The United States, like many developed nations today, is facing population decline within its native born population. Fortunately, lots of people would like to immigrate here. Many of them have skills we need, such as nursing skills for an aging population and agricultural workers for our farms. Some have computer and other skills for higher level jobs.
Meanwhile, paths for legal immigration are narrow. The desire to immigrate, with no meaningful legal line to join for many, feeds irregular migration, leading to its control by gangs and sometimes drug dealers.
“States that focus on border restrictions, mass deportations, or the abrogation of legal protections for asylum seekers will fail to solve the problem. They will simply redirect it while creating a new host of problems that will, in the long term, feed the problem rather than solve it. They will empower criminal networks and black markets while leaving their own economies worse off. The system will continue to decay.” (“Migration Can Work for All; A plan for Replacing a Broken Global System,” Amy Pope, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2025.)
Our current system feeds irregular migration, as family members migrate irregularly to stay with those already in the U.S. “That so many migrants who are undocumented find jobs in the informal markets of their destination countries signals an imbalance between legal immigration pathways and economic need . . .”
The author suggests one approach is for countries with labor shortages, such as the United States, to set up programs within the refugee sending countries to train would be immigrants for jobs needed in the receiving country. This would include preparing them for legal migration.
If reasonable pathways to migration are in place, countries will have more justification for shutting down the illegal ones. The idea is not to stop migration but to channel it, then work to shut down illegal migration traffic.
Migration from places with less possibility for improving one’s life to ones of greater possibility has been the norm since civilization began. Better to work with it for good.