What will the new year bring for U.S. immigration?

Here’s what my crystal ball predicts:

1: The chaotic situation at the Southern Border will only get worse in 2023. Should the Supreme Court agree to the removal of Title 42, madness will ensue in January. The numbers of immigrants entering will be dramatically higher than the recorded 204,155, crossing over from Mexico in November 2022 alone.  

Thousands more migrants, fleeing a host of issues including climate change, food insecurity, crime, violence and poverty and desperate to enter the U.S., will continue to risk their lives crossing the southern border illegally to find a way in. This will further overwhelm border towns like El Paso and San Antonio and make it more dire in cities far away from the border, including Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago. 

Throwing money at the situation and setting up tent cities in the middle of winter is not the solution. What is needed is an urgent change of how asylum seekers apply for asylum to enter the U.S., but the Republican Congress will be too busy playing the game of retribution and blame to bother about solutions. 

2: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will undoubtedly keep up his insane busing of more migrants crossing the southern border to Democratically run cities. This will further crush those cities’ resources and create more friction between the cities and Washington, D.C. as well as immigrant rights groups. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, gearing up for 2024, will likely add to the fire, much like he did with the Cape Cod flight. No communication and no solutions will be the order of the day.

3: With Republicans set to take over the U.S. Congress, the political football being played with immigrants’ lives is going to reach epic proportions. Both parties will continue to kick the ball down the road, without offering any real solutions, including for Dreamers in the U.S. or the labor crisis, which will continue to keep inflation high. Despite a labor shortage blamed on a slowdown in immigration, especially for agricultural workers, Republicans will have zero interest in any immigration reform, especially one pushed by the Biden administration. 

4: The Biden administration, and especially immigration czar and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, will continue the lackluster attention to the crisis at the U.S.’s southern border and the issue of immigration reform will also only get worse in 2023. President Joe Biden will make his first trip to Mexico as president in January as thousands gather at the Mexican border, living in tents in the winter.

But Biden is sure to stay away from visiting the border as his administration has few solutions on handling the crush of people seeking to enter America. He may drop his hope for reform into the State of the Union, basing the need for it on lowering inflation to please the progressive base—all the while knowing fully well that the House Republicans will do nothing. But Biden will make this move so he can later tell his base as we head into the silly season in 2024 that he tried.

5: The backlog in immigration processing, including for asylum seekers, will continue in 2023, even as the U.S. CIS tries hard to play catch up. 

6: Millions of Dreamers or DACA recipients will continue to hang on by a thread and live in limbo as the fight to stay in the U.S. will now rest on the U.S. Supreme Court. Many Dreamers will likely move out of the U.S. and seek to build lives elsewhere, leading to a higher labor shortage. (Amsterdam News)