‘Higher visibility’: How US immigration dynamics are shifting

The humanitarian crisis on the U.S. southern border is a political crisis for President Joe Biden. Cities receiving migrants, meanwhile, face a crisis of logistics. 

From El Paso to Denver to New York, elected officials are increasingly calling for more federal assistance to help manage a large number of arrivals. “The absence of federal support to significantly defray state and local costs, long waits for migrants to work legally, and large numbers arriving without connections in the country have combined to create an inordinate burden” for several cities, concludes a recent article by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. 

Doris Meissner, director of the institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, recently shared more on the issue in a telephone interview with the Monitor. She has watched the border transform since the 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, she served