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**Hugh** · 21-04-2025, 08:44

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Originally Posted by Pierre

You mean the last US administration didn’t have an open border policy in the South?

The Cato Institute*, a Right-Wing libertarian think-tank, doesn’t think so…

https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didn...part-1-summary

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Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis, Part 1: Summary

During President Joe Biden’s term, Border Patrol arrested an unprecedented number of immigrants who crossed illegally into the United States. Many believe Biden caused this increase in migration by reducing border enforcement. However, data obtained by the Cato Institute through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenges this narrative. In fact, the border crisis began before Biden took office and ended before he left.

From his administration’s first day in January 2021, Biden actually increased border enforcement—arrests, detentions, and removals of border crossers all increased. The prevailing narrative that blames Biden overlooks the real causes of the crisis: America’s robust labor market and bad immigration policies that incentivized illegal entries. However, Trump, not Biden, mostly started those policies. Biden eventually phased out some of them; he increased legal migration, and as the labor market cooled, the problem dissipated.

Summary

The main takeaways are:

- Illegal immigration had already increased to a 21-year high before Biden entered office.
- Biden immediately started increasing expulsions from his first day in office.
- Biden tripled interior detention and increased border detention 12-fold.
- Biden increased air removal flights by 55 percent over 2020 levels.
- Biden negotiated broader expulsion deals with foreign countries than Trump.
- Biden got many foreign countries to carry out crackdowns on illegal and legal migration.
- Biden removed or expelled 3.3 million border crossers—three times as many as Trump.
- Biden even managed to remove a similar percentage of crossers as Trump’s four years.

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About Cato

For more than 40 years, Cato has led the charge for liberty in our nation and around the world. The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates.

Our mission is to keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive for future generations, while moving public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.