Migration Policy Institute (MPI) - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

Increased Number Of Migrants From India And Haiti Attempting To Cross Into The US

Kaylee Greenlee - reporter — Sun, 30 May 2021 09:02:14 +0000

(Photo by SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images)

An increasing number of migrants from India, Romania, Haiti, and Cuba are attempting to enter the U.S. through the southern border, Axios reported Wednesday.

Migrants are reportedly flying to Central America since U.S. courts are backlogged with asylum cases preventing them from living or working in the country as their case is processed, according to Axios. Border officials encountered over 33,000 migrants from countries other than Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador attempting to enter the U.S. in April, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Some smugglers and migrants are waiting until border officials are overwhelmed to attempt to cross the border, Migration Policy Institute Associate Policy Analyst Jessica Bolter told Axios.

“The Biden administration has made it clear that our borders are not open and individuals and families are subject to border restrictions, including expulsion,” a Department of Homeland Security said, Axios reported.

A migrant family waits to be processed after being apprehended near the border between Mexico and the United States in Del Rio, Texas on May 16, 2021. (Photo by SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images)

CBP officials encountered 35% more migrants attempting to enter the U.S. from countries other than Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in April than in March, according to the agency. Around 30% of the families encountered in April came from countries other than Central America or Mexico.

While most of the migrants are single adults or families, Border officials have encountered several unaccompanied minors from Bangladesh, India, and Armenia, including a 1-year-old from Ecuador, Axios reported. (RELATED: Migrants Who Thought They Could Stay In The US ‘If We Came With Our Children’ Filling Up Mexico’s Shelters)

“Immigration from Central America is important,” independent research consultant and migration analyst Cris Ramón, told Axios. “But we can no longer assume that that’s going to be the only source of immigrants coming to the U.S.-Mexico border, because of the fact that immigrants are far more mobile, with being able to fly to countries like Mexico.”

Source: https://dailycaller.com/2021/05/27/central-america-romania-customs-and-border-protection/

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As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants

Kirk Semple — Thu, 28 May 2020 09:48:22 +0000

Laborers have not just stopped traveling in search of work. Many have also headed back to their home countries.

Credit…Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

MEXICO CITY — A migrant shelter in southern Mexico called La 72 has for years been a popular way station for those traveling from Central America to the United States. Last year it received a record number of visitors, sometimes sheltering more than 2,000 a month.

In recent weeks, however, that traffic has come to a grinding halt and even gone into reverse.

Since late March, amid the coronavirus pandemic, no more than 100 migrants have passed through the shelter. And nearly all were heading south, trying to get back to their homes in Central America.

“We’ve never seen this before,” said Ramón Márquez, the former director of the shelter. “I’ve never seen anything slow migration like the coronavirus.”

Border closures, suspended asylum programs, interruptions in global transportation, and stay-at-home lockdowns have drastically curbed migration around the world, particularly from poorer nations to rich ones.

In Latin America, once-crowded migratory routes that led from South America, through Central America and Mexico and to the United States have gone quiet, with the Trump administration seizing on the virus to close the border to almost all migrants.

But the phenomenon extends well beyond the Americas. The number of East Africans crossing the Gulf of Aden to seek work in the Gulf States has plunged. Farms in western Europe are contending with severe labor shortfalls as travel bans have blocked the movement of seasonal migrant laborers from Eastern Europe.

Credit…Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“The pandemic has essentially — not absolutely, but essentially — stopped international migration and mobility dead in its tracks,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-founder and president emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

In some places, migratory flows have seemingly made a U-turn, as migrants no longer able to earn a living abroad have decided to return home, even if their home countries are mired in political conflict and economic ruin.

Thousands of Venezuelans who had sought sanctuary and work in Colombia in recent years have crossed back into Venezuela, Afghans have returned home from Iran and Pakistan and Haitians from the Dominican Republic.

“We’re finding mass numbers moving back to their countries of origin because they cannot survive,” Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations Refugee Agency, said in an interview.

Many of those who are returning barely had a toehold in the informal labor sector in their adopted countries and were denied access to social safety nets. “They are the people who are at the bottom of the pyramid,” Ms. Triggs said. “And they are almost always the first to go.”

In recent years, one of the world’s busiest migration corridors has run through Central America and Mexico, with tens of thousands of people reaching the southwest border of the United States every month, either to apply for asylum or try to slip undetected into the country.

