The New Yorker book review mentions that “the American immigration system is a victim of its own dysfunction”.  It discusses how backlogs in asylum cases incentivize people to stay in the country, and draconian border laws increase the population of undocumented immigrants. This statement about the dysfunction of the system can also extend to the broader history of the problem at the border because the United States directly contributed to many of the conditions in Central America which are leading people to want to migrate. State repression and crackdowns beget more state repression and crackdowns, and simply redirect the problem rather than solving it; deportations resulting from collaborative crackdowns led by law enforcement and immigration enforcement planted some of the seeds for the problem at the border which is prompting more crackdowns to control the problem.

The Atlantic piece about the Darien gap shows just how much people are willing to sacrifice to make it to the United States. Before Dickerson went down to make the trip, she was told that she could take measures to make it safer, but ultimately, “survival requires luck”. Her takeaway was that making the migration process more difficult does not mean that fewer people will migrate. It just means that cartels and other dangerous groups step in and profit from the process, and many migrants will die. The UN migration officials sent to bus stops and other checkpoints leading up to the Darien gap were ineffective at convincing people to turn back. It is somewhat expected that once people are set on making it to the US and are determined to make the journey regardless of the dangers that lie ahead, there is little that can be done to convince them to change their minds. Additional enforcement attempts by Panama border officials also do not do much to discourage immigration; migrants simply warn each other down the line as they are approaching the border and learn to avoid the officials.

The New Yorker article mentions that there are generally two categories of people who try to come into the country without permission: those who offer themselves up for arrest and apply for asylum (which have increased since 2021) and those who sneak in and try to evade capture. The increase in the number of people who claim that they will face violence or persecution if they return home and are coming from places as far as China is another illustration of the fact that deterrence is not effective at reducing the influx of migrants at the border. A more effective approach would be to facilitate the legal pathways of migration to reduce the number of people who remain undocumented in the country or are waiting for years (in some cases over a decade) for their asylum hearings. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to figure out which asylum seekers are playing by the rules, according to the article. It is interesting that some officials think that more lenient policy is the reason behind more migrants crossing the border because they think the system is gameable.