Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

The question gives me three boxes to choose from, and I taught long enough to distrust any question that comes with its own boxes, so let me say at the outset that the caravan is all three and that the order in which a person ranks them tells you more about the person than about the caravan. It is humanitarian, because six thousand people, a great many of them children, are sleeping in a sports complex in Tijuana in the rain. It is a security matter, because any uncontrolled movement of several thousand people toward a border is a security matter by definition, and the people who rushed the fence on Sunday and got tear gas for it made that plain. And it is political, because the President spent the three weeks before the midterms calling it an invasion and has barely mentioned it in the three weeks since, which tells you exactly what it was to him. The honest answer is that the caravan is a humanitarian problem that was turned into a political instrument on both sides, and that the security dimension, which is real, has been used by one side to justify the instrument and dismissed by the other to deny it.

Let me start with the people, because I spent my career with children and I cannot start anywhere else. The caravan left San Pedro Sula, which has one of the highest murder rates in the world, on October 13, and it grew as it moved because people in Honduras and Guatemala saw that a crowd of thousands could cross Mexico in a way that a family of four could not, without paying a smuggler and without being robbed. That is not an invasion. It is the oldest form of safety there is, which is numbers. Most of those people are not refugees under the legal definition, which requires persecution on specific grounds, and most of their asylum claims will fail, and they know that, and they are coming anyway because the alternative is a city where their sons are recruited by gangs at twelve. I do not say that to argue they should be admitted. I say it because a policy that does not understand why people are in the sports complex will not stop the next sports complex from filling.

Now the security side, and I want to give it its due because the people who live along the Arizona line are not fools. A movement of six thousand people toward a port of entry that can process forty asylum claims a day is going to produce exactly what happened on Sunday, which is a crowd, a rush, and a confrontation. The Border Patrol used tear gas; it has done so before, under the previous administration, and the coverage that treated Sunday as unprecedented was not accurate. There were people in that crowd who threw rocks. There are people in every crowd of six thousand who should not be let in, and the only way to find them is to process everyone, slowly, with records, which is the thing the system cannot currently do. The security problem is not that the caravan is dangerous. It is that the border has no capacity to sort it, and a border that cannot sort is not secure no matter how many soldiers stand behind it. The five thousand eight hundred troops the Pentagon sent are stringing wire and sleeping in tents. They cannot adjudicate a claim, and the claim is the bottleneck.

The political side is the one I find hardest to write about with the restraint a teacher is supposed to show. The caravan was eight hundred miles from the border on election day. The President called it an invasion, said it contained Middle Easterners, which his own officials could not confirm, sent troops in numbers he inflated, and ran an advertisement about it that the networks pulled. After November 6 the troops were told some would be home by Christmas and the President moved on to other subjects. The Democrats, for their part, treated any suggestion that an uncontrolled movement of thousands toward the border was a problem as bigotry, which it is not, and offered no policy beyond opposition. Both parties used the people in the sports complex as a prop, and the people in the sports complex are still there, and the policy that would address them has not been proposed by anyone running for anything.

So what does it demand? Here is what a former teacher who has spent twenty years in a border state would write on the board. First, capacity at the ports: enough asylum officers and immigration judges to process a claim in weeks rather than years, because the backlog is the magnet and the backlog is also the humanitarian crisis. Second, a credible-fear standard that means something, applied quickly, so that the people who do not qualify are returned fast and the people who do are admitted fast, rather than everyone waiting in Tijuana or being released into the interior with a hearing date in 2021. Third, a regional arrangement with Mexico, which the incoming government is reported to be negotiating and publicly denying, under which claims are processed closer to where the people are and Mexico is paid for the burden it is carrying, because Mexico has absorbed more of this caravan than we have. Fourth, money in Honduras and Guatemala for the thing that actually moves people, which is a government that cannot protect them, instead of the aid cuts the President has threatened, which punish the governments for the behavior of the people fleeing them. None of that is a wall. None of it is open borders. All of it is the kind of unglamorous administrative work that neither party campaigns on.

