Why letting in more refugees could work for Biden

But the reverse could be true, immigration advocates say. Increasing the number of refugees allowed into the country—and adding the resources to make that happen—is an important part of reducing the number of people who decide to come unlawfully to America’s borders in the long term, they say. “If you are worried that letting people in is going to be a political problem, so you set the caps low, all that is going to do is create disincentives to legal pathways to immigration,” says Jess Morales Rocketto, co-chair of Families Belong Together, a campaign to end the separation of families by immigration proceedings. “We should be doing everything we can to increase legal pathways.” In fact, raising the number of refugees the U.S. will accept was already part of a broader playbook to open more legal avenues for migration that Biden’s team developed in the months before he took office, according to two people who worked on the transition team. If more people are offered a legal avenue to come to the U.S., more people will board a plane to get here instead of trying to walk across the border, the argument goes. To that end, the Biden Administration is considering standing up centers in Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where people can apply for legal avenues to reach the U.S., through agricultural and non-agricultural work visas, lodge refugee claims and, if the Administration decides, grant immigration parole status to allow for family members to join other family in the U.S., as has been done for family members from Cuba and Haiti in the past.