Remember Those ‘Root Causes’ of the Border Crisis?

By John R. Puri

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

 

For four years, the Biden administration and the media kept telling us that the crisis at the southern border was out of the president’s hands because it was caused by international, uncontrollable “root causes” of migration. No matter what policy changes Biden made, millions of migrants would keep showing up. They were pushed out of their home countries by forces beyond domestic politics, like poverty and violent conflict — as though these were novel developments.

 

This was the official line from beginning to end. In March 2021, two months after Joe Biden was sworn in, he assigned Vice President Kamala Harris to help stem the flow of migration by addressing its “root causes” in poor Latin American countries. The administration rarely specified what forces or events it was referring to.

 

Almost three years later, in 2024, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the migration crisis was

 

not specific to the United States’ southern border. This is something that we are seeing throughout the hemisphere and throughout the world. We have an increase in authoritarian regimes. We have more extreme weather events that are driving people from their homes. We have poverty. And America is proving to be prosperous with more than 8 million jobs that need to be filled. We recovered from the COVID pandemic more rapidly than any other country. This is something that is not specific to the southern border.

 

Based on such defeatism, media outlets concurred that the administration was helpless to deal with record border crossings.

 

Time magazine wrote in 2023: “There’s very little a homeland security secretary or an American President can do to reverse human migration patterns predominantly caused by climate change, new storm patterns, rampant violence and economic need.”

 

The New Yorker wrote in 2023: “Much of the migration to the United States in recent years has been driven by profound developments in Central and South America and in the Caribbean, where economic turmoil, natural disasters, and drug-related violence have brought many states to the brink of collapse, and where gangs and drug cartels often operate beyond state control.”

 

The Cato Institute told Axios in 2024 that “apprehension numbers have little to do with changes in enforcement tactics or new policies,” because “it’s really primarily reflective of the state of the U.S. economy,” and “the smuggling networks have taken years to build out — but once they’re built out, there’s nothing you can do to rewind the clock and eliminate those.”

 

Axios itself wrote in 2024: “Much of the current crisis is rooted in factors Biden’s team has had little control over — including unprecedented global calamities that have pushed millions of migrants to the U.S., decades of congressional inaction, and the state of key agencies after the Trump administration.”

 

Mayorkas told PBS that year, “We can only do so much within a broken immigration system, a system that is fundamentally broken,” since the problem was “hemispheric and global.”

 

Then, in 2025, the Trump administration entered office and immediately changed border policy by shutting down pathways to admission. In the administration’s first full month, border encounters fell to the lowest level in recorded history — 8,349, compared to 140,641 the year before and 29,105 just a month earlier — and have pretty much stayed at that level ever since. The record was beaten again in July 2025, with just 4,592 encounters.

 

So much for those supposedly insurmountable “root causes.” When the push factors of migration — poverty and conflict in home countries, attractive conditions in America — are relatively constant, it turns out that policy incentives are what really matter.