Given the never-ending partisan brawl over the southern U.S. border, it is not surprising that American voters would believe that the United States faces a wave of migration with little precedent in the history of the world.
And yet, of some 22 million displaced people on the move in the Americas last year, maybe more than 3 million came to the United States. Colombia has received more than one-third of the 7.7 million migrants who have fled Venezuela. The United States has received about 500,000.
This fact should reshape the immigration debate in Washington. If the Biden administration and Congress want to manage the crush of asylum seekers and help the unprecedented number of migrants moving across the Western Hemisphere, they might focus less on hardening the border and more on dealing with the regional dimension of the challenge.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, points out that countries along migrants’ path to the United States have few choices. Stopping migrants and sending them back home is the least realistic. (Honduras, for instance, has seen immigrants from China, Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, India and Uzbekistan. Where should Hondurans “send them back” to?)
So countries along the way are either openly letting migrants in transit through — busing them north as Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras have done — or, like Mexico, performing a sort of Kabuki of cooperation with Washington, occasionally deploying the National Guard, which detains and expels some migrants, to keep Washington happy.
Several have tightened visa restrictions to stanch the flow. Almost every country north of Colombia now requires a visa for Venezuelans. Following Nicaragua’s decision to allow visa-free entry for Cubans to continue their journey north, Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico started requiring transit visas to stop the air route from Havana to Managua that had layovers in their countries.
Still, nobody is happy with how anybody else is handling the issue. The United States wants more help stopping migrants along the route. It has provided substantial aid — committing some $2.9 billion since 2017, according to USAID — to help South American countries address the humanitarian crisis caused by mass Venezuelan migration.
But aid groups assess that financing represents only about one-fifth of what is needed. The Colombian government has been calling for more. Overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, in May it stopped offering temporary residence to Venezuelans, so new arrivals have less reason to stop their journey north.
Aid to most South Americans countries goes into the hands of dictators. Only the people of South American can change their conditions by electing better governments and/or rebelling against dictators. We can not absorb the current flow of immigrates according to big city mayors, boarder states governors and a majority of our citizen . We need to moderate boarder immigration with a wall that has monitors to detect tunneling under it, thorough it and over it to focus out Boarder Patrol resources.
Ed - we are regular visitors to El Salvador, my wife was born there. I observed again that on their TV stations they show how well Salvadorans do in the US with plenty of encouragement from NGOs and armies of attorneys here. Consider that the going wage in El Salvador is $12 per day versus a Salvadoran cleaning crew here that charges $50 per hour, one can only imagine the attraction to come here. It is not just the corruption, lack of opportunity and crime there, but the enormous wage gap that drives those folks here. Can't blame them. Moreover, NGOs advertise locally in the media on how to get to the US and what assistance may be provided. We should all withdraw any funding from NGOs and that includes particularly the religion-based ones that collect millions from clueless US citizens.
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(2) comments
Aid to most South Americans countries goes into the hands of dictators. Only the people of South American can change their conditions by electing better governments and/or rebelling against dictators. We can not absorb the current flow of immigrates according to big city mayors, boarder states governors and a majority of our citizen . We need to moderate boarder immigration with a wall that has monitors to detect tunneling under it, thorough it and over it to focus out Boarder Patrol resources.
Ed - we are regular visitors to El Salvador, my wife was born there. I observed again that on their TV stations they show how well Salvadorans do in the US with plenty of encouragement from NGOs and armies of attorneys here. Consider that the going wage in El Salvador is $12 per day versus a Salvadoran cleaning crew here that charges $50 per hour, one can only imagine the attraction to come here. It is not just the corruption, lack of opportunity and crime there, but the enormous wage gap that drives those folks here. Can't blame them. Moreover, NGOs advertise locally in the media on how to get to the US and what assistance may be provided. We should all withdraw any funding from NGOs and that includes particularly the religion-based ones that collect millions from clueless US citizens.
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Keep the discussion civilized. Absolutely NO personal attacks or insults directed toward writers, nor others who make comments.
Keep it clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
Don't threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Anyone violating these rules will be issued a warning. After the warning, comment privileges can be revoked.