This post was updated Aug. 25 at 7:37 p.m.

The United States has long branded itself as a haven for asylum seekers and refugees.

In 1948, the U.S. signed into law the Displaced Persons Act, the first piece of national legislation that provided a formal legal framework to accommodate people leaving their country out of fear of persecution.

Unfortunately, this branding has not always matched with reality. There have been many times during our nation’s history where public sentiment has turned against immigrants.

We live during one of those times today. A 2024 poll conducted by Monmouth University found that 61% of Americans consider illegal immigration to be a very serious problem, up from only 45% in 2015.

It is partially in response to this sentiment that on June 4, President Biden announced a new executive order that will restrict asylum eligibility when the daily average of encounters between migrants and border patrol exceeds 2,500. These restrictions will then be lifted when the number of encounters dips below 1,500.

However, this will not solve the crisis at the border. Rather, this move undermines the Biden administration’s principal view of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. Biden has used this phrase in the past to appeal to a romanticized view of the U.S. as a country that welcomes immigrants, but in this case, his actions speak louder than words.

Under these restrictions, migrants will only be referred to an asylum officer if they express either a credible fear of going back to their country of origin or explicitly state their desire to seek asylum.

There is a fundamental problem with this process: People have to use the CBPOne app in order to get an asylum appointment, which has several barriers to access.

“It’s really disappointing that we would see a Democratic president utilize the same type of strategy that Trump did,” said Amanda Alvarado-Ford, the deputy directing attorney of the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area.

In addition to the new policy’s anti-immigrant turn, there is also reason to believe that it will not be an effective long-term solution to the border crisis.

It may even make things worse.

According to Fred Tsao, the senior policy counsel for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, rather than going back to reside in their home country, migrants may resort to more dangerous and desperate measures to cross the border.

A lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations on behalf of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services described the new restrictions as essentially banning any migrants who don’t arrive in the country via government-designated entry points.

Further, the new restrictions unfairly raise the standard for the level of persecution that asylum seekers must prove to justify their claims. Thus, asylum seekers who would previously have been admitted will be turned away while these restrictions are in place.

Devastatingly, these new restrictions further impact families within the U.S.

“Even if it’s at the border hundreds of miles away, there are still very real effects that it has on undocumented families and mixed-status families that are already within the country,” said Jeffry Umaña Muñoz, a UCLA alumnus and the outgoing chairperson of Improving Dreams, Equity, Access and Success, a group that represents undocumented students at UCLA.

The short-term decrease in border crossings cannot justify forcing people to return to the danger they’re fleeing.

However, it’s not just asylum seekers who are affected by the new regulations. Monika Langarica, a senior staff attorney with the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said they are also taking a toll on immigration advocates working at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Those organizations and the pro bono lawyers that are available, even before this new change, have never come close to meeting the needs of the many people at the southern border. And so, changes like these, which make things even more complicated and more confusing, only cause further strain for those organizations and advocates,” Langarica said.

These restrictions also break with decades of precedent in terms of how the U.S. accommodates asylum seekers.

Javier Hidalgo, the legal director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, said these new restrictions went against the spirit of landmark pieces of legislation such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 because they undermined humanitarian protections that were designed to protect people fleeing persecution.

A more effective solution to the border crisis would instead be to strengthen the current asylum system and offer alternative pathways for immediate border crossing to asylum seekers.

The American Immigration Council has compiled several recommendations to the Biden administration, including clearing the existing immigration court asylum backlogs, working with Latin American countries to build asylum and refugee processing structures and creating noncustodial processing centers at the border itself.

In sharp contrast to the Biden administration’s band-aid attempt to assuage American voters’ fears of immigrants before the 2024 election, these recommendations are all rooted in humanitarian goals and concrete research.

Rather than a short-term, futile distraction from the real border crisis at hand, implementing these alternative solutions provides the possibility for deep-rooted humanitarian progress for asylum seekers to the U.S.