Instead of pretending he has a plan to solve the border crisis, President Biden should consider the proposals lawmakers have already put forth.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A fter overseeing an unprecedented two-year border crisis, President Biden implied during his State of the Union address that he finally had a plan to resolve this disaster. But when pressed for further details, Biden’s own officials stressed that “no proposal is under serious consideration.”

Instead of pretending to have a plan in place, Biden should pay attention to the solutions that lawmakers have already rolled out. Last Congress, a group of border-state lawmakers introduced the  Border Solutions Act. If passed, this bill would address one of the border crisis’s major driving forces: the perverse incentives in our asylum system. Because merely receiving an asylum hearing often takes over four years, people can file claims that lack merit and work indefinitely in the U.S. while their case is pending.

The Border Solutions Act would fix this problem by moving the most recent asylum cases to the front of the line during periods when migration surges are most extreme. This “last in, first out” policy would reject and remove applicants with weaker asylum claims more quickly, preventing them from using the typically prolonged adjudication times as a means of staying in the U.S. over an extended period.

By deterring people with otherwise weak claims from applying, a last-in, first-out policy could eventually reduce backlogs for applicants with stronger claims. Research from the Migration Policy Institute found that roughly 90 percent of Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans cited “economics” as their reason for wanting to migrate, while fewer than 10 percent cited “insecurity and violence.” Although Northern Triangle countries no longer represent as large a proportion of new border-crossers, these findings suggest that economic migrants are slowing the process of receiving asylum for people with legitimate claims.

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Many of these weak asylum cases come from people who were given false information about their eligibility to enter the U.S. Some of this can be attributed to local gossip, but it’s also true that smugglers have weaponized the Biden administration’s incoherent messaging and policies in order to sell their services to people who don’t know better. This was an especially prominent driver of the September 2021 migrant crisis, in which numerous Haitian arrivals were deceived by smugglers’ marketing campaigns.

Biden should counter smuggler propaganda by supporting the Border Response Resilience Act, which would require routine government reports about the tactics and propaganda deployed by human smugglers and the perception of American immigration policy among potential migrants. The bill also requires the U.S. government to devise an interagency plan to rapidly expand detention capacity by dispatching facilities and personnel from other agencies during migration surges. Such a plan would keep the government from purchasing detention space on an ad hoc basis at unreasonably exorbitant prices.

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As our asylum process collapses under the weight of unresolved claims, our U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel are being diverted from their routine law-enforcement duties in a vain attempt to hold our system together. During the 2019 asylum-seeker surge, anywhere from 40 percent to 60 percent of our Border Patrol agents were redirected so they could process applicants. This trend has certainly grown worse in recent years, as more parts of our border have become unmanned.

Our sprawling asylum system may also be contributing to today’s fentanyl crisis, given that hundreds of the CBP officers who guard our legal ports of entry are periodically diverted to help handle large flows of families. The thousands of American lives lost from drug overdoses — not to mention the hundreds of thousands of workers who have left the labor force due to synthetic-opioid addiction — are reason enough to get this crisis under control.

Most of CBP’s staffing problems can be ameliorated by regaining control over our asylum system, but Congress must also act immediately to attract CBP personnel. According to an exchange between Representative Nancy Mace and Tucson Border Patrol chief John Modlin during a recent oversight hearing, the process of hiring a Border Patrol agent takes well over a year, and CBP may be facing a staffing shortage of roughly 2,700 agents. Modlin recommended shortening these hiring times by eliminating redundant security clearances for Border Patrol applicants who have already been federally cleared due to their prior service in a different federal agency.

All these solutions are critical for addressing America’s immediate security needs. But over the long term, policy-makers must revamp America’s asylum system so that it’s capable of rapidly adjudicating cases no matter how circumstances change at the border. One idea for achieving this goal is to equip asylum adjudicators with artificial-intelligence technology to help them decide cases at a faster pace. Such technology could in theory streamline the simpler elements of an asylum case while providing adjudicators with additional bandwidth to evaluate the more complex aspects. Figuring out the extent to which automation can assist personnel in reaching asylum decisions will require elaborate risk assessment. But continuing to rely solely on human judgment to decide asylum cases inevitably results in glaringly disparate outcomes in addition to keeping applicants in limbo.

The status quo of our asylum system is untenable. What we need instead is a humanitarian system that resists exploitation while better serving those for whom it was designed. If President Biden actually wants to fix the border crisis, that’s a good place to start.