President Joe Biden this week signed an executive order that would cap the number of asylum seekers able to enter the United States at the southern border. It’s arguably the most restrictive border policy he’s taken as president — one that puts him more in line with former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies — and would reshape America’s asylum system if allowed to take effect.

The shift comes after Republicans, pressured by former President Donald Trump, moved in February to kill a bipartisan immigration bill they’d once supported. The bill, which Biden and Democrats supported, would have made it easier to expel migrants from busy crossings at the southern border, itself already a shift away from immigrants-rights approaches that had defined policy attempts from the left in recent years. 

“While Congressional Republicans chose to stand in the way of additional border enforcement, President Biden will not stop fighting to deliver the resources that border and immigration personnel need to secure our border,” a White House spokesman said in a statement Monday.

But this political move — even if it does survive likely court challenges — is less a solution to America’s interlocking immigration crises, and much more a symptom of the country’s inability to create a cohesive federal solution to the crisis. 

Border crossings are at an all-time high. Non-border cities are finding themselves unable to provide services for migrants. And there’s a record years-long backlog of cases of people seeking asylum. As Vox’s Nicole Narea explained, the crisis isn’t really the number of people who are coming; it’s more that the type of migrant has shifted — from lone male economic migrants to families (many of whom are seeking asylum) — and America’s immigration systems are not designed with this in mind. 

All that contributes to today’s immigration debate being more polarizing than any other issue the US has grappled with in nearly 25 years.

That’s according to Gallup, which polls Americans each month on what they consider to be the most important issue facing the nation. For three consecutive months now, immigration has topped that list, beating out the government (overall), the economy, and inflation.

That masks a huge partisan divide: While 48 percent of Republicans said it was the most important issue in Gallup’s most recent poll, just 8 percent of Democrats did.  

At the same time, Gallup finds the support for immigration that does exist is often rooted in idealism. “They welcome immigration in concept,” Lydia Saad, a research director for Gallup, told Sean Rameswaram on a recent episode of Today, Explained,  “but they’re concerned about illegal immigration.” 

“The thing about immigration is that on some level, it’s always a conversation about what we want America to be,” Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (and a former Vox immigration reporter), told Today, Explained.

One major factor complicating our national immigration debate is that for all the talk on the issue, the country has done very little to legislate on it. Sure, presidents have taken charge with executive action, and states are increasingly trying to get in on the game. 

But the last major federal immigration legislation passed way back in 1996, under President Bill Clinton. That law increased enforcement while decreasing the number of legal pathways to enter the country, which ultimately, Lind argues, led to a lot of the mess we’re seeing today. Presidents after Clinton moved the needle on immigration, but none signed legislation even remotely comprehensive. 

The closest a piece of immigration policy got to becoming law was 2013’s “Gang of 8” bill in the Senate, which included provisions to step up border enforcement in exchange for a path to citizenship for some immigrants already in the country. It could not survive the increased partisanship that emerged during the Obama years: “There was polling at that time that showed that Republicans supported the bill — until you told them Obama supported it,” Lind says. “Immigration was an issue that resisted polarization for a long time, and then that stopped.”

Riding high on that message of brokenness, naturally, is former (and he hopes future) President Donald Trump. He’s approaching 2024 with an even tougher approach to immigration than he had in either 2016 or 2020 — a plan that includes “closing the border” and mass deportations.

“So Americans have hit this point where, you know, they don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of the policy issue,” Lind says. “They absorb this message that it’s broken.”

While the current federal immigration situation is stuck somewhere between deadlocked and dystopian, state and local governments are trying to find solutions.

“I think it is important for local governments and cities to prove that these problems can be solved so people don’t lose all faith that government can figure anything out,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat elected in 2023, tells Today, Explained. “Because we actually can.”

Denver has recently welcomed some 40,000 immigrants, especially since Texas and some other southern states began busing migrants to blue cities. And while it has created problems, especially around housing, encampments, and city spending, Johnston is confident that the city has found a way to work around the current broken immigration system.

Central to Johnston’s enthusiasm is the city’s new Denver Asylum Seeker Program, which provides asylum seekers with housing, food assistance, and job training. “What we’ve done is set up an infrastructure,” says Johnston, that pairs a federal six-month waiting period for asylum-seekers to obtain work authorization with a city-run job-training program. The city says the program sets immigrants up for financial security and ultimately costs less than relying on housing shelters. “So instead of seeing that as a risk,” Johnston says, “we see it as an opportunity.”

Other blue cities — including some “sanctuary cities” — have struggled more to accommodate recent migrants. Absent congressional action, many are actively working on ideas that include work visas for immigrants (something Canada already does, and which states like Indiana and Utah have in the past lobbied the federal government for), improved coordination around immigrant arrivals (a favorite cause of big-city mayors like Johnston and New York’s Eric Adams), and better sharing of best practices. 

Ultimately, experts say, federal action is needed. 

But “we’re not gonna wait for anyone else to save us,” Johnston says. “Now we’ve just got to figure it out ourselves.”

Additional reporting by Hady Mawajdeh and Sean Rameswaram. You can listen to the entirety of the Today, Explained podcast’s two-part series on immigration here.

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.