Not only is this a real headline from The New York Times, but this is a real post from Homeland Security:
Extreme levels of based from DHS!
However, I do like the way this op-ed opens:
The first step in responding to a crisis is to acknowledge it exists. The surge in illegal crossings at our southern border during the first three years of Joe Biden's presidency was, by any reasonable definition, a crisis. The failure to acknowledge this reality and take timely action to try to resolve it cost Democrats a great deal of trust with American voters and contributed to President Trump's return to the White House.
By the way, this was written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Biden administration official who worked on border and immigration policy at both DHS and the White House.
Here's what he learned during his time with the Biden administration:
I learned that the border crisis is, to a large extent, an asylum crisis: Our broken immigration laws have increasingly incentivized economic migrants to claim that they fear persecution in order to start a lengthy administrative process that allows them to remain in the United States and work. The political left typically refers to these immigrants as asylum seekers, because our laws allow them to make those claims. Many on the political right refer to them as criminals, because, they often say, crossing the border without documentation is a crime.
The fact that both views have at least some merit shows the dysfunction in our immigration laws.
And his solution?
I bet you can guess by now ...
Congress.
Only Congress can fix those laws, and until its members — from both parties — take action, the challenges at our border will continue.
...
The bipartisan bill unveiled last year by Senators James Lankford, Chris Murphy and Kyrsten Sinema would have been a good start. It would have streamlined the asylum process at the border, provided an emergency authority to shut the border down during surges and added thousands of personnel, including administrative judges. Knowing that passage of the bill would have been perceived as an election-year win for Democrats, Mr. Trump successfully pressured congressional Republicans to kill it.
...
Congress should create an immigration system that is most generous to those who are willing to wait and use significantly expanded pathways to come here and work and that is least generous to those who cross illegally.
So here's how to fix our immigration system: Let Congress do it and hope that they come up with something that works.
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