Arrests of undocumented migrants at that border have long stood as a measure, however imperfect, of changes in the regional migration flows.

In March, the American authorities arrested 29,953 migrants there, a slight drop from the previous month’s total. But migration experts say April’s numbers, when they are finally published, may reflect a significant decrease in migration.

Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times

Shelter managers and migrants’ advocates throughout the region said they had seen migrant traffic slow to a trickle in recent weeks.

The Rev. Pat Murphy, director of Casa del Migrante, a shelter in the Mexican border city Tijuana, said that only about 10 people had shown up at his door in the past two weeks looking for a place to sleep — and that most had just been deported from the United States rather than traveled from the south.

Latest Updates: Global Coronavirus Outbreak

But Father Murphy and most other shelter operators in Tijuana and elsewhere have closed their doors to new arrivals as a way of protecting quarantined residents. And some shelters in the region have shut down entirely for fear of becoming places of contagion. One shelter, Casa del Migrante Nazareth in the Mexican border city Nuevo Laredo, suspended operations after it suffered an outbreak that sickened at least 15 residents.

Most of the migrants who have reached the southwest border of the United States in the past year have been from Central America, but advocates say that the particularly stringent lockdown and border-control measures throughout that region have persuaded some to delay their departures until the situation eases.

Migrants have also been discouraged by the Trump administration’s decision last month to severely tighten border restrictions. Citing the threat of the coronavirus, the administration instituted a new policy under which it has been quickly deporting people who illegally cross the southwest border of the United States. The administration also halted the processing of undocumented migrants at ports of entry.

The changes have effectively blocked access at the southwest border for migrants seeking asylum.

“I would hazard to say that the only migration that’s working now is migration with smugglers,” said Mr. Márquez, the former director of La 72 migrant shelter, which is in Tenosique, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

The United States is not an outlier. All over the world, governments have temporarily closed their doors to refugees seeking protection.

Credit…Raul Arboleda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Triggs said that of more than 120 countries that have ordered some form of border closure, only about 30 of them are giving any consideration to the claims of asylum seekers. Most countries, she said, “have closed their borders, terminated their asylum process, and are pushing back.”

And resettlement of refugees she said, “has stopped for all practical purposes” because of limitations in air travel.

In recent weeks, boats loaded with hundreds of Rohingya refugees have been turned away from ports in Malaysia by officials citing border closures related to the pandemic, according to human rights groups.

But while opportunities for migration and protection have been severely curtailed in many places around the world, deportations have continued over the objections of migrant advocates — sometimes with damaging public health consequences.

Scores of deportees sent back to Guatemala from the United States in the past several weeks have tested positive for Covid-19, Guatemalan officials said. The United States government sent a C.D.C. team to Guatemala to test deportees and found some of them were sick, Guatemalan officials said.

At the time, American officials said that all deportees were given a “visual screening” and had their temperature checked before boarding chartered deportation flights.

In some places, stranded migrants are crammed into shelters, encampments, and overcrowded hotel rooms, unable to practice social distancing or easily protect themselves against infection.

A group of about 2,500 migrants, many of them Haitians, are stuck in government migration centers in southern Panama because the border with Costa Rica is closed, impeding their trip toward Mexico and the United States, said Marcelo Pisani, the regional director of the International Organization for Migration for Central America, North America, and the Caribbean.

Credit…Luis Robayo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

At least 23 of those migrants have tested positive for the coronavirus, he said.

As economies continue to crater, sowing poverty, food shortages, and desperation, the drive among the neediest to relocate will most likely soar once again, experts said.

The International Labour Organization estimated this week that nearly half of the world’s workers are at risk of losing their livelihoods. Job losses have already begun to cause a drop in remittances — the money migrants send back home — with potentially devastating impacts in the developing world.

Erol Yayboke, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said he anticipated that even once the pandemic fades, protectionist impulses among some leaders in wealthy nations may continue, thwarting a complete resumption of longstanding migration patterns.

Instead, Mr. Yayboke said, flows may be greater than normal between developing countries that pose fewer restrictions on migration.

“I think that once you turn the faucet back on, it’s not going to immediately flow,” he said. “And when it does flow, it’s not necessarily going to flow in the same direction.”

Mr. Papademetriou offered another possibility: In spite of border restrictions in wealthy countries, the pent-up demand might drive desperate people to start surging across borders, as Central Americans have done recently in migrant caravans, and Syrians and others did in 2015 during the European migration crisis.

