Last month I argued that one element of the new Biden border control process made sense.

Under the new rules, people who cross through a third country on the way to the U.S. and fail to seek protections there are presumed ineligible for asylum. Only people who enter the U.S. without authorization are subject to this new restriction.

Simply put, if you try to game the asylum system, you get deported with a penalty (a five-year bar on reentry). The only way to gain access is to sign up for an appointment and wait for it. Here we are several weeks later and the new system seems to be working. That doesn’t mean it has solved the problem of mass immigration by any stretch but it has reduced the level of chaos.

On the border bridge from Mexico, about 200 asylum seekers lined up on a recent morning with their phones open to a Customs and Border Protection mobile app, ready for appointments at a reception hall on the U.S. side.

Thirty miles north, the Biden administration provided a different reception for those attempting to enter the United States illegally, bringing them to a massive tent complex in the desert for migrants facing deportation. The new 360,000-square-foot facility’s shelves were stocked with diapers, snacks and baby formula, signs of the administration’s efforts to meet the changing demands of U.S. immigration enforcement…

The preliminary result is a nearly 70 percent drop in illegal entries since early May, according to the latest U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. After two years of record crossings and crisis-level strains, the Biden administration appears to have better control over the southern border than at any point since early 2021…

U.S. agents made about 100,000 arrests along the Mexico border in June, the first full month that Biden’s new measures were in effect, down from 204,561 in May, according to the latest CBP data.

The Post makes clear that the total number of people entering the US hasn’t been reduced much. In addition to the 100,000 people arrested along the border the Biden admin is admitting 43,000 people per month via the app plus another 30,000 (from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti) under humanitarian parole. Add that up and you’re nearly back to the 200,000 people stopped at the border in May.

Long term that still seems like a problem to me. We’re still adding more than 3/4 of a million migrants per year who will come here and never leave despite the fact that nearly all of them are economic migrants moving here for jobs. At some point we need to actually limit the use of the asylum system to people who are actually eligible and insist on removing the people who don’t qualify. Nothing like that is going to happen during the Biden administration which is one reason I’ll be happy to see him leave office.

That said, at least the border patrol isn’t being overwhelmed with 11,000 asylum seekers per day. It’s still the wrong approach, just as it was before this was adopted, but at least this way it can be managed in a somewhat more orderly way. Punishing the people who cheat is better than sending them back to Mexico for another try at crossing the border the next day. But even this temporary restoration of order may be short-lived. Border activists led by the ACLU are suing the administration.

The ACLU-led suit…characterizes Mr. Biden’s policy as a replay of President Donald Trump’s pre-covid attempt to impose a flat ban on asylum for border crossers who transited a third country, which federal courts on the West Coast had blocked, calling it a violation of a 1980 statute providing “any alien physically present in the United States” with a right to seek asylum.

The Biden administration differentiates its plan, citing the fact that migrants may rebut the presumption that they should be denied entry and that the new system provides alternative pathways to legal entry. It therefore qualifies as a “condition” on asylum-seeking, the administration argues, of the kind a separate provision of immigration law permits. To be sure, the ACLU-led lawsuit complains that glitches in the asylum appointment app prevent many from taking advantage of it, but a June 6 DHS statement noted that it had enabled more than 1,000 asylum seekers a day since May 12 to present themselves at ports of entry. The department recently announced an increase in the number of such spaces available to 1,450 per day. A half-million people a year could seek asylum through this channel.

Republican led states are also suing the administration claiming (plausibly in my view) that the new system lacks required congressional authorization. I’m not sure what their odds are in court but if either side wins we’ll probably wind up with the kind of overwhelming chaos we had for most of last year.