The record multitudes of refugees on the US-Mexico border has been described as “a perfect storm” by a former senior adviser on migration to the Obama administration.
The accumulation of simultaneous crises — internal wars, gang violence, pandemic and politically induced recession, the reversal of decades of poverty eradication, and hunger — are driving a huge human displacement. Millions are leaving their homes across Latin America for sanctuary and economic security in the US.
Venezuela alone, enduring one of the world’s worst economic crises, has since 2015 seen an exodus of 7.2 million people, a quarter of its population. Not all are heading for the US, but those who are are feeding into streams from Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, while gang violence drives refugees from Ecuador and Haiti. The UN expects up to 400,000 people this year to traverse the Darién Gap, a treacherous 70-mile jungle connecting Central and South America, nearly 40 times the recent average.
The crisis for the US authorities has come to a head with the expiry of an emergency, Covid-inspired public-health measure, Title 42, used since 2020 to expel 2.7 million people who crossed into the US illegally. Now uncertainty, fed by smugglers’ and social media claims, falsely suggesting the gates are being thrown open and deportations will end, is leading thousands more to head north in the hope that the restoration of a more permissive legal asylum appeals mechanisms means they will be allowed in. More than 11,000 migrants a day have been crossing the southern border illegally.
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Since he took office, US president Joe Biden’s administration has, nevertheless, allowed some 1.8 million migrants to stay in the country while awaiting asylum hearings. It is rolling out new eligibility restrictions, intending that many will still be deported relatively quickly.
The issue is politically toxic and certain again to dominate debate in next year’s elections. Democrats and Biden, however, like many European politicians, find themselves unwilling to counter the populist myths that migrants are a threat to the jobs and wages of voters, a permanent, parasitic underclass dragging America down.
And yet there is strong evidence, both in Europe and the US, that growing economies need and can absorb extra labour, gaps which migrants can fill, and whose social costs can be met by the positive contributions they make to the exchequer. Assimilation is far less problematic than the anti-immigration lobby suggests. A recent US study of intergenerational mobility finds that the children of immigrants are nearly twice as likely to end up rich as the children of the US-born. New, generous legal paths to immigration should be the priority, not more Trump walls.