Immigration law in the United States has stayed stagnant for decades. The Trump administration has turned to a flurry of executive orders to conduct much of its immigration enforcement actions.
A floating buoy border wall is being deployed along a stretch of the Rio Grande, and physical border barriers are planned across Texas, from Laredo to the Big Bend Region.
The article “More than borders: Smart foreign policy to manage migration” argues that foreign policy — not just short-term executive orders — can help play a key role in addressing the root causes of illegal immigration.
Author Theresa Cardinal Brown, Immigration Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, said border security and immigration policy in the U.S. is more generally seen as a domestic matter.
“What the paper is arguing is that that’s no longer sufficient,” she said. “We need to think about our border not as a line, so much as a process. What can we do to help work with other countries to manage migration before it reaches our border?”
Brown said different presidential administrations have used either coercion — like tariffs or withholding aid — or cooperation to help mitigate migration.
“Both are legitimate policy tools … but at the end of the day, it’s about figuring out how we can best align our interests in managing migration with other countries’ interests and in some ways, helping other countries understand that managing migration is in their interests,” Brown said.
Read the report below:
