by Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

March 7, 2024

As a father of two daughters, I look at photographs of Laken Riley and her family and I feel grief. I feel anger. It’s hard to imagine losing a child like that, the victim in what appears to be a random, brutal murder. 

It doesn’t help any that the man charged in Riley’s death, Jose Ibarra, is being used to feed a narrative of rampaging hordes of criminals flooding across our nation’s southern border, a narrative that is as false as it is dangerous.

We do have a serious border issue. With jobs plentiful and unemployment at record low levels, a booming economy is drawing desperate people northward, overwhelming the resources available to stop them. We’re also trying to deal with that influx under immigration laws that haven’t been updated in a generation thanks to the ongoing political stalemate in Washington.

Overall, though, violent crime is dropping significantly from COVID-era highs, and study after study has confirmed that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit less crime than natural-born U.S. citizens. In one study published by the National Academy of Sciences, for example, researchers dug into six years of arrest records compiled by the Texas Department of Public Safety. 

Their conclusion?

“We find that undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”

Again, that isn’t meant as an argument against working to bolster our southern border and revamping immigration policy. It’s just a reminder that facts matter, and that undocumented immigrants aren’t “poisoning the blood of our nation,” as Donald Trump has put it.

Based on what we know so far, Ibarra is a migrant from Venezuela who fled that country’s socialist dictatorship, and has been in the United States since 2022 as an applicant for asylum. Under longstanding federal law, people who manage to enter the United States have the right to seek asylum if they claim persecution in their country of origin. 

However, the system created to judge whether such claims of persecution are valid has been overwhelmed. The backlog of unprocessed asylum cases is roughly three million and growing quickly, and it now takes five to seven years to either grant or deny such claims. Even asylum applicants arrested for minor crimes, as Ibarra had been, are rarely deported because federal authorities lack the resources and manpower to do so. They have more important things to do.

That’s the system that allowed Ibarra to remain in the United States. If the murder charges against him are valid, that’s the system that failed Laken Riley and her family, with tragic consequences.

So, given what we know about Ibarra’s background in particular and about the immigration system in general, how could we try to address the problem?

Well, what if we added 100 immigration-judge teams, to begin to address the backlog of asylum claims and remove migrants with unfounded claims more quickly? 

We currently have 1,000 asylum officers on staff; what if we hired more than 4,000 additional asylum officers, while significantly increasing their authority to make quick decisions on who goes and who stays? 

We know that Ibarra was released by immigration officials because they had no place to detain him: What if we also added 10,000 detention beds, which are generally used to house single males, while also tightening restrictions for asylum, meaning far fewer would qualify?

We had the chance to find out. The bipartisan Senate immigration bill, killed at birth at Trump’s demand, would have done all that and much more. Overall, the goal of such changes – negotiated by Republicans and Democrats – was to shrink the time needed to process asylum claims from the current five to seven years down to six months. 

Instead, at Trump’s demand, Congress is doing nothing.

If you’re living in Venezuela, Nicaragua or other chaotic countries, think about what that would have done to your incentive structure. Today, you might be willing to march through jungles and deserts and pay all your savings to the cartels to smuggle you into the United States, because you know you will get to live here for five to seven years before your asylum application is even adjudicated. 

But if you know you’re only going to get six months in the U.S., if you know that you might be detained that entire time and that your application is probably going to be denied in the end and you’ll be quickly shipped back home, your cost-benefit analysis changes. (The Senate bill would also have appropriated money to greatly increase the number of air flights deporting illegal immigrants back to their home countries.)

Those are the kind of changes that can make a difference, that can choke off the flow of migrants northward. They would certainly have been far more effective than showboat photo ops on the border or shipping your state’s National Guard off to sit in the Texas desert for months at a time, as a costly public-relations gesture. 

If allowed to come to a vote in the House and Senate, the bipartisan Senate bill would have passed pretty easily.  But as long as certain politicians find it useful to pretend that our immigration problems are some “Deep State conspiracy” intended to steal the country from “real Americans,” rather than a solvable policy challenge, we’re going to continue to get nowhere.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.