No. of Recommendations: 4
I think it might be safe to say most ideas have been tried by now and the best we can do without legislation is tighten up where it's feasible.
You could do a lot with more resources.
While most of the criticism lobbied at Biden and Mayorkas is unjustified, there is some blame to be laid at their feet. And that's in not diagnosing the problem caused by the mismatch between our current border controls and the changing demographics of immigrants and in not requesting additional resources to deal with that mismatch as soon as it started happening.
Early on (say, 2021), the Administration should have recognized that their resources for dealing with asylum requests were insufficient. A Mexican national who has is caught on the U.S. side of the border (and who doesn't claim asylum) can be very quickly removed to the other side of the border, but a national from any other country (and claiming asylum) can't be. So the change in composition of border encounters meant that those encounters couldn't be handled through the same processes. A significant increase in funding for immigration processing staff (officers and judges) and detention facilities could have kept the population of people waiting for hearings much more manageable.
Had Mayorkas - and perhaps Biden himself - been pounding the table and demanding more resources for asylee processing from the get-go, they could have avoided this pickle. Certainly it would have mitigated the political damage whether they got the funds or not; but if they had been successful in getting the resources, they could have substantially avoided the absolute number of asylees hanging out in the U.S. waiting for hearings. We had a system set up for tens of thousands of asylum applications per year, not hundreds of thousands of applications. It is a valid criticism to point out that the Administration chose not to demand a significant increase in resources - partially because it wasn't something they wanted to spend political capital on, and partially because they politically didn't want to admit that there was a problem down at the border. And maybe a little bit due to them just being slow to recognize a problem and thinking (hoping) that it will pass without the need for major action, reminiscent a bit of "Team Transitory" inflation policy which has also inflicted lasting political damage.
