration are associated with significantly lower homicide and lower overdose death rates overall and across substance type.”⁶⁹ U.S. citizens are also the primary smugglers of fentanyl. In 2023, at southwest border courts, U.S. citizens accounted for 80 percent of fentanyl traffickers.⁷⁰ The same year, they accounted for 80 percent of the individuals stopped with fentanyl. Cartels employ U.S. citizen traffickers because smuggling is significantly easier at ports of entry than between them, and U.S. citizens have legal access to the United States and are subject to less scrutiny at ports of entry.

For this reason, from fiscal year 2019 to June 2023, 93 percent of fentanyl seizures by CBP have occurred at ports of entry or vehicle checkpoints, not along illegal migration routes.⁷¹ The following graph displays the available data on seizure location for fiscal year 2023. About 96 percent was seized from vehicles at checkpoints, traffic stops, or ports of entry, while one-half of a percent was seized on people carrying the drug over the border.

Although CBP’s data does not include the fentanyl that escapes their detection—both at ports and between them—CBP’s seizures provide a sample to estimate the rate at which people who evade detection are carrying fentanyl. As of June 2023, Border Patrol had arrested about 9,000 people for every single event where fentanyl was seized at a location away from vehicle checkpoints. The people who are crossing between ports of entry are primarily seeking safety and opportunity, not smuggling fentanyl.

CBP has not estimated the quantity of fentanyl successfully smuggled through ports of entry, but for several years, it has calculated the probability of seizure for cocaine at ports of entry. In 2020, CBP estimated that it seized just 2 percent of the cocaine entering the country at ports.⁷² Given its potency, significant amounts of fentanyl are even easier to conceal than cocaine. By contrast, CBP estimates that it interdicts a majority of the people crossing the border illegally.⁷³ Thus, it is more than 90 percent easier to enter the country legally with hard drugs than cross the border illegally with them.

Border Patrol also does not seize any more fentanyl when arrests fall. Notably, despite a 42 percent drop in arrests in January 2023, Border Patrol seized almost no fentanyl (just 4 pounds) not at vehicle stops or checkpoints, the same amount as the prior month.⁷⁴ In June 2023, arrests again fell 42 percent, and the amount of fentanyl seized by Border Patrol not at checkpoints went down 67 percent.⁷⁵/​p>

Qualitative assessments based on law enforcement intelligence also indicate that trafficking organizations understand that hard drugs are more easily smuggled through ports. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) National Drug Threat Assessment 2021 has said drug traffickers “exploit major highway routes for transportation, and the most common method employed involves smuggling illicit drugs through U.S. POEs in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor-trailers.”⁷⁶ DEA testified that its investigations have found that “the vast majority of fentanyl is coming in the ports of entry.”⁷⁷ CBP and other agencies have made similar assessments.⁷⁸ It is precisely because these ports of entry are both scarce and incredibly valuable that cartels war for control over them.⁷⁹

The reasons for the ease at which drugs enter through ports are multifaceted. Only as much as 17 percent of commercial trucks and 2 percent of passenger vehicles are scanned for any drugs.⁸⁰ CBP reports of drug interdiction arrests indicate that it is most often the driver’s behavior that tips off agents to conduct a search, meaning that interdiction is dependent on a factor almost entirely outside of the agency’s control.⁸¹ The motivation for traffickers to innovate to evade detection is much stronger than the motivation to innovate to detect drugs crossing the border, which results in increasingly sophisticated smuggling techniques that quickly defeat interdiction efforts.

Even when a drug is easier to detect, the massive difference between the cost of production abroad and its value in the United States means that trafficking organizations can respond to greater interdiction simply by increasing production and smuggling more. From 2003 to 2009, for instance, Border Patrol more than doubled its staffing and built hundreds of miles of fences. As a result, Border Patrol marijuana seizures doubled, but cartels smuggled more to compensate, and the effort made no difference to the availability of Mexican marijuana in the United States.⁸² In fact, the effort backfired. During the Border Patrol’s hiring surge, the potency of marijuana increased by 37 percent.⁸³

Fentanyl trafficking itself developed as a border-evasion measure to supply the market for heroin and other opioids. It initially had little natural demand because the fentanyl experience is so fundamentally different from that of heroin.⁸⁴ But fentanyl has 50 times the potency of heroin, which means that the same weight can supply 50 times as many consumers, creating a massive economic incentive for smugglers to prefer it to heroin.

