Biden Open-Door Policy: Some Facts and Historical Context

The fact is that when Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 and said Mexico was "not sending their best," the surge of low-skill immigration from Mexico, which lasted from 1982 until the mortgage security crisis in 2007, was already over. We were in the midst of a pause in mass immigration, something like the pause that occurred after the 1924 Immigration Act, which limited immigration beyond western and northern Europe.

Immigration restrictionists say that earlier pause allowed or furthered assimilation of the huge 1892-1914 Ellis Island surge of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The post-2007 pause seems to have facilitated the assimilation of legal Latin immigrants, as evidenced by, among other things, increased willingness to vote Republican, which I noted in a recent column.

That 1982-2007 immigration surge may have occurred in response to the labor market's low supply of low-skill workers due to reduced workforce participation by low-skill black and white Americans. The argument then made was that it was too much to expect urban ghetto residents to travel a dozen miles to new suburban workplaces. But Mexican immigrants proved willing to travel 1,200 miles and more for those jobs.

There's an echo here of the 75 years after the Civil War, when few black or white Southerners were willing to move to the higher-wage but culturally hostile North. Instead, the rapidly expanding number of jobs in garment sweatshops in Manhattan and steel mills along the Monongahela and Mahoning rivers were filled by Ellis Island immigrants from Eastern Europe and southern Italy.

Are the million-plus illegal immigrants that the Biden administration has let into the country, with some told to report for court hearings in 2031, filling a gap not filled by American workers? Or, as seems more likely, is America getting a million-plus low-skill residents who will be stuck in illegal status indefinitely?

There's little evidence the Biden administration ever pondered such questions in its haste to overturn the policies of the Evil Orange Man and slam the border wide open.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.