MEXICO — Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador today. Ahead of the meeting, the U.S. has considered asking Mexico to take additional measures to stem migration, Hamed Aleaziz reports in BuzzFeed News. Aleaziz obtained a draft memo that outlines the U.S. policy agenda going into the meeting, which includes wanting Mexico "to implement a policy to help relieve pressure on border resources as they continue to use a Trump-era border policy, Title 42." Christopher Wilson, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, notes that today's meeting will cover more than migration — Mexico's secretary of economy is among the participants. "The White House is smart to embed the migration issue in a broader framework of bilateral cooperation," Wilson says. 

EMERGENCY SHELTERS — The Biden administration has successfully reduced the number of migrant children in Border Patrol custody by opening more than a dozen emergency shelters "using convention centers, concert venues, army bases and camps built for oil-field workers," report Michelle Hackman and Alicia A. Caldwell of The Wall Street Journal. But the rapid ramp-up of these emergency shelters, which are run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has advocates concerned about the conditions inside. "When we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the government has to ensure that the services are being provided and that we are meeting the needs of the children," Scott H. Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, told Adriana Gomez Licon of the Associated Press. In an opinion column for The Washington Post, Greg Sargent lays out how the situation at the border is being managed by the Biden administration and why, politically, some Republicans may not want to be constructive.  

DEMOGRAPHIC NEEDS — The pandemic has exacerbated the slowdown in U.S. population growth, but immigration can help, reports Philip Bump of The Washington Post. He notes that between 2010 and 2019, immigration was solely responsible for preventing or stemming population declines in nine states. To his concluding question of "whether immigration can offset an eventual population loss," we’d say it depends on the level of legal immigration (our suggestion here). As Nicole Narea of Vox points out: "The average age of newly arriving immigrants is 31, which is more than seven years younger than the median American, meaning that they could help replace an aging workforce. They are also more entrepreneurial, which encourages economic dynamism, and more likely to work in essential industries, such as health care, transportation, construction, agriculture, and food processing."