“Closing the border” increased fentanyl deaths.

Despite fentanyl’s built-in economic advantage, it took the massive restriction on imports and travel during the pandemic—particularly the U.S. policy of limiting travel with Mexico—to force U.S.-Mexico border traffickers to shift from heroin to fentanyl. Within two months of the pandemic, fentanyl seizures overtook heroin by weight, and by the time the restrictions were lifted, fentanyl accounted for over 90 percent of the seizures.

Tragically, the shift toward fentanyl and away from heroin caused a spike in fentanyl deaths. From 2019 to 2021, fentanyl deaths nearly doubled as trade and travel were restricted with Mexico. Unfortunately, additional efforts to restrict the trade in fentanyl will likewise backfire. There are already synthetic opioids many times more potent than fentanyl that cartels could switch toward if fentanyl trafficking becomes more difficult. For instance, the Tennessee Department of Health reported a fourfold increase in deaths in 2021 from Nitazenes—synthetic opioids 10 to 20 times more potent than fentanyl.⁸⁵

This process of enforcement increasing the potency of prohibited items is called the “Iron Law of Prohibition.” It occurred under Alcohol Prohibition when liquor dominated wine and beer, and it has repeatedly played out under drug prohibition: crack cocaine as a substitute for powdered cocaine, heroin as a substitute for prescription drugs, and fentanyl as a substitute for heroin. To stop drug deaths, policymakers must focus on demand, not supply.

Legal immigration increases security.

Legal immigration would free law enforcement to focus exclusively on public safety threats. ICE should remove criminals, and Border Patrol should block their reentry. Despite the positive economic and social benefits of immigration, Congress’s caps on legal permanent immigration will block about 97 percent of applicants in 2024—just 3 percent of applicants will receive a green card.⁸⁶ This restrictive system is the primary cause of illegal immigration, which diverts law enforcement resources away from serious threats to the country. America is just concluding a century of immigration restrictions that replaced America’s traditional system of legal immigration.

Currently, the United States has a legal immigration rate—the number of new permanent residents as a percentage of its population—of just 0.3 percent. As Figure 13 shows, this rate was dramatically lower than in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was consistently two to three times higher.

Legal immigration improves security by directing people to enter through a process in which they are vetted and screened before they enter. This is one reason why the legal immigrant incarceration rate is so low. DHS has made some efforts to increase the ability to vet people before they enter by creating parole sponsorship processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Unfortunately, the process’s low cap of 30,000 per month and the uncertainty about its long-term future have undermined its effectiveness. Parole is only a temporary status, which may be canceled at any time.

Nonetheless, the process has still greatly increased legality among the four targeted countries. In March 2024, a majority of entries by all four nationalities were lawful. Cuban and Haitian illegal immigration has greatly diminished, with 96 percent of Cuban and 99 percent of Haitian entries being lawful. This processing change has given Border Patrol more resources to focus on other crossers.

Congress should make the parole sponsorship programs permanent, allow parolees to obtain permanent status, and require DHS to expand the process to other nationalities with a high likelihood of crossing illegally. These reforms would benefit the country’s security while removing illegality and chaos from the border.

Conclusion

People who commit crimes that violate the rights of others should be punished, including through deportation if they are not citizens of the United States. However, each person should be treated equally. In America, we believe in individual accountability. We say, “You do the crime, you do the time.” We don’t lock up their families for what their relatives do. We don’t target entire races, religions, or ethnicities. We don’t ban childbirth for Americans just because they have higher rates of crime.

When a terrible crime occurs, justice demands that the person who committed it pays. Blaming whatever category an individual can fit into is not justice. It is unjust. Everyone knows this when the category is one they fit into or sympathize with, but it’s quite easy to forget when it’s not. It’s one reason to have strong limits on power to force the government to only target those who violate others’ rights.

It is also just bad policy to waste law enforcement resources going after entire races or categories of people. It’s common sense to try to stop violence by catching and prosecuting violent criminals. Our justifiable fear of criminality should not cause us to forget the upside of people who, despite their flaws, are the basis of the greatest economy and society in the world. It is exactly because of this fact that so many people want to come to this country. We should create ways for them to do so legally.