So my answer is that the caravan is a humanitarian issue in its cause, a security issue in its arrival, and a political issue in its use, and that the policy it demands is the one thing Washington is least able to provide, which is capacity rather than theater. I would give the response so far a failing grade, from both parties, and I would write the same note I wrote on too many papers: you were asked a question about a problem and you answered a question about each other. The people in the sports complex did not ask either question. They asked whether anyone would process their claim, and the answer, for most of them, is still no.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent

The caravan is a Mexican issue before it is an American one, and I want to begin there, because the American debate has conducted itself as if the six thousand people in Tijuana appeared at the border by teleportation and as if the country they crossed to get there has no stake in the matter. Mexico has carried this caravan for six weeks. It offered the migrants asylum and work permits in Chiapas, which a minority accepted; it allowed the rest to move north on its highways, fed in part by its own churches and municipalities; and it is now hosting them in a border city whose mayor has declared a humanitarian emergency and whose residents marched against them last week. The incoming Mexican government, which takes office tomorrow, is reported to be negotiating an arrangement under which people seeking American asylum would wait in Mexico while their claims are processed, and is denying the reports publicly, which in my experience of small states dealing with large ones means the arrangement is nearly done. Whatever the caravan is to the United States, to Mexico it is a test of whether a new left-populist president can absorb a humanitarian burden on behalf of a neighbor who is threatening him with tariffs, and he is going to pass that test by accepting the burden, because the alternative is worse.

That is the first thing a Caribbean observer notices. The second is that the caravan is not new in kind, only in form. People have been leaving the Northern Triangle for the United States at these rates for a decade; the family-unit apprehensions at the southwest border set a monthly record in October, before the caravan arrived, driven by individual families crossing in Texas. What the caravan did was make the flow visible, by concentrating it, and visibility is the thing that converts a migration into a political event. Six thousand people walking together are an image. Six thousand people crossing separately over a month are a statistic, and the statistic was larger. The President understood the difference and used it before his midterm elections, and has lost interest since, which tells you that the political dimension of the question has already been answered and the humanitarian and security dimensions remain.

On those two I will say something that may be uncomfortable for both American camps. The caravan is a security issue in the precise sense that any uncontrolled movement of thousands of people is one: a state that cannot regulate who crosses its frontier is not fully a state, and the people who rushed the fence on Sunday and were met with tear gas were testing exactly that proposition. The American left’s reluctance to concede the point has made the right’s exaggeration of it easier. But the caravan is not a security issue in the sense the President described before the election, as an invasion with criminals and Middle Easterners in its ranks; his own officials could not substantiate that, and the migrants are overwhelmingly families from three countries with murder rates that would empty any city in the hemisphere. It is a humanitarian issue in its origin and a security issue in its arrival, and the two are not in tension. A well-run port of entry is both humane and secure. The port at San Ysidro, processing forty to a hundred claims a day against a waiting list in the thousands, is neither, and that is the actual failure.

What policy does it demand? From the regional view, three things, and I will be direct about them. First, the United States should stop threatening the Northern Triangle governments with aid cuts for the behavior of the people fleeing them. Honduras cannot stop its citizens from walking out, and punishing its government for failing to do so will weaken the institutions whose weakness is the cause. The small states of this region have watched American aid turn on and off with the political weather for a century, and the lesson they draw is not compliance but hedging. Second, the arrangement with Mexico should be made and paid for. If Mexico is to host asylum seekers while their American claims are heard, it should be compensated for doing so, generously and publicly, because a Mexico that absorbs the caravan at its own expense is a Mexico that will not absorb the next one. Third, and most important, the United States should build the processing capacity that would let it decide claims in weeks. The backlog is the magnet, as the Americans say; it is also the humanitarian crisis, because people wait in Tijuana because they cannot be heard in San Diego. The troops at the border cannot hear a claim. The judges can, and there are not enough of them.

I want to add a word on what the episode has cost the United States in the region, because that is my particular brief. The image of American agents firing tear gas across the border at a crowd that included children ran on every front page from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, and it ran beside the image of the troops stringing wire, and together they confirmed a story the region tells itself about the United States that the United States would rather it did not. The story is not new and the episode did not create it. But a country that wishes to lead a hemisphere cannot simultaneously treat the hemisphere’s poorest citizens as an invading force, and the governments that Washington needs for the regional arrangement I described, Mexico above all, are now negotiating with a counterparty whose public has just been shown what the counterparty thinks of their people. That is a cost. It is paid slowly, in the terms of the next agreement.

So my assessment is that the caravan is a humanitarian problem by origin, a security problem by arrival, and a political instrument by use, and that the policy it demands is regional and administrative rather than military and rhetorical: capacity at the ports, a funded arrangement with Mexico, and investment rather than punishment in the countries people are leaving. The troops will go home by Christmas. The people in the sports complex will not. And the next caravan will form in San Pedro Sula when the conditions that formed this one are still there, which, on the evidence of the American response, they will be.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

I am going to pick a box, because the question offers three and most of the people answering it are going to say all three, and I think that is a dodge. The caravan is primarily a security issue, in the plain sense that a country which cannot decide who enters it has lost control of the one thing a country is for, and everything else about it, the humanitarian part and the political part, follows from that loss of control rather than causing it. I will explain what I mean, and I will try to do it without the word invasion, which the President used before the election and which I think was wrong, because an invasion has an army and this has families, and the difference matters even if the problem is the same.

