In the three years President Biden has been in office, illegal immigration from Venezuela has increased by an astounding 7,300 percent. Admittedly, the economic and political situation in Venezuela is bad, but it’s not 7,300 percent worse than it was in 2020.
Venezuelans are now the second-largest nationality group of illegal aliens flooding into the United States. The alarming increase is a direct result of “pull” factors and incentives put in place by the administration’s policies. Aside from the sheer volume of Venezuelan illegal immigration, the influx also poses serious national security threats. Venezuela is controlled by a regime that is hostile to the U.S. and which maintains close ties with some of our most implacable enemies and adversaries.
A newly-released analysis of Venezuelan illegal migration by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) shows the dramatic and dangerous real-time consequences of bad administration policy. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2020, the last full year before President Biden took office, only 4,520 Venezuelan nationals were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at America’s borders. In FY 2021, that figure jumped to over 50,000. FY 2022 saw almost 190,000 Venezuelans apprehended, and, in FY 2023, that number ballooned to 335,000. Altogether, that’s almost 600,000 illegal aliens from Venezuela during the past three fiscal years – exceeding the populations of many large U.S. cities, such as Atlanta.
The evidence suggests that the surge of Venezuelan illegal immigration has almost nothing to do with conditions in Venezuela. About 84 percent of the 7.7 million Venezuelans who left Venezuela since 2014 first settled in neighboring Latin American nations. Many would uproot their lives again once the allure of higher American wages was paired with policies that made illegal immigration easy. The fact that many of these migrants, who had already settled safely elsewhere in South America, are making the dangerous trek north indicates that the vast majority of Venezuelan migrants are economic migrants rather than bona fide asylum seekers.
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The Biden administration isn’t just encouraging Venezuelan illegal immigration. It is actually facilitating it through the mass abuse of parole. Originally intended to be used only on a case-by-case basis in very limited circumstances, parole has been the administration’s chief tool to release hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals into the country. In fact, the administration granted Venezuelans (along with Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans) a special parole program, which comes with the added benefit of easy work permits for large numbers of people who are really economic migrants.
In addition, the Biden administration designated Venezuela for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in March 2021. Rather than offering temporary reprieves from deportation for foreign nationals unable to return to their homelands due to natural disasters or civil strife, TPS has morphed into a perpetually-renewed quasi-amnesty that allows people to remain in the U.S. for decades after the original conditions justifying it ended. These factors, coupled with the Biden administration’s refusal to secure the border, discourage asylum fraud, or use detention as a deterrent, have convinced Venezuelan migrants to come in large numbers.
Aside from the usual burdens associated with mass illegal immigration, the Biden administration’s encouragement of Venezuelan illegal immigration comes with added risks. The Venezuelan regime is hostile to the U.S. and is a close ally of China, Russia and Iran – the world’s preeminent state sponsor of terrorism. Moreover, Venezuela’s former vice president, Tareck El Aissami, is linked personally to Hezbollah terrorist networks. Caracas has also supplied genuine Venezuelan passports to non-Venezuelans, including potential national security threats from countries like Iran. Letting in hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans – or people claiming to be – is especially reckless and irresponsible, exposing Americans to added risk at a time when terror threats are at an all-time high.
Since President Biden is seeking foreign aid for countries that are fighting the same global threats as indicated above, it makes zero sense to make it easier for those dangers to infiltrate our country through bad immigration policy. In the coming weeks, Congress will have the opportunity to do just that by including the language of H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, in the foreign aid bill. That bill, which has already been passed by the House, would end catch-and-release policies, the flagrant abuse of parole authority, massive asylum fraud and other incentives that are driving the humanitarian and national security crisis unleashed by the Biden administration.
Pawel Styrna is Senior Researcher at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and a legal immigrant.
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