This would pose political and philosophical tests for liberal-minded governments, he said.

“What do you do then?” Mr. Papademetriou said. “That’s going to challenge the countries that have been using the rhetoric of human rights, of solidarity, of cooperation. It’s going to challenge that kind of rhetoric. How will they react?”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/world/americas/coronavirus-migrants.html

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US expands powers to deport migrants without going to court

BBC — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:45:38 +0000

Rights activists protesting against ICE near the organization’s headquarters in Washington DC last week – Reuters

The US government is introducing a new fast-track deportation process that will bypass immigration courts.

Under the new rules, migrants who cannot prove they have been in the US continuously for more than two years can be immediately deported.

Until now, expedited deportations could only be applied to those detained near the border who had been in the US for less than two weeks.

Rights groups say hundreds of thousands of people could be affected.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says it will challenge the policy in court.

The new rule is expected to be implemented with immediate effect after it is published on Tuesday.

US immigration policy has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months – in particular, the conditions at the country’s detention centers on the southern border with Mexico.

Kevin McAleenan, acting secretary of Homeland Security, said the change was “a necessary response to the ongoing immigration crisis” and would help to relieve the burden on courts and detention centers.

US Border Patrol says it has made 688,375 apprehensions on the south-west border since October 2018, more than double that of the previous fiscal year.

Several analysts predict US President Donald Trump will make hardline immigration control a key element of his re-election campaign in 2020.

What’s changing?

Previously, only people detained within 100 miles (160km) of the border who had been in the US for less than two weeks could be deported quickly.

Migrants who were found elsewhere, or who had been in the country for more than two weeks, would need to be processed through the courts and would be entitled to legal representation.

But the new rules state that people can be deported regardless of where in the country they are when they are detained, and without allowing them access to a lawyer.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the new rules would allow it to pursue large numbers of illegal migrants more efficiently.

There are 10.5 million undocumented migrants in the US, according to the Pew Research Center – Reuters

Who is affected?

There are about 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the US, according to the Pew Research Center.

The average undocumented adult immigrant has lived in the country for 15 years, it says.

The DHS has said it could make exceptions for those with serious medical conditions or “substantial connections” to the US.

It also says migrants who are eligible for asylum will still be entitled to speak to an asylum officer, who will access their claims.

Muzaffar Chishti, a lawyer from the Migration Policy Institute, says many migrants will struggle to be able to prove how long they have lived in the country when they are put on the spot.

He told CBS News: “When you’re apprehended on the street or at a factory, it’s obviously not easy to establish with evidence that you’ve been here for more than two years because you’re not carrying all your documents with you.”

Who is objecting?

Within hours of the policy being announced on Monday, the ACLU said that it was planning to launch a legal challenge.

“We are suing to quickly stop Trump’s efforts to massively expand the expedited removal of immigrants,” the rights group tweeted.

“Immigrants that have lived here for years will have less due process rights than people get in traffic court. The plan is unlawful. Period.”

Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told reporters: “The Trump administration is moving forward into converting ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] into a ‘show me your papers’ militia.”

Legal expert Jackie Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, told Reuters that about 1% of the people detained by ICE and 0.5% of those deported were actually US citizens.

“Expedited removal orders are going to make this much worse,” she said.

Who is objecting?

Within hours of the policy being announced on Monday, the ACLU said that it was planning to launch a legal challenge.

“We are suing to quickly stop Trump’s efforts to massively expand the expedited removal of immigrants,” the rights group tweeted.

“Immigrants that have lived here for years will have less due process rights than people get in traffic court. The plan is unlawful. Period.”

Legal expert Jackie Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, told Reuters that about 1% of the people detained by ICE and 0.5% of those deported were actually US citizens.

“Expedited removal orders are going to make this much worse,” she said.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49079495

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America closes the doors to asylum-seekers from the South

The Economist - Democracy in America — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 07:48:51 +0000

A new rule issued by the White House effectively prevents Latin Americans from claiming asylum at the southern border.

COUNT THE ways in which the government under President Donald Trump has grown more hostile to foreigners who seek sanctuary. For years America led the world, resettling more persecuted people as refugees than any other country. During the Cold War, especially, welcoming asylum seekers from countries under Soviet oppression sent a message that American democracy was more self-confident and open than any rival political system. Few arrived at a land border; most were processed by officials overseas: for example, the “boat people” who fled war in Vietnam, were processed in South East Asia and transferred as refugees to America in the 1970s. More recently Somalis fleeing conflict in the Horn of Africa, or victims of persecution in the Middle East found homes in America.

