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THE CRISIS along America’s southern border is a political liability for Joe Biden. Polling suggests that just 27% of Americans approve of the president’s handling of immigration; more than twice as many say they trust Donald Trump, his likely challenger in November’s election. Increased migration is not all down to policymaking in Washington, DC. But our ten charts below show how the problem has worsened over recent administrations.
Image: The Economist
Start with the number of undocumented, or illegal, migrants crossing the border. By these numbers Mr Biden is a clear outlier. During his presidency there have been record numbers of apprehensions and expulsions at the border; nearly 250,000 people crossed in November alone.
The president with the lowest number of arrivals in at least four decades is Barack Obama. During his first term yearly apprehensions averaged out at just 431,000, down from an average of 1.2m in the 1980s through to the early 2000s.
Numbers began to rise again under Mr Trump. In 2019 the surge was so great that a quarter of the recent arrivals were released into the country, as government detention facilities and local jails struggled to keep up.
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America’s tight labour market increases the incentive for people looking to earn a better living. Wars and global instability are also playing a part. Whereas most migrants used to come from just Mexico and the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), people from these countries now make up less than two-thirds of all those apprehended (see chart 2). The share of Venezuelans is growing, and tens of thousands of people from as far as India, Russia and China are also seeking asylum in America.
Image: The Economist
All this is putting pressure on the country’s overstretched immigration courts. Our third chart shows that the backlog of cases more than doubled during Mr Trump’s presidency, and doubled again under Mr Biden—the backlog now stands at more than 3m.
The number of judges who deal with these cases has risen steadily over time, though not by enough to make a dent. If America’s 659 immigration judges ruled on four cases every business day it would still take them more than four years to clear the docket (without adding any other cases). The Congressional Research Service, a government body, reckons that even doubling the number of judges would not clear the backlog until 2032.
Image: The Economist
Our fourth chart shows what this backlog means for asylum waiting times. Judges reached a decision on only around 70,000 applications in the 12 months to October. Most of those cases are likely to have been several years old. The long wait is a further incentive for migrants to cross the border illegally, even if they have a weak claim to asylum. The low chance of detention means they could get at least a few years’ work in America before a decision is even made.
Roughly equal numbers of people were granted and denied the right to stay in the past two years. That is far more than in Mr Trump’s day, when only around a third of rulings ended in asylum being granted.
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Handling these cases is all the more difficult when families and children are involved. Immigration detention centres were built to house single adult men, not families and children. Encounters of unaccompanied children reached similar peaks under both Mr Obama and Mr Trump (though the latter’s administration also separated children from their parents, meaning the true number was even higher). During the most recent wave, under Mr Biden, the number has rocketed (see chart 5).
Image: The Economist
Despite these pressures, the number of agents hired to patrol the border has barely budged since at least 2014. In the 2017 fiscal year, during which Mr Trump was elected president, there were 746 fewer agents than the year before. In the year of the 2020 election, the number rose by less than 100. Funding for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency charged with patrolling America’s borders, has stalled amid partisan fighting. Adjusted for prices, this fiscal year’s requested budget for the agency is roughly the same as it was in 2018.
Image: The Economist
Detaining illegal migrants can be done by CBP officers at the border, or by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency anywhere in the country. Mr Trump enjoyed the show of force that came with ICE raids; they were a prominent feature of his time in office. Arrests peaked in May 2019, when roughly 57,000 people were taken into custody. That has since dropped to roughly 20,000 per month during Mr Biden’s term.
Image: The Economist
Some of these detentions will lead to deportations, rates of which have fallen since Mr Obama left office (he was nicknamed “deporter-in-chief” among rights groups). Annual “non-citizen removals” were on average 22% higher in his second term than in Mr Trump’s time in office.
The current administration has taken a different approach. On the campaign trail in 2020 Mr Biden promised a pathway to citizenship for some unauthorised immigrants already in America. Deportations have since dropped to record lows. ICE was told to prioritise certain people for deportation, mainly recent arrivals or those who posed a threat to national security. The perception that Mr Biden is more welcoming than his predecessor is no doubt contributing to the current surge.