Here is the problem. Under the law as it stands, a person who sets foot on American soil and says the words credible fear is entitled to a hearing, and because there are not enough judges to hold the hearing for two or three years, and because a court settlement called Flores limits how long a child can be held, a person who arrives with a child is released into the country with a notice to appear and, in a large share of cases, does not. Everyone who deals with the border knows this. The smugglers know it, which is why family-unit apprehensions set a record in October before the caravan ever reached Mexico; the families in Honduras know it, which is why the caravan is full of them; and the people in Washington know it and have known it for years and have not fixed it, because fixing it requires one party to accept more enforcement and the other to accept more judges and a legal status for the people already here, and neither will give the other the first half. The caravan did not create that problem. It walked up to it in front of the cameras and showed everyone the loophole, and six thousand people are now in Tijuana waiting to use it.

So when I say security, I do not mean that there are terrorists in the sports complex. The President said there were Middle Easterners in the caravan and his own people could not find any, and I will not repeat a claim that the government that made it cannot support. I mean that a border is a system for sorting, and this one cannot sort. The port at San Ysidro processes forty to a hundred asylum claims a day. There are thousands on the list. The alternative to the port is the fence, and on Sunday several hundred people rushed it and got tear gas, which the Border Patrol has used before under the last administration and which the coverage treated as a war crime. A system that offers people a choice between a two-year wait and a rush at the fence is not a humane system and it is not a secure one, and the people who are angriest about the tear gas are, in my experience, the least willing to talk about the two years.

Now the humanitarian side, and I will give it its due, because I have two kids and I have seen the pictures. The people in Tijuana left cities with murder rates that would empty Tyler in a month. Most of them are not refugees in the legal sense; the law covers persecution, not poverty or gangs, and most of their claims will fail if they are ever heard. They know that. They came because the trip is free in a crowd and because the loophole is real, and the cruelty of the situation is that the loophole gives them a reason to make a two-thousand-mile walk toward a door that will, for most of them, eventually close. The humane response is not to open the door wider. It is to decide the claims fast, in weeks, so that the people who qualify get in and the people who do not go home before they have sold everything to pay for the walk. The backlog is not mercy. It is the thing that keeps the sports complex full.

The political side is the part I will spend the least time on, because I think it is the least important and it has gotten the most coverage. The President used the caravan before the midterms and dropped it after. The troops were deployed in numbers he inflated and are coming home for Christmas. The Democrats called every concern about an uncontrolled movement of six thousand people toward the border a racist talking point and offered nothing. Both parties used the people in the sports complex to turn out their voters, and both will do it again, and I do not think the people in the sports complex care which party’s advertisement they were in. I sit through school-board meetings. I know what it looks like when two sides would rather have the fight than the fix.

So what does it demand? Here is where I will say what I think, and it is more than my own party has proposed and less than the other wants. Judges, hundreds of them, so that a claim is heard in weeks, not years. A fix to the Flores settlement so that a family can be held together while the claim is heard, which is the thing the family-separation disaster in June was supposed to accomplish and did not, because the administration tried to do it by prosecution instead of by law. The arrangement with Mexico that the incoming government is reportedly negotiating and denying, under which people wait on the Mexican side while their American claims are decided, with Mexico paid for it, because Mexico has carried more of this caravan than we have and will not carry the next one for free. And a credible-fear standard that is applied honestly, so that the words mean something and the system stops rewarding the people who have learned to say them. That is enforcement and capacity in the same package, which is the deal that has been available for five years, and which nobody in Washington will sign because each side would rather have the other side’s half as a campaign issue.

