Realistic solutions to the U.S. border crisis
A Gallup poll surveying American voters last month found that immigration is the single most important issue in this election. (28% of people believe it’s the “most important problem” today, up 8% from an identical survey a month ago.) Last December broke a record for illegal border crossings: 250,000 people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization (that’s up from 132K five years ago).
If you’re a U.S. citizen and don’t live close to the border, it can be easy to think of this issue abstractly. To prevent myself from doing that, I keep going back to this post from Isaac Cudjoe, CEO at the nonprofit Peace First, who was 1 out of 5,531 Ghanaians to win a lottery granting him admission to the U.S. Cudjoe reminds us that immigration (legal or not) is a painful process — emotionally, psychologically, and culturally. “The violence of immigration lies not just in leaving but also in becoming. It is a process that tests the limits of our resilience, challenges our sense of self, and ultimately, reveals the strength within us,” he writes. And this isn’t just an American phenomenon; over 281 million people worldwide are acclimating to life in a new country.
As the nation with the highest number of immigrants in the world, the U.S. has a unique responsibility to develop policies that scale. On Medium, political analyst Isaac Saul lays out a realistic path. His solutions appease both Republicans and Democrats, and include ideas like tightening the asylum process and making legal immigration easier. That second one resonates with me. We’ve all heard how difficult it can be to obtain a Green Card, even for folks who’ve been working in the U.S. for years. As with any system, if you want people to do the right thing… you have to make the right thing clearer and easier to do.
Solving these problems will require collaboration and new ideas. That’s what I like about Saul’s post: it’s solutions-focused rather than ideologically-driven. Maybe consider dropping the link to your congressperson?
— Harris @ Medium
What else we’re reading
- Software developer Dare Obasanjo outlines how burgeoning search tools are encroaching on Google’s core business: showing you ads on top of your search results. “What people want from search engines is an answer to their question and a tool that can help them with decisions they need to make, not a collection of links to websites,” Obasanjo explains. LLMs are better at question-answering than Google (sometimes), and new tools like the Arc browser’s AI-powered search are making it harder for Google to compete.
- American malls are dying. Mall culture peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, when there were over 2,000 large malls in the U.S. Now, there are around 700. Essayist Steffany Ritchie takes us inside a dead mall, where her job is to wrap Christmas gifts months in advance because there’s nothing else to do. This is the type of personal perspective I can’t get elsewhere: It’s a portrait of how tedious, but also freeing (?), it can be to work inside a borderline obsolete business.
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Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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