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Sept. 26, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: Mike Lowry’s recent column on immigration stated, “The problem has grown in recent years.” Actually the problem has been reduced more in the past three months in 2024 than at any time in recent U.S. history. The best measure of “the problem” regarding illegal border crossings is the number of “enforcement encounters” by our Border Patrol. There were 107,523 enforcement encounters in August 2024, down by 64% since December 2023, and below the number of “enforcement encounters” under Donald Trump in April and May of 2019. That’s from the U.S. Border Control website.
Biden’s executive order, put in place when Trump killed the bipartisan immigration legislation, is working. “Liberal groups and organizations” (Lowry’s code words for Democrats) did not, as he claimed, organize “caravans” nor advise people to apply for asylum, which was started in 1948 by Congress. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of undocumented immigrants peaked in 2006 at 12 million and has gone down by over 10 percent to around 11 million ever since.
Our peak undocumented immigration numbers of 2006 were not Biden’s doing. Unauthorized crossings of the border are a problem. Biden-Harris are solving it. HERB RUBENSTEIN Chair, LexRockBV Democratic Committee
