‘This is a crisis’: Kansas voters, politicians want to reform US immigration. But how?
Kansas is at least two states and around 500 miles from the southern border but Debbie Snapp, the executive director for Catholic Charities of Southwest Kansas, said its her job to welcome any immigrant who shows up at her door and help them where she can.
Snapp lives in Dodge City, a town that’s majority minority, just like Garden City and Liberal. She finds the confluence of cultures makes the area enriching.
But she also sees the some of the challenges immigrants face. There’s a lack of affordable housing. Some people aren’t legally able to get a drivers license while they wait for updates on their immigration status. Some aren’t legally allowed to work while their immigration status is being processed by the courts.
“They want a good place to raise their children,” Snapp said. “They want to be able to work hard, and they want to be able to make a decent living and have a nice place to live. They want to be able to help their families.”
And, in order to help, Snapp said she wants Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
Immigration was at the top of mind for many in Washington this week as thousands of migrants crossed the border as the federal government ended a pandemic-era policy that enabled officials to turn people away, quickly overtaxing the country’s already overtaxed border agencies. Yet attempts at immigration reform seemed farther away than ever.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, said he considers himself an optimist, “Don Quixote.” But he thinks the chances of anything clearing Congress are slim.
“Because we’re so poisonously polarized, nothing is gonna get done,” Cleaver said. “It hurts me to say that because I’m part of the body.”
Polarization was on full display this week as President Joe Biden faced criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike for ending Title 42, a pandemic-related policy that allowed Border Patrol to more easily turn away migrants at the southern border.
In preparation for the end of the policy, the Biden administration sent around 4,000 people to the border, including additional national guard troops to help deal with the surge. It is implementing regional processing centers to reach people seeking asylum before they get to the border. It also issued a new rule that assumes that people who are attempting to enter the country illegally are not eligible for asylum and allows the administration to deport people who do not establish a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country they fled.
But for many, Biden’s policies weren’t enough. Moderate-leaning lawmakers criticized Biden for not working with Congress to pass reform, while more liberal Democrats and immigrants rights groups are saying the Biden administration’s policies are cruel to people who are fleeing oppressive countries.
“Some Democrats and all of the Republicans are blaming Biden, which is lunacy,” said Cleaver, who was an early supporter of Biden’s presidential bid. “Biden has not been alive long enough to have created all these problems.”
Kansas elected officials respond to border situation
Rep. Sharice Davids, of Kansas, was one of the Democrats who criticized Biden. She wrote a letter to a letter to Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, disapproving of Biden’s decision to lift Title 42.
“As the president has decided to lift the order this week, we now face a doubling of illegal crossings at our southern border by some estimates, exacerbating the current humanitarian and refugee crisis,” Davids wrote. “While you have presented a list of ways you plan to address the surge of migration, some of which I agree with, we still have not reached a comprehensive, long-term plan with bipartisan support.”
But even as Davids criticized Biden, she voted against an immigration bill in the House, one heavily focused on border enforcement that includes a provision to resume building former President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.
Democrats denounced the legislation as extreme, giving it little to no chance of passing the Senate. Biden pledged to veto the bill if it even made it to his desk, saying it would make the immigration system worse.
“A successful border management strategy must include robust enforcement at the border of illegal crossings, deterrence to discourage illegal immigration, and legal pathways to ensure that those in need of protection are not turned away to face death or serious harm,” the statement said.
Davids is considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country, despite winning reelection by 12 percentage points in 2022. Immediately after the vote, the National Republican Congressional Committee put out a statement criticizing Davids for voting against it.
Congress has failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform since the 1980s. The last time lawmakers came close to passing a bipartisan deal — led by a group of eight senators in 2013 — it failed to get approval in the House.
A small group of Senate Republicans — including Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas — said Thursday they see the House bill as a potential starting point for negotiations on another immigration reform effort.
“Without action, these problems will only get worse,” Moran said in a joint statement with three Republican senators. “Congress must devote the time to get these policies right, fix our broken border, and ensure we have the resources to make our immigration system orderly, humane, and legal.”
Rep. Jake LaTurner, a Kansas Republican, said he believes both Republicans and Democrats are concerned about the situation at the border, tying together two issues — the surge of migrants attempting to cross the border and a rise in fentanyl, a drug that has been responsible for increasing overdose deaths.
“This is a crisis,” LaTurner said. “I don’t think this is political. It certainly shouldn’t be political. This is something that we ought to be able to come together on for the good of the country.”
‘Disinformation, part of a political national agenda’
Monica Vargas-Huertas, the political and community outreach director for the United Food and Commercial Workers union in Wichita, said Kansas might not be a top destination for many of the people currently crossing the border because the immigrant population in the state is mostly made up of immigrants from Mexico, or more recently from Central American countries.
The recent surge is largely made up of people from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti.
She said the political conversation about immigration quickly gets oversimplified and that any reform needs to think about the geopolitical, diplomatic, economic, legal and humanitarian aspects that drive immigration in the first place. Rhetoric about how immigrants are flooding the border and smuggling drugs, she said, does little to productively move the conversation forward.
“Those politicians that are creating this terror, terrifying Kansas, they are not looking to protect Kansas,” Vargas-Huertas said. “What they are creating is more disinformation, part of a political national agenda.”
Still, Republicans have spent the week railing about the surge of migrants at the border.
Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, went with a group of senators to Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday. Asked how he believed the trip would contribute to the conversation about passing immigration reform, Marshall said he wants Kansans to know he’s “got the pulse of the big problem.”
“I think it’s to look for myself to see really what’s happening,” Marshall said. “What does it look like to have 13,000 people crossing the border every day. This will be my fourth trip there. And each time I walk away overwhelmed with the problem.”
This story was originally published May 12, 2023 at 11:59 AM.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to a Kansas town as being majority minority. The story should have made reference to the city of Liberal.
