Life on the US-Mexico border is chaotic. An immigration scholar explains why − and it’s not for the reasons that some GOP lawmakers claim

By William McCorkle, College of Charleston

As debate over U.S. immigration policy heats up during the 2024 presidential campaign, separating fact from fiction on the U.S.-Mexico border becomes increasingly difficult.

In May 2023, shortly after the end of a public health restriction that allowed U.S. officials to immediately expel asylum-seekers, a team of academic and humanitarian aide colleagues and I went to the Mexican city of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from the banks of Brownsville, Texas.

At the time, we didn’t encounter the “invasion at the border” that conservative lawmakers such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott predicted would happen once the COVID-19 restrictions – officially known as Title 42  – expired.

From what we learned, the actual rush of thousands of people across the border occurred in the days before Title 42 was lifted on May 11, 2023. Many migrants told us they saw it as their last chance to cross the U.S. border.

Most people we talked to were waiting in overcrowded, temporary camps in Mexico. They feared that if they tried to cross into the U.S., they would lose their opportunity to seek asylum and would be deported under restrictive polices unveiled during the Biden administration.

The situation at the border has constantly changed ever since. In June 2024, for instance, President Joe Biden signed an executive order limiting the number of asylum seekers at the border to no more than a weekly average of 2,500 migrants. The new restrictions would be lifted once that weekly average dropped to 1,500.

The crackdown came shortly after the election of Mexico’s first female president Claudia Sheinbaum whose policies on immigration remain largely unknown.

But the brief period when Title 42 ended is a perfect illustration of the differences between right-wing hysteria and the realities on the ground.

The evolution of US border policy

Since the fall of 2019, I have been working at the Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros – across from McAllen and Brownsville, Texas.

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