Who pays? Right now, the people of Tijuana, who did not ask for six thousand guests, and the Border Patrol agents who are being asked to hold a line with wire and gas because the courts are not there, and the taxpayers of Texas and Arizona and California who fund the hospitals and the schools when the notice to appear goes in the trash. The people in the sports complex pay too, in two years of their lives waiting for a no. I would rather everybody paid less, and the way to that is the boring one: build the capacity, close the loophole, fund the neighbor, and stop calling it an invasion, because it is not one, and calling it one has made it harder to say what it actually is, which is a border that cannot sort, and a country that has decided, for now, that it would rather argue than fix it.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

I want to answer this question with a statute, because I think the three boxes the question offers are all downstream of a single legal fact that neither party wants to say out loud. The fact is this: under the Refugee Act of 1980 and the regulations built on it, any person physically present in the United States, however they arrived, may apply for asylum and is entitled to a hearing, and the standard for getting past the first screening, a credible fear of persecution, is deliberately low, because Congress wanted to be sure that no genuine refugee was turned away at the door. That was a decent law written for a world in which the people arriving at the door were a few thousand a year. It is now being applied to a world in which family units arriving at the southwest border set a record in October, before the caravan ever reached Tijuana, and in which the hearing that the law guarantees is two or three years away because there are about four hundred immigration judges for a backlog approaching eight hundred thousand cases. The caravan is what that law looks like when six thousand people arrive at once and the system has no capacity to do what the law requires. Everything else follows.

So is it humanitarian, security, or political? As a legal matter it is a capacity problem, and capacity problems become whichever of those three the people describing them want. It is humanitarian because the law promises a hearing and the system cannot deliver one, so people wait in a sports complex. It is a security matter because a system that cannot process arrivals cannot screen them either, and the alternative to the port is the fence, which is what Sunday was about. It is political because a visible failure of the law is an opportunity for anyone who wants to blame the law or blame the people using it, and both parties took the opportunity before the election. I spent ten years in a prosecutor’s office watching what happens when a statute is written for one volume of cases and gets another. The answer is never that the statute is cruel or that the defendants are criminals. It is that the docket does not move, and the people on it wait, and the waiting is the injustice.

Let me take the administration’s legal response, because it illustrates the problem. On November 9 the President issued a proclamation declaring that anyone who crossed the border between ports of entry would be ineligible for asylum. On November 19 a federal judge in San Francisco enjoined it, on the straightforward ground that the asylum statute says a person may apply whether or not they arrive at a designated port, and a president cannot by proclamation rewrite a statute. The administration will appeal and will probably lose, because the statutory text is not ambiguous. What the proclamation tried to do, channel everyone to the ports, is not unreasonable as policy; the ports are where the screening happens. But the ports can process forty to a hundred claims a day at San Ysidro, and the proclamation did nothing to increase that number, so its practical effect, had it stood, would have been to leave thousands waiting in Tijuana indefinitely with no legal path at all. That is the pattern of this administration’s border policy: a legally doubtful instrument aimed at the symptom, which the courts strike, while the cause, which is capacity, goes unaddressed because capacity is a budget line and a budget line is not a headline.

The other side has its own legal evasion, which I will name because fairness requires it. The Democratic position, as far as I can discern one, is that the law should be enforced as written and the administration’s instruments are illegal, which is true, and that the people in the caravan should be processed under existing law, which is also true, and that nothing about the existing law should change, which is where the position stops being serious. A law that guarantees a hearing and cannot provide one for three years is a law that has become, in practice, a release program, and the Democrats know that as well as the smugglers in Honduras do. Defending the statute while refusing to fund the judges that would make it work is not defending the law. It is defending the backlog.

So what does the caravan demand? From the paralegal’s chair, four things, none of them novel. First, judges and asylum officers in numbers that match the caseload, so that a credible-fear screening happens in days and a merits hearing in months, because speed is both the humane answer and the deterrent; a system that says yes or no in eight weeks does not fill a sports complex. Second, a legislative fix to the Flores settlement so that families can be held together through a fast hearing, which is the only way to end the choice between separation and release. Third, a lawful agreement with Mexico, not a proclamation, under which asylum seekers wait there with status and support while their American claims are heard, which the incoming Mexican government is reported to be negotiating and which, if it is done by treaty or executive agreement with Mexican consent, is on much firmer legal ground than anything tried so far. Fourth, a congressional revision of the credible-fear standard that raises the screening bar modestly while preserving the guarantee of a hearing, which is the one piece that requires both parties and which neither will offer first.

