UNBURDENED: How a nation of immigrants should fix the border

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson outlines a three-part plan for how a Harris administration might address the border question — and the larger issues behind it

Regardless of your political views, we’ve now reached a point where nearly all Americans believe we are mishandling the situation at our border. And it’s only going to worsen as polarized politics at home and deteriorating economic and political conditions across Latin America complicate any attempts to address the issue.

In the third installment of our Unburdened interview series — where we ask experts of various perspectives to envision a truly bold Harris administration’s policies — we spoke to former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson about how America should confront the border issue and the larger immigration system, how the Harris campaign should position her prosecutorial past when confronting issues of policing and criminal justice, and how threats to national security have evolved since he left the White House in 2017.

As a former top law enforcer, Johnson represents one way of looking at the problem. We encourage readers looking for a range of views to check out our interview with Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas. That conversation dug even deeper into the geopolitical forces that led us to this moment and sheds some light on what it’s like to be a current house representative trying to make progress on the issue.

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UNBURDENED is The Ink’s interview series named after Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, where we ask some of the smartest policy minds out there to envision a bold, aggressive Harris agenda to materially improve people’s lives — unburdened by what has been.

Previously: Debt and education and economics, featuring Astra Taylor, and foreign policy, featuring Matthew Duss

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“Border realism”: a conversation with Jeh Johnson

If you were freed to push for the boldest vision of a Harris agenda on immigration, the border, and homeland security, what are some of the ideas you'd love to see?

The way I always like to put it is, if I were king or the emir or monarch, what would I decree? I'm, however, a realist, having existed within the confines of the system. So my views are obviously tempered by that. But if I could come up with a comprehensive reform to our immigration system, it would be largely along the lines of the bill that passed the United States Senate in 2013, S.744. It would have several tenets to it.

One is a secure border, which means fewer illegal crossings and manageable numbers. Now to obtain a secure border, the only way you're going to ever really do that is address the push factors at the source. No matter what we put up by way of defense on our southern border, as long as poverty, corruption, drought, famine, and violence persist in Central America and South America, they're going to keep coming. 

Families are going to make the basic choice to flee a burning building or to send their 10-year-old to America to live with the great aunt in Northern Virginia because they don't want their children to become the victims of gang violence. So they're making that very basic choice, even if it means they only get to stay in [the U.S.] for four or five years while their asylum claim is pending. It’s better than staying put. I believe that we can address this problem at the source.