In current negotiations on Capitol Hill, Republicans have been unwilling to pass aid for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan without making big border changes that would curb illegal immigration to the United States. Democratic leaders have said they are open to the border talks but warned Republicans about taking too hard a line. Debates in the Senate have focused on exactly what new border measures could be implemented. As news reports suggested that these discussions might lead to potentially harmful immigration consequences, a group of Democratic senators decided to take a public stand to guard against where the talks could lead. They issued a statement expressing their concerns.

"As negotiations surrounding the supplemental aid package progress, we are concerned about reports of harmful changes to our asylum system that will potentially deny life saving humanitarian protection for vulnerable people, including children, and fail to deliver any meaningful improvement to the situation at the border."

The group of senators includes prominent Democratic figures like U.S. Senators Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, Bob Menendez and Elizabeth Warren. They highlighted a critical point that often gets overshadowed in these discussions, "We remain committed to working in good faith to modernize our outdated immigration system on a bipartisan basis and through a deliberative process. We cannot truly secure our border and help American communities without increasing lawful pathways for migration and legalizing long-time undocumented immigrants who put food on our tables, care for our elderly, and form the fabric of our communities."

The harmful proposals they are concerned about include tightening the asylum standard for individuals initially screened at the border, stripping humanitarian parole authority from the President, and reviving a version of the 2019 Trump-era transit ban.

Among the Republican Senators engaged in the negotiations are Senators Thom Tillis, Tom Cotton, James Lankford, and Lindsey Graham. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an independent senator, is also involved. Ultimately, however, the fate of any border deal will hinge on House Speaker Mike Johnson not deserting his GOP counterparts across the Rotunda by bringing any Senate proposal to a vote in the House. That is the big step that will make or break the efforts.

As to the question of exactly what kind of measures are needed to secure the southern border, Congressional leaders would be wise to consider the work of Dutch geographer Hein de Haas.

In a groundbreaking study spanning two decades, Hein de Haas, affiliated with the universities of Oxford and Amsterdam's International Migration Institute, challenged prevailing narratives surrounding global migration and, for our purposes, migration to the United States. De Haas's Determinants of International Migration project revealed a striking finding: there is no migration crisis. Over the past six decades, global immigration levels, accounting for approximately 3 percent of the world's population residing in countries they weren't born in, have remained remarkably stable. Likewise, refugee flight has maintained a steady rate of about 0.3 percent of the global population. What De Haas's research compellingly demonstrated about the crisis on the southern border is that rather than mitigating the issue, these border security measures have exacerbated the challenges at the border, rather than solving them.

More concretely, the measures implemented by the U.S. government by way of a shift in policy between the 1970s and 1990s closed off limited, controlled migration options that historically allowed smaller numbers of people to enter the U.S. for work or asylum. Instead of working with the controlled migration options, the new measures compelled millions of migrants fleeing from intolerable conditions in their home countries to opt for more dangerous and unmonitored migration routes, necessitating longer journeys to evade legal authorities.

To effectively address the situation, more focus is needed on addressing the economic factors and labor demand that drive migration. Abolishing humanitarian parole and restricting asylum is hardly the answer to the southern border problem. Instead, the key policy goals should be to create and restore reasonable ways for migrants to come to America, including ways to take up temporary and seasonal jobs that need to be filled. In addition, legislators need to introduce measures that reduce the economic incentives attracting migrants here by addressing the political, social and economic conditions abroad that cause migrants to flee from there. Instead of just focusing on punishing those who do not abide by the immigration laws, America needs to make it more attractive for migrants to comply with those laws, including implementing cross border temporary work options and programs that help to link deserving migrants to U.S. sponsors who want to help them come and contribute to the country.