I want to close with the thing a decade in law enforcement taught me about systems under strain. When the docket cannot move, everyone involved starts behaving badly: the prosecutors overcharge to force pleas, the defendants skip, the judges rubber-stamp, and the public concludes that the law is a joke. The border is there now. The administration is issuing proclamations the courts will strike. The migrants are rushing a fence because the port is a two-year wait. The Democrats are defending a statute they will not fund. And the public, watching tear gas on television, has concluded that the whole thing is either a humanitarian outrage or an invasion depending on which channel it watches. None of them is wrong about what they are seeing. All of them are wrong about what it is, which is a law written for a volume it no longer gets, administered by a system that was never given the means to keep its promise. Fix the capacity and the three boxes collapse into one. Leave it and the sports complex is permanent, whatever anyone calls it.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

I study migration patterns, which sounds grander than it is; mostly it means I pay attention to who is moving where and why, because the small professional firms I advise in Central Florida live or die on that information. So I want to answer this question as a migration question first, because I think the caravan has been treated as a border event when it is actually a regional labor and demographic event that happened to arrive at the border in a form the cameras could follow, and the three boxes the question offers, humanitarian, security, political, are the three ways a border event gets described. The migration underneath them is older, larger, and less dramatic than the caravan, and it will continue when the sports complex in Tijuana is empty.

Here is the pattern. Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have a combined population of about thirty-three million, young, poor, and governed badly, with murder rates among the highest in the world and economies that depend on money sent home from relatives in the United States, which in Honduras and El Salvador runs around a fifth of national income. That is a structure that produces emigration the way a tilted table produces rolling marbles, and it has been producing it for fifteen years. The people arriving at the southwest border are no longer mostly Mexican men looking for work, as they were in 2000; they are Central American families and children seeking asylum, and family-unit apprehensions set a monthly record in October, before the caravan reached Mexico. The caravan did not change the flow. It gathered a few weeks of it into one place and walked it up the highway where everyone could see.

Now the three boxes, briefly, because I think the migration frame makes them simpler. It is humanitarian in the obvious sense: six thousand people in a sports complex in the rain, children among them, with a port that processes forty to a hundred claims a day. It is a security matter in the sense that any uncontrolled arrival of thousands at a frontier is one, and the rush at the fence on Sunday and the tear gas that answered it are what happens when the orderly channel is a two-year wait. And it is political in the sense that the President called it an invasion before the midterms, sent troops in numbers he inflated, and stopped talking about it after November 6, while the other party called every concern about it bigotry and proposed nothing. All three are true. None of them is the thing that will determine whether this happens again next October, which is the structure of the three countries and the capacity of the American asylum system, and neither of those was changed by anything that happened this fall.

Let me say something about Florida, because the caravan is a California story on television and a Florida story in the long run. Central Florida has absorbed Puerto Ricans after the hurricane, Venezuelans fleeing their government, and for twenty years a steady flow of Central Americans who work in the hotels and the groves and the construction trades around Orlando. The firms I advise, the landscapers and the roofers and the restaurant groups, cannot find workers at the wages they can pay, and they know exactly where the workers who do show up come from. The honest position of the Central Florida business community on the caravan is that it would like the people in it processed quickly and legally and put to work, and that it will not say so publicly because its customers are divided and its trade associations are cautious. That is the labor economics underneath the politics, and it is the reason the federal government has never fixed the system: a fixed system would either admit these people legally, which half the country opposes, or exclude them effectively, which half the economy opposes, and the current system, which admits them slowly and informally through a backlog, is the compromise nobody designed and nobody will defend.

So what does it demand? From the small-business consultant’s chair, I would say what I say to a client whose problem keeps recurring: stop treating the symptom as the event. The symptom is the caravan. The event is a regional migration that will run for another generation. The policy that addresses the symptom is capacity, judges and asylum officers in numbers that decide a claim in weeks, and a Flores fix so that families can be held together through a fast hearing, and an arrangement with Mexico, which the incoming government is reported to be negotiating, under which people wait there and Mexico is paid. The policy that addresses the event is harder and nobody is proposing it: a guest-worker program sized to the actual labor demand in states like Florida and Texas, so that the man who would otherwise walk from Honduras with his daughter to claim asylum he does not qualify for can instead apply for a visa to pick oranges in Lake County, which is what he actually wants to do. Aid to the three countries, aimed at the courts and the police rather than the governments, so that the structure tilts a little less. And an end to the threatened aid cuts, which punish the governments for the behavior of the people fleeing them and will weaken the only institutions that could slow the flow.

