The Border Is “Sealed.” So What?
Asylum in America is all but over. That isn’t the end of the immigration story. It’s the start of the chapter nobody campaigned on.
In early May, Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, stood in front of a Phoenix convention hall full of vendors hoping to sell the government surveillance gear and told them the country now has the most secure border in its history. He thanked the Border Patrol, and, of course, he thanked the president. By the metrics he cares about, it was a fair boast. A week later, The Economist laid the numbers out under a blunt headline: “Asylum in America is all but over, and it may never come back.”
Securing the border was always the easy promise. It’s measurable, it photographs well, and it ends conveniently right before anyone has to answer the next question: now that the workers are gone, who does the work?
The asylum system had become a loophole. It was never designed to handle the surge of applicants that arrived since the COVID pandemic. For many migrants, it was a way to get into the country and work for a while since all other routes were closed. Which only underscores the need to reform the entire immigration system. People weren’t crossing the desert to exploit a humanitarian technicality. They came because there were jobs on this side and no legal door to walk through. Asylum became the door because we refuse to build a real one.
Most of the people showing up at the border would come the legal way if a legal way existed. And we have proof that creating that legal way works. When the U.S. expanded the H-2A visa for Mexican farmworkers, illegal crossings from Mexico fell. Enforcement and legal pathways aren’t opposites—they’re complements. Seal the border without opening a door and you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just hidden it behind concertina wire.
The problem that isn’t going anywhere
Immigration is not going away, no matter how hard the crackdown. The American birth rate is falling. The workforce is aging. The jobs in construction, agriculture, hospitality, and health care still need filling, and the arithmetic of who’s available to fill them only gets worse from here. When the border is finally declared secure, the economic forces that drove people across it will still be there. The system that failed to accommodate them will still be broken. We’ll just have spent a fortune pretending otherwise.
So why does a policy that doesn’t touch the underlying problem stay so popular? Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M, explained it to me several years ago. Fear appeals work, she said. Activate someone’s fight-or-flight response with a credible threat, and they stop evaluating and start reacting. She calls it “amygdala hijacking,” in which the stress response floods out the part of the brain that does the math. That’s why the economic evidence bounces off. The argument was never aimed at the part of us that thinks rationally.
The morning after
Meanwhile, there’s little hope that anything will change or that lawmakers will address the economic issues. Democrats are scarred by the last border surge and are now trying to show they’re tough on border security, essentially allowing their opponents to define the issue. New laws make it easy for states to sue any future president who loosens the screws and limits the number of immigration judges, ensuring backlogs continue. Asylum may not come back even if the politics do. Which means the question my book keeps returning to is no longer hypothetical. When the border is sealed, the workers are gone, and the jobs remain—what then?
The triumphant version of this story ends in Phoenix, with a standing ovation and a blessing for the president. The true version starts the next morning: in a half-staffed kitchen, on a framing crew that can’t make its schedule, in a nursing home down a shift, on a farm watching fruit rot in the field. That’s where the reckoning is. That’s the story that gets overshadowed by political chest-beating.
The question that never gets asked is, if the border’s secure, then what’s next? If the border’s secure, we have an opportunity to rebuild, to create an immigration system from that position of security and turn it into a valuable tool for economic growth.
Of course, our political leaders cling to the theatrics that hijack the public’s collective amygdala and keep them in office. It’s easier than doing the hard work on reform. Just weeks after Homan’s declaration, federal authorities deployed new water barriers along the supposedly secure border. The Trump administration continues double-down on the enforcement-only mindset that defines its myopic immigration policy.
We are told the border is secure. The next question ought to be “now what?” Instead, Congress and the administration seem to be asking a different question: “so what?”
Loren Steffy is the author of the forthcoming Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America’s Economic Advantage, now available for preorder from Stoney Creek Publishing.