Image: The Economist
Despite the increasing number of migrants reaching the border, the amount of people actually living in America illegally had, until recently, been falling. The Pew Research Centre reckons that there were 10.5m illegal immigrants in 2021, the latest year available. That is roughly the same as in 2017 and fewer than in any other year between 2005 and 2015. It also puts illegal migrants at roughly 3% of people living in America and 22% of the country’s foreign-born population—the lowest shares since the 1990s. This data does not include estimates since the latest wave of encounters at the border; some 600,000 people are thought to have slipped through undetected in 2023. But the numbers did go down under Mr Trump and Mr Obama and in the latter years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Image: The Economist
Our final chart shows how America’s opinion of illegal migration has hardened, especially among the left. A poll in December 2017 found that only 12% of Democrats favoured building a wall at the southern border (one of Mr Trump’s main campaign promises in 2016). In December 2023 that rose to 32%.
Construction of the border wall, however, has done little to help. For all Mr Trump’s talk, the Obama administration added more new barriers than he managed. Building has continued under Mr Biden, though record numbers of people are still showing up. Decades of neglect wrapped up in political fighting has crippled the country’s immigration system. Our charts show that neither party has made meaningful improvements.■
U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Craig Hudson | Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Now that President Donald Trump has set out his landmark tariff plans, the Federal Reserve finds itself in a potential policy box to choose between fighting inflation, boosting growth — or simply avoiding the fray and letting events take their course without intervention.
Should the president hold fast to his tougher-than-expected trade policy, there’s a material risk of at least near-term costs, namely the potential for higher prices and a slowdown in growth that could turn into a recession.
For the Fed, that presents a potential no-win situation.
The central bank is tasked with using its policy levers to ensure full employment and low prices, the so-called dual mandate of which policymakers speak. If tariffs present challenges to both, choosing whether to ease to support growth or tighten to fight inflation won’t be easy, as each courts its own peril.
“The problem for the Fed is that they’re going to have to be very reactive,” said Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS. “They’re going to be watching prices rise, which might make them hesitant to respond to any growth weakness that materializes. I think it’s certainly going to make it very hard for them to be preemptive.”
Under normal conditions, the Fed likes to get ahead of things.
If it sees leading gauges of unemployment perk up, the Fed will cut interest rates to ease financial conditions and give companies more incentive to hire. If it sniffs out a coming rise in inflation, it can raise rates to dampen demand and bring down prices.
So what happens when both things occur at the same time?
Risks to waiting
The Fed hasn’t had to answer that question since the early 1980s, when then-Chair Paul Volcker, faced with such stagflation, chose to uphold the inflation side of the mandate and hike rates dramatically, tilting the economy into a recession.
In the current case, the choice will be tough, particularly coming on the heels of how the Jerome Powell-led central bank was flat-footed when prices started rising in 2021 and he and his colleagues dismissed the move as “transitory.” The word has been resurrected to describe the Fed’s general view on tariff-induced price increases.
“They do risk getting caught offsides with the potential magnitude of this kind of price increase, not unlike what happened in 2022 where, they might might feel the need to respond,” Pingle said. “In order for them to respond to weakening growth, they’re really going to have to wait until the growth does weaken and makes the case for them to move.”
To be sure, the Trump administration sees the tariffs as pro-growth and anti-inflation, though officials have acknowledged the potential for some bumpiness ahead.
“It’s time to change the rules and make the rules be stacked fairly with the United States of America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC in a Thursday interview. ” We need to stop supporting the rest of the world and start supporting American workers.”
However, that could take some time as even Lutnick acknowledged that the administration is seeking a “re-ordering” of the global economic landscape.
Like many other Wall Street economists, Pingle spent the time since Trump announced the new tariffs Wednesday adapting forecasts for the potential impact.