I will close with the migration analyst’s observation, which is that every wave that has arrived in Florida in my fifteen years here, the Puerto Ricans, the Venezuelans, the Haitians before them, was described on arrival in exactly these three boxes, and every one of them is now a part of the state’s economy and electorate that nobody would propose removing. That is not an argument for open borders; it is an argument that the question of whether people arrive is, over time, mostly settled by the structure of where they come from and the labor demand of where they go, and the question policy can actually answer is whether they arrive in order or in chaos. This fall they arrived in chaos, and the chaos was useful to everyone except the people in it. The sports complex will empty. The structure will remain. I would advise anyone in Washington to plan for the structure, because the caravan was never the client. It was the symptom, and the symptom is going to walk up the highway again.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent

Australia solved this problem, in the narrow sense that the boats stopped, and I want to describe how, honestly, including the parts that Australians prefer not to discuss abroad, because I think the American debate about the caravan is being conducted as if there were no example of a liberal democracy that chose the security answer and lived with the consequences. There is one. It is us. And the lesson is more complicated than either American camp would like.

Between 2008 and 2013 roughly fifty thousand people arrived in Australia by boat from Indonesia, most of them asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran, Sri Lanka, and Iraq, and more than a thousand drowned on the way. The political effect was convulsive; it helped bring down two prime ministers. In 2013 the incoming government adopted a policy with three parts: the navy turns back every boat it can safely turn back, anyone who does arrive is transferred to offshore facilities on Nauru and Manus Island and told they will never settle in Australia, and the whole thing is called Operation Sovereign Borders and run by a military officer who declines to discuss operational matters. The boats stopped within a year. They have not resumed. The policy has bipartisan support that no American immigration measure could dream of, and it is paired with one of the largest planned migration programmes in the developed world. Australians accepted both because they were persuaded the government controlled the door.

Now the parts we do not discuss abroad. The offshore facilities have held people for five years and more in conditions that the United Nations, our own medical profession, and a long line of courts have condemned; there have been deaths, suicides, and a children’s health crisis on Nauru that forced the government this year to begin quietly moving the children off. The policy works as a deterrent precisely because it is cruel to the people it catches, and the cruelty is not a side effect; it is the mechanism, in the same way the family separations in Texas in June were the mechanism of that policy, and the Australian public has decided that the cruelty to a few thousand is an acceptable price for control of the border and the drownings it prevented. Reasonable people disagree about that trade. I want American readers to understand that it is a trade, that we made it with our eyes open, and that it has worked on its own terms.

What does the Australian example say about the caravan? Three things. First, the American situation is a border, not a sea, and the deterrent that works on a boat does not work on a bus. You cannot turn back a family walking up a highway in Mexico; you can only decide what happens when they reach the fence, and what happened on Sunday, tear gas against a crowd that rushed it, is the land version of a turn-back and is far uglier on camera. Second, the Australian policy depended on a neighbour’s cooperation: Indonesia tolerated the turn-backs and Nauru and Papua New Guinea hosted the camps, all of them paid handsomely. The arrangement the incoming Mexican government is reported to be negotiating, under which asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their American claims are heard, is the nearest American equivalent, and it will work only if Mexico is paid and respected rather than threatened with tariffs. Third, and this is the point the American right misses, the Australian policy succeeded politically because it was paired with a generous legal programme. The public accepted the hard door because there was a wide one beside it. The American debate offers a hard door or no door, and neither half of the country will accept the other half’s version.

On the three boxes, then. The caravan is a security issue in the precise sense that an uncontrolled arrival of thousands at a frontier is one, and I would not have Australians pretend otherwise; we did not. It is a humanitarian issue in its origin, which is three small states with murder rates that would empty any city, and in its present condition, which is six thousand people in a sports complex. And it has been a political issue in the way the President used it before the election and dropped it after, which is a use Australians recognise from our own 2001 election, when a boat called the Tampa decided a government. The question of which it is primarily is a question about the observer, not the caravan.

What policy does it demand? The Australian answer, translated, would be: decide who controls the door and make it unmistakable, then open a legal path wide enough that the hard door is survivable politically. In American terms that means asylum capacity sufficient to decide claims in weeks, a lawful waiting arrangement with Mexico that Mexico is paid for, a legislative fix to the Flores constraint, a guest-worker programme sized to the labour demand that actually draws these people north, and an end to punishing the Northern Triangle governments for the behaviour of their citizens. It does not mean troops stringing wire, which is theatre, and it does not mean a proclamation rewriting the asylum statute, which a court has already enjoined. It means administrative capacity and a regional bargain, which are the two things the American system is worst at producing and the two things Australia, for all its cruelty, actually built.

