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Amongst the few substantive issues that affect the US election, migration comes top. “The crisis on the border” is a major election theme. And this reflects a dramatic surge in encounters along the US border between border guards and migrants. On just one day—December 19 2023—a record 12,000 migrants arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization to enter.
Source: Pew
As the World Migration Report for 2024 confirms, the Mexico-US border is by some margin the largest single corridor of country-to-country migration in the world.
In US discourse “the border” is commonly depicted as a zone of crisis. The chaos and suffering are real. But the World Migration Report puts this in perspective. Relative to the flow of people it would seem that the migration routes to Europe are even more lethal than the American migration routes.
Mobility in the Americas is a long-established normality going back millenia. But the current “migration crisis” is defined by the stark asymmetry between the USA in the North and the multiple polycrises in the Caribbean, Central America and South America. It is shadowed by the legacies of Cold War interventions, the War on Drugs and new confrontations with the Venezuelan regime. The moral panic is compounded by the fact that the flow of people overlaps in discourse and, to a degree, also in reality with the flow of illegal narcotics in one direction and the flow of guns in the other.
But the intensive migration regime of the Americas is also a result of the fact that it is a region that is developed enough for people to have the money, resources and information necessary to contemplate the risky business of moving. Much of the population of Central and Latin America finds itself in the most active segment of the so-called “migration hump” with incomes in the lower middle-income range.
Source: World Migration Report
The pull factor on the US side is strong. 20 million legal migrants make a living in the USA. Alongside them, or perhaps I should say “us”, the unauthorized migrant population in 2021 was thought to number at least 10 million. The number was higher in the early 2000s when it was dominated by as many as 6.9 million Mexicans living without authorization in the US.
Source: Pew
Altogether unauthorized migrants, far from acting as a drag on the American economy, account for 7.5 million workers, or just short of 5 percent of the workforce. This is how Pew estimated the sectoral distribution of workers in 2017.
Legal and unauthorized workers in the US feed one of the largest flow of remittances in the world. Mexico ranks consistently in the top four of remittance recipients ($61.1 bn in 2022) and the United States is consistently the #1 origin of remittance flows ($79.15 in 2022).
As Pew notes, its estimates of the unauthorized population at around 10.5 million does not take account of the surge in migration since 2021. It is likely, therefore. that in terms of absolute numbers we are currently at a record high, somewhat above the level in the early 2000s. However, over the course of the last twenty years the population of the US has increased by over 15 percent. So in proportional terms though the “crisis of illegal migration” is making headlines, we are well off the peaks of the early 2000s.
What has changed is the composition of the unauthorized migrant population. Today alongside migrants from Mexico, unauthorized migrants from Central America, Caribbean and South America add another 3.5 million.
This reflects the multiple crises in the region.
The largest of these is the unfolding disaster in Venezuela. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have emigrated since 2015 in response to political and economic crisis to which the US contributes with its blockade of the Venezuelan regime. This is by far the largest flow of people in the America and one of the largest in the world. One of the things that enables this stand off to continue is that the vast majority of Colombia migrants did not flow North. As of November 2023, approximately 6.5 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees had found new homes in Latin America, above all in Colombia (2.9 million) and Peru (1.5 million) and Brazil (510,000).
For many years, the USA was insulated from the effect of the Venezuelan crisis. That changed post-COVID. As the economic situation of the Venezuelan refugees deteriorated and routes were opened up through the Darién jungle into Panama, the flow to the North accelerated. In 2022 Venezuelans accounted for 150,000 or 61 per cent of the total of 248,000 Darien crossings. In 2023 that figure more than doubled.
Source: Migration Policy
The Darién jungle crossing is an extremely tough trek that was not attempted at large scale until after the COVID crisis. It is telling that this arduous land bridge between the continents was opened up in 2021, not by Venezuelans but by Haitians. Haiti’s accumulating misery especially since the earthquake of 2010s has sent hundreds of thousands abroad. In recent times the Darién route has began to attract global migants from as far away as China and Afghanistan.
Once into Central America, the migrant flow is joined by hundreds of thousands fleeing the poverty and gang violence of the “Northern triangle” of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. As they proceed North by bus and rail, their numbers are swollen by hundreds of thousands from the more desperate parts of Mexico and those with long-standing connections to the USA engaged in repeat migration.
The statistics of the US border guards reflect these migrant flow into the US.
To call this mixture “global” is to exaggerate. But it is certainly far more diverse than in previous decades.
The Obama administration was the first to deal with the new economics of migration. For Trump, combating migration looked like a winning issue. And he reacted with his familiar bluster about “building a wall” etc. But in 2019 numbers surged and Washington was forced to resort to strong-arming the Mexican government into cooperating in stopping the flow on its Southern border. As soon as the COVID lid came off, the migration flow resumed with full force.
Clearly what is called for, is a policy that goes beyond “defense of America’s border” to offering the population of the entire region both the chance for development at home and regularized movement within the region.
To its credit, the Biden administration has been one of the most active on record on the migration issue. One of its most bold initiatives was to seek regional and bilateral agreements to manage the flows across the region. Although non-binding, the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection (adopted in mid-2022) is a landmark of governmental ambition. It commits its 22 signatories to addressing the root causes and drivers of irregular migration, expanding regular pathways, combatting human trafficking, improving protection of vulnerable migrants, creating an early-warning system for large-scale crises, and strengthening dialogue and collaboration.
It is in this sense a typical policy of the Biden team. Smart and capacious in its understanding of the crisis. But also typical in that it lacks real resources to address the crisis.
Whereas the Biden administration has mustered tens of billions for Ukraine and Israel, the “root causes strategy” for addressing migration in Central America that has been headed by Kamala Harris has a budget of .. wait for it … $4 billion dollars over 4 years i.e. $ 1 billion per annum. The plan has many excellent features. It focuses on the sustainability of agriculture, improving supply chains, encouraging job-creation on the ground. If had a budget ten times as large, it would count as a serious effort. As it is, it is no more than an inadequate figleaf. Unsurprisingly, the migrants have kept on coming.
Inside the US, the administration has responded with a proliferating array of schemes to give at least “twilight” status to a range of new arrivals. These schemes now cover 2.3 million people but because they do not offer paths to permanent U.S. residence, many people in them will end up applying for asylum further overloading the asylum application system.
Meanwhile, at the border itself, the Biden administration has made use of every available administrative measure to turn unauthorized arrivals back, especially the powers provided under Title 42 of emergency COVID provisions.
The result is increasing frustration both in Mexico and the US. And an opening for Trump to offer his constituency ever more drastic policy promises. Currently, he is proposing a complete deportation of all unauthorized migrants in the USA. It is an authoritarian, xenophobic fantasy to which liberal think tanks like the Peterson Institute respond by estimating a gigantic hit to the US economy. According to their estimates US inflation would spike and GDP fall by a dramatic 5 percent.
Both sides are engaged in shadow-boxing. No one can seriously contemplate the shock to the US economy of removing 5 percent of its workforce. But what is truly telling is the fact that the debate is held without any serious consideration of the impact on America’s immediate neighborhood. Where would the over 10 million unauthorized migrants in the US be deported to? To Mexico? Back to their original homes? The surreal quality of the proposal is so telling because it reflects the systematic failure on the part of the US to address the “crisis” as a challenge of regional development and stabilization. The Biden administration at least gestures in this direction. But it too prioritizes other “more pressing” global concerns over the region where the United States is actually at home.
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