Bracing for inflation and flat growth
The general consensus is that unless the duties are negotiated lower, they will take prospects for economic growth down to near-zero or perhaps even into recession, while putting core inflation in 2025 north of 3% and, according to some forecasts, as high as 5%. With the Fed targeting inflation at 2%, that’s a wide miss for its own policy objective.
“With price stability still not fully achieved, and tariffs threatening to push prices higher, policymakers may not be able to provide as much monetary support as the growth picture requires, and could even bind them from cutting rates at all,” wrote Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.
Traders, however, ramped up their bets that the Fed will act to boost growth rather than fight inflation.
As is often the reaction during a market wipeout like Thursday’s, the market raised the implied odds that the Fed will cut aggressively this year, going so far as to put the equivalent of four quarter-percentage-point reductions in play, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tracker of futures pricing.
Shah, however, noted that “the path to easing has become narrower and more uncertain.”
Fed officials certainly haven’t provided any fodder for the notion of rate cuts anytime soon.
In a speech Thursday, Vice Chair Philip Jefferson stuck to the Fed’s recent script, insisting “there is no need to be in a hurry to make further policy rate adjustments. The current policy stance is well positioned to deal with the risks and uncertainties that we face in pursuing both sides of our dual mandate.”
Taking the cautious tone a step further, Governor Adriana Kugler said Wednesday afternoon — at the same time Trump was delivering his tariff presentation in the Rose Garden — that she expects the Fed to stay put until things clear up.
“I will support maintaining the current policy rate for as long as these upside risks to inflation continue, while economic activity and employment remain stable,” Kugler said, adding she “strongly supported” the decision in March to keep the Fed’s benchmark rate unchanged.
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Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hug each other as they queue outside the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building, after it was reported that the Trump administration fired staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at the Food and Drug Administration, as it embarked on its plan to cut 10,000 jobs at HHS, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 1, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
A surge in federal government job cuts contributed to a near record-setting pace for announced layoffs in March, exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic, according to a report Thursday from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. Some 280,253 layoffs across 27 agencies in the past two months have been linked to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to pare down the federal workforce.
The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million, according to Challenger records going back to 1989.
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert at the firm. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”
However, DOGE has continued to cut aggressively across the government.
Various reports have indicated that the Veterans Affairs department could lose 80,000 jobs, the IRS is in line for some 18,000 reductions and Treasury is expected to drop a “substantial” level of workers as well, according to a court filing.
The year to date tally for federal government announced layoffs represents a 672% increase from the same period in 2024, according to Challenger.
To be sure, the outsized layoff plans haven’t made their way into other jobs data.
Weekly unemployment claims have held in a fairly tight range since President Donald Trump took office. Payroll growth has slowed a bit from its pace in 2024 but is still positive, while job openings have receded but only to around their pre-pandemic levels.
However, the Washington, D.C. area has been hit particularly hard by the announced layoffs, which have totaled 278,711 year to date for the city, according to the report.
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BERLIN, GERMANY – FEBRUARY 24: Robert Habeck, chancellor candidate of the German Greens Party, speaks to the media the day after German parliamentary elections on February 24, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. The Greens came in fourth place with 11.6% of the vote, down 2.9% from the previous election. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump will “buckle under pressure” and alter his tariff policies if Europe bands together, acting German economy minister Robert Habeck said Thursday.
“That is what I see, that Donald Trump will buckle under pressure, that he corrects his announcements under pressure, but the logical consequence is that he then also needs to feel the pressure,” he said during a press conference, according to a CNBC translation.
“And this pressure now needs to be unfolded, from Germany, from Europe in the alliance with other countries, and then we will see who is the stronger one in this arm wrestle,” Habeck said.
Elsewhere, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he believed the latest tariff decisions by Trump were “fundamentally wrong,” according to a CNBC translation.
The measures are an attack on the global trade order and will result in suffering for the global economy, Scholz said.
On Wednesday, Trump imposed 20% levies on the European Union, including on the bloc’s foremost economy Germany, as he signed a sweeping and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy.
Germany is widely regarded as one of the countries likely to be most impacted by Trump’s tariffs, given its heavy economic reliance on trade.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.