So my assessment is that the caravan is a security problem by arrival, a humanitarian one by origin, and a political one by use, and that the American response has so far been entirely political. The example of a democracy that chose the security answer is available and is instructive, and the instruction is not that cruelty works, though it did, but that control works only when it is paired with a legal path that the public can see, and that the control itself is impossible without the neighbour. Australia bought its neighbours. The United States is threatening its. That is the difference, and it will determine whether the sports complex empties into an orderly process or into the next rush at the fence.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent

I manage supply chains, so when I look at the caravan I see a logistics operation, and I want to describe it that way, because I think the three boxes in the question are all describing the same throughput problem from different ends of the line, and a throughput problem has a throughput answer. Six thousand people left a city in Honduras seven weeks ago and moved two thousand miles north on foot and in trucks, fed by churches and towns along the route, protected from the robbers and the smugglers by their own numbers, and arrived at a port of entry that processes between forty and a hundred asylum claims a day. That is a shipment of six thousand units arriving at a dock rated for fifty. Every bad thing that has happened since, the sports complex, the rush at the fence on Sunday, the tear gas, the mayor declaring a crisis, is what happens at any dock when the arrivals exceed the capacity by two orders of magnitude. The question of whether it is humanitarian or security or political is a question about what you call the pile-up. The pile-up is the fact.

Let me describe the supply side, because the people in Honduras are responding to signals the way any supplier does. The signal is that a family with a child who reaches American soil and says the words credible fear will be released into the country with a court date years away, because there are not enough judges and because a court settlement limits how long a child can be held. That signal has been broadcasting for several years and the market has responded: family-unit apprehensions set a record in October before the caravan ever reached Mexico, carried by individual families paying smugglers seven or eight thousand dollars each. The caravan is a logistics innovation on that market. It moves the same product without the smuggler’s fee and with the protection of a crowd, and it was organized, as these things are, by people who understood that a crowd of thousands cannot be robbed in Chiapas or turned back in Oaxaca the way a family of four can. From a supply-chain view it is efficient, and the efficiency is the problem, because the dock did not get bigger when the shipments did.

Now the demand side, which the political conversation ignores and which Michigan knows about. The farms in the Thumb and the west side of this state, the dairies and the orchards, cannot find domestic labor at the wages they can pay, and have not been able to for a decade. The construction trades around Detroit are short. The hotels in Traverse City run on seasonal visas that the government caps below demand every year. The people walking from Honduras are walking toward that demand, and most of them know it; the asylum claim is the available door, not the destination. A system that admitted that demand and built a legal channel to it, a visa sized to the actual labor shortage, would redirect a large share of the flow into a process that could be sorted, screened, and taxed. The current system instead forces the demand through an asylum door built for a different purpose, and then complains that the door is crowded.

On the three boxes, I will be quick. Humanitarian: yes, six thousand people in a sports complex in the rain, children among them, with a two-year wait for a hearing most of them will lose, is a humanitarian problem, and the people most vocal about it are the ones least interested in the two-year wait, which is the actual cause. Security: yes, an uncontrolled arrival of thousands at a frontier is a security problem by definition, and the Border Patrol used tear gas on Sunday because a few hundred people rushed the fence, and the agency has used tear gas before and will again, and the coverage that treated it as a massacre was not accurate. Political: obviously, because the President called it an invasion before the midterms, inflated the troop numbers, and dropped it after November 6, and because the other party treated any concern about it as bigotry and offered nothing. The boxes are all true. None of them moves a single person through the dock faster.

So what does it demand? The throughput answer, which I will give the way I would give it to a plant manager. First, capacity at the bottleneck: asylum officers and immigration judges in numbers that clear a claim in weeks, because a dock that processes in weeks does not accumulate a pile and a signal that says yes-or-no fast does not attract shipments that will get a no. Second, a buffer upstream: the arrangement the incoming Mexican government is reported to be negotiating, under which people wait in Mexico while their American claims are heard, which is a staging yard, and which works only if Mexico is paid to run it and treated as a partner rather than threatened with tariffs. Third, a legal channel for the demand: a guest-worker visa sized to the farms and the trades that actually pull these people north, so that the asylum door is used for asylum. Fourth, a fix to the Flores constraint, so that families can be held together through a fast hearing rather than released or separated. And fifth, stop punishing the suppliers’ governments with aid cuts, which weakens the only institutions that could reduce the supply, and start funding the courts and the police in the three countries, which is the long-run fix and the one nobody campaigns on.

