Steve Rattner, a New York investor who advised the Treasury Department in the past, has fascinating observations in his appearances on Morning Joe. One this week really caught my eye. It was on one of his favorite topics — immigration.

Not the problem it seems

While we hear a lot about the need for a border wall, it’s not the whole problem by a long shot. Rattner said that 2.5 million of this year’s border apprehensions weren’t those who snuck in and got caught.

Instead, they were people who came in and were detained at ports of entry by border patrol. Another perhaps 600,000 did sneak in and are outside the jurisdiction of the immigration system. So taken as a whole, apprehending 2.5 million of 3.1 million isn’t a bad record.

So what happens now?

The 2.5 million are stuck in the quagmire of an under-funded immigration court system. So they are “out there” in many different lines waiting for hearings. They aren’t getting hearings because we lack the funds to have enough courts to hear them. During the Trump administration that backlog in the court system grew from 540,000 to 1.3 million. And remember that was with Trump’s border wall effort, family separation and other extreme measures.

Did Biden beckon them?

Some feel Biden’s softer message toward immigrants as he first took office gave some an incentive to come. Maybe. But remember that economic conditions here are strong, thus inviting. We’re in a strong economic recovery mode coming off the Pandemic. We have more jobs than it seems we can fill. It’s rare to see a restaurant or hotel/motel without “help wanted” signs.

But this is not the case in Latin America. It’s even worse in countries like Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela where gangs and strife add to the distress of residents. People feel threatened. They fear for the lives of their children and themselves.

And we can’t welcome them?

My own family immigrated from Germany at the turn of the 20th century, some a bit later. My husband’s is from Northern Europe and perhaps Ireland as the name might imply. Unless you are Native American, your family didn’t originate here. And in many cases, they were fleeing from economic disaster just like those coming today.

My ideas

I’ve felt strongly for a long time that we need a broadly stepped up immigration court system. I think we need to build substantial temporary housing facilities along the border where asylum seekers can be housed while awaiting a prompt hearing. We need tremendous resources placed in those border cities to ensure hearings take place quickly. They can help place the migrants in jobs where needed and help send them on their way to family and work.

Of course, that awful backlog must be erased at the same time. And for those, the asylum hearings will need to occur in or near the cities where the migrants now have scattered.

We need the influx

Rattner pointed out that the U.S. fertility rate, like that of many nations, has been dropping. Next year our population will peak at about 340 million people. Adding in 1 million new immigrants a year will serve to keep that growth flat over time. But if we want to grow at the same rate we’ve been growing, we need to add 3.5 million new migrants per year.

Do we want to be like China?

The birth rates in China also are flat or falling. Its population will drop to some 700 million by the turn of the century. Still a lot of people. But not the 1.4 billion this year. And that spells a tremendous impact on that nation’s economy. Rattner asks, “Do we want to be like them?”

Workers need to match the jobs

Of course, none of this will work unless the workers coming in match the jobs we have and in the places these workers chose to live. There is no easy all-encompassing solutiion. But what we’re doing now is cruel to those coming. And our economic system isn’t being served.