While the end of Title 42 didn’t lead to the border rises some expected, America still faces an immigration crisis, with a backlog of nearly 1.6 million asylum applications. Officials approved more than migrants across the border

five 5

million times from February 2021 to March this year, the highest number of arrests in decades.

Border stress and asylum backlogs are not new. But instead of learning from past generations’ policies, politicians hunt for gimmicks, such as bringing migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’s home or imposing cheap immigration laws that don’t stand a chance.

To form a functionally legal immigration system, one place both sides may want to look is history.

A major immigration spike in the US came after the end of World War II when we faced a labor shortage similar to today. In 1954, more than 1 million people were stopped at the border. In response, immigration authorities expanded and accelerated legal routes for migrants through a guest worker system known as the bracero program.

Under the program, immigration authorities questioned migrants at the border and admitted them as guest workers. Rather than placing a hard numerical limit on migration, the program admitted people based on the needs of the U.S. economy, with California receiving the most workers of the 24 participating states.

Joseph Swing, who was head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the time, said that if there is an employer who cannot get legal employment, he has to let either the Department of Labor or the Immigration Department know, and we’ll see him get it. The program raised more than four 4 million braceros (so named after a Spanish term to describe workers who mainly work with their arms). Border detentions fell

by

by 96% between 1953 and 1959.

But by the end of 1964, after problems with implementation, Congress let the bracero program expire. Some participating employers discriminated against and mistreated the employees. While the program promised workers wage protection and basic housing, employers often paid late or not at all and provided only substandard housing.

The end of the bracero program largely marked the collapse of a functioning immigration system. Border Patrol detentions increased again from 35,000 to nearly 617,000 in 1974. We never replaced the program with a system to create viable legal immigration routes that could begin to meet the needs of people arriving at the border, or the needs of our labor market. And ending the program has not improved wages for US-born workers.

We have tried other reforms. A bipartisan coalition pushed through the Comprehensive Immigration Act of 1986. Most importantly, the law provided a path to legal residency and opportunities for nearly 3 million migrants entering the country

before before

1982. But this one-time piece of legislation didn’t completely solve our demand for labor, and by the 1990s we were in another crisis. As is the case today, applying for asylum was the most accessible legal mechanism for migrants at the border to remain in the country. A wave of asylum cases overwhelmed the system, creating a huge backlog.

To address this, immigration authorities under the Clinton administration dramatically increased funding for immigration courts, doubled immigration judges, and added more asylum officers. The changes allowed the courts to meet a six-month deadline for asylum cases and allowed the system as a whole to separate work permits from asylum applications. These factors reduced the number of asylum applications from over 147,000 in 1995 to 46,000 in 2003. This in turn reduced the number of border crossings.

None of these past solutions were perfect. The bracero program remains controversial largely because of the working conditions it promoted. The Immigration Reform Act of 1986, while important, was a one-off legalization that underestimated the labor and family demands that continually push migrants to cross our borders. The reforms in the 1990s were criticized for being too harsh on some legitimate asylum seekers and relying too much on deportation.

But some of the principles underlying each approach still apply. Right now we have a system that ridiculously only allows 140,000 work-based visas a year in a country with millions of job openings.

We should look at our current temporary work visas, which are essentially small-scale bracero programs, and stop using hard quotas, instead linking admissions to current economic conditions, as we did before. We can also improve this approach by better protecting migrants by making it easier for them to change employers and by applying for permanent residence themselves after working for a number of years. This would give migrants the kind of influence over their employers that the original bracero participants never had.

As for our asylum system, we need to rebuild the immigration courts to handle the current workload while creating more legal pathways to work permits in addition to applying for asylum and waiting at least 150 days for a resolution (after which you can apply for a work permit).

We could make these changes with the same bipartisan approach that created the 1986 bill,

now

aimed at providing recurring rather than one-off legal pathways for permanent residence.

The policy challenges of immigration will not be resolved overnight. But the past teaches us that the system is not unmanageable.

Christopher M. Richardson is an immigration attorney, former U.S. diplomat, and director of BDV Solutions, an immigration consulting firm.