I coach youth soccer and I have two kids, and I will say the thing a father says and then I will stop. The children in that sports complex are the age of mine. They walked two thousand miles because their parents calculated that the walk was safer than staying, and they arrived at a dock that cannot process them, and they were tear-gassed on a Sunday because the dock was closed and the fence was there. None of that is an argument for letting them all in. All of it is an argument for building a dock that can tell, in a reasonable time, which of them has a claim and which does not, and treating both with the ordinary decency a plant extends to anyone standing in its receiving yard. The pile-up is a failure of capacity. Capacity is a budget. The budget has been available for five years and nobody in Washington has voted for it, because the pile-up is more useful to both parties than the dock would be. That is the political issue. It is the only one of the three that is a choice.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent

The caravan was the first migration in history that people could follow in real time on their phones, and I want to start there, because I think it explains why six thousand people walking through Mexico became the biggest story in America for three weeks and then stopped being a story on the morning of November 7, and because I think the explanation answers the question. The caravan was humanitarian for the people in it, security for the people at the border, and political for everyone else, and the political part was the part that ran on video, which is why it was the part that mattered until it did not.

Let me describe the media operation, because there was one, on both sides, and it was good. The caravan had its own hashtags within days of leaving San Pedro Sula. Reporters embedded with it and filed daily. Drone footage of the column crossing the bridge into Mexico ran on every network and every feed, and it was, as footage, extraordinary: thousands of people moving as one, which is the oldest image of threat and the oldest image of pilgrimage at the same time, and each side chose which one it saw. The President saw threat and said so every day until the election, calling it an invasion, saying there were Middle Easterners in it that his own government could not find, sending troops in numbers he inflated and then quietly corrected, and running an ad that the networks pulled for being too much even by this year’s standards. The other side saw pilgrimage and ran the pictures of children. The audience sorted itself by which pictures it had already decided to believe, and the engagement numbers on both sets of pictures were the highest of the fall. I do this for a living. I have never seen a story perform like that one, for both audiences at once.

Then the election happened, and the story died, not because the caravan stopped but because the audience that had been fed it stopped being fed. The President’s mentions of it dropped to almost nothing after November 6. The troops were told some would be home for Christmas. The networks that had led with it for three weeks moved on. The caravan itself, meanwhile, did the thing it had been going to do all along, which was arrive in Tijuana, fill a sports complex, and wait at a port that processes forty to a hundred claims a day. That part was not on video, because waiting is not footage. The rush at the fence on Sunday was footage, and the tear gas was footage, and for a day the story came back, and then the images were absorbed into the two existing stories, invasion and pilgrimage, and the audience went back to its corners. The people in the sports complex are still there. The attention is not.

Here is what that tells me about the question. The humanitarian problem is real and is the only one that does not depend on an audience: six thousand people in the rain with children, a two-year wait for a hearing most will lose, a Mexican city that did not ask for them. The security problem is real in the plain sense that a crowd of thousands at a fence is a crowd of thousands at a fence, and the Border Patrol did what it does, and had done before, and the agency that cannot process forty claims a day cannot screen six thousand people either. The political problem was manufactured, by the President first and loudest and by his opponents in reaction, and it was manufactured out of footage, and it expired when the footage stopped being useful. So the caravan is primarily a humanitarian and security problem that was, for exactly twenty-five days, primarily a political one, and the twenty-five days are the reason the other two did not get addressed.

I want to say something about attention as a resource, because it is the thing I actually understand. Attention is what gets a policy made in this country, and attention on the caravan was spent, entirely, on the question of what the caravan meant rather than on what to do about it. The administration’s one policy move, a proclamation barring asylum for people who cross between ports, was enjoined by a court within ten days because it rewrote a statute by executive order, and it was, I would argue, itself a piece of content, something to announce rather than something designed to work. The thing that would work, which every person who follows this knows, is capacity, judges and officers to decide claims in weeks, a deal with Mexico that the incoming government is reportedly negotiating and denying, a fix to the court settlement on holding families, and a legal channel for the labor that actually pulls these people north. None of that is footage. None of it was discussed during the twenty-five days. All of it is still undone, because the attention that could have forced it was spent on the drone shot of the bridge.

So my answer is that the caravan is primarily what the question’s third box describes, political, in the specific sense that the politics consumed the attention that the other two boxes needed, and that the policy it demands is the unglamorous kind that does not perform: processing capacity, a paid arrangement with Mexico, a Flores fix, and a work visa sized to the real demand. From the Grand Strand, where the hotels run on seasonal labor that the visa system has never supplied, the whole thing looks like a very expensive way of not solving a problem everyone in the hospitality business understands. The caravan will disperse. The sports complex will empty. The hashtags are already gone. And next October, when the conditions in San Pedro Sula are what they are now, another column will form and cross another bridge, and the drone will be there, and the two audiences will be waiting, and the port will still process forty claims a day. That is the thing nobody filmed, and it is the only thing that matters.