WHEN POLITICS MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: FUTURE

THE BOY IN the video is crying. He is 10 years old, and he has been walking alone on a rural road outside of La Grulla, Texas, for a long time. He was traveling with a group, he says to the Border Patrol agent who has found him, and got left behind. "I came here looking for help," he sniffs. "I'm afraid." He doesn't know what will happen to him, or why the adults around him are behaving so unpredictably.

There's no doubt that this boy was in mortal peril. Hundreds of bodies have been found at the Texas border in the last year alone. But whose fault is it?

Commentators have blamed everyone from his parents in Nicaragua to President Joe Biden, but the real problem--not just at the border, but in so many areas of American life--is something more complicated and difficult to grasp, let alone fix. When the rules that govern people's lives are subject to repeated change at the hands of politicians who are focused on short-term electoral gain or partisan point scoring, it becomes increasingly difficult to make responsible decisions and plan for To make good choices, people must have a fairly solid sense of what the consequences of those choices will be. But an ever-greater sphere of American life is subject to political risk. A lack of clarity about consequences can lead even people who want to do the right thing down dubious paths.

For more than a decade, there has been a move away from generating lasting policy through conventional means and toward short-term wins through any mechanism available. This is reflected in everything from the disintegration of the congressional budgeting process to the increase in the use of executive orders to the vestigial involvement of the legislative branch in decisions about treaties and warmaking.

All of this would be less likely to do damage under a government more constrained in its size and scope, since you cannot generate political uncertainty in areas where politics have no place. But as a starting point, a political culture that takes more seriously the costs of uncertainty and that values the rule of law would be an improvement.

If we want immigrants and asylum seekers to come only when they have a legitimate claim to entry and to do so in an orderly manner, we must communicate the terms of admission clearly and consistently. Congress should do its job and hammer out a durable immigration policy, then provide the means to implement it. This is not a matter to be dealt with via tissue-thin executive...