Mr. Trump has already dramatically cut how many are resettled in this way. Last fiscal year just 22,500 refugees were resettled in America (Canada now accepts more). That was down from 110,000 who were expected (by Barack Obama’s administration) for fiscal 2017. Yet as the number of resettled refugees fell, and amid efforts to deter and deport unauthorized immigrants, there was a surge in asylum applications at America’s southern border. Most were people fleeing Central America, notably El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Many say, plausibly, that they are escaping widespread criminal violence and the threat of abduction or murder by gangs. In practice, distinguishing between such cases and plain economic migrants is hard.

Relatively few have been processed, so as a big backlog has built up, thousands of people have been stranded in northern Mexico, where applications for asylum are considered. That has added to a widespread impression of a crisis at the border. Mr. Trump responded this week with a new interim order, one issued without congressional approval. Under this, a person who crosses through a third country—for example, a Guatemalan who passes through Mexico en route to America—may no longer seek asylum. The new rule insists that an individual must have sought asylum in that third country, and been rejected, before moving on to try for sanctuary in America. It will apply to unaccompanied children, as well as adults.

Only three exceptions to the new rule are allowed. It will not apply to victims of trafficking, to the tiny numbers of people who seek to reach America by sea, or to those who arrive in the United States having only passed through countries that have not signed the UN refugee convention or the convention against torture, such as North Korea.

The UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has said it is “deeply concerned” by the interim rule. It might well be. The UN’s refugee convention allows for refugees to pass through third countries—think of Vietnamese boat people who initially went to Thailand or other parts of Asia—before lodging an asylum appeal elsewhere. Remove that principle and the effect is to tell the (mostly poor) countries next door to war-torn or violent ones that only they, and not rich ones, have a duty to help refugees. The governments of Central America will not go along with this. Mexico’s government has rejected the proposal as “severe” and “not the best way forward”. A court in Guatemala has prevented that country from agreeing to act as a “safe third country” to which America can deport asylum-seekers.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said the rule, which takes force on July 16th, is “patently unlawful” and it will sue to scrap it. Democrats, too, are opposed. Mr. Trump may be calculating that a dust-up over this issue will help him politically, even if he loses. If a court or Congress were to overturn the rule, that could energize his nativist base: 73% of those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 “strongly approve” of his handling of immigration; only 4% “strongly disapprove” and most of the remainder are supportive. On the campaign trail next year, he will doubtless tell voters that only he can be trusted to keep outsiders from gaming the immigration system.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a think-tank in Washington, notes that Mr. Trump’s new policy is similar to one that Europeans have long pursued. In Norway, for example, anyone arriving at its border after first passing through neighboring Russia (as some Syrians did in 2015) is denied asylum because Russia has been declared a safe third country for refugees. Similarly, the Dublin convention in Europe insists that those seeking asylum within the EU must apply in their first country of arrival—a rule that (if properly applied) would place most of the burden of processing them in countries with a Mediterranean coastline, such as Italy and Greece, and hardly any on northern countries. On an even larger scale, European countries give large amounts of foreign aid to the third countries through which refugees typically pass, such as Turkey and Libya, so that those countries will stop the refugees from crossing the Mediterranean. Australia, too, has paid for third countries in the Pacific to host asylum seekers who had tried to get down under.

The lessons from these international examples are complicated, says the MPI. It is not clear that safe third-country agreements are implemented effectively—few asylum-seekers actually get returned from EU countries to Turkey, for example. And if the real point of such deals were to deter asylum seekers from making journeys in the first place, then it is not obvious that it works. Unless the third countries use rather brutal force to detain asylum seekers, as Turkey and Libya do, then the flow of people tends to continue. Big payments, in the form of billions of dollars in foreign aid, are essential for buying co-operation from countries (or even warlords) who operate at a distance from Europe’s borders, clamping down on asylum seekers out of sight of European eyes. For the safe third country system to work, in other words, it seems to need willing and rather authoritarian partners who will lock up asylum seekers or otherwise prevent their movement. The proposed solution to the increase in asylum seekers thus relies on the very thing the system was originally intended to undermine.

Source: https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/07/16/america-closes-the-doors-to-asylum-seekers-from-the-south

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