As growing numbers of migrants — especially families and mothers with children — are seeking to enter the U.S. along our country’s border with Mexico, the system for processing and detaining them is under increasing strain.
Last week, President Donald Trump, who has long called for harsh measures to deter immigration to the U.S., threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico.
The State Department has cut off some humanitarian aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Residents of the three Central American countries account for most of the migrants who continue to make their way to the United States as part of the so-called “migrant caravans.”
Both moves disregard who is trying to come to American and why. As a result, these “solutions” are counterproductive.
There are two basic elements to this type of migration — the pull of opportunities and safety in the United States, and the push of deteriorating conditions in the country migrants are leaving.
Addressing both the pull and push is essential.
While the number of people seeking to enter the United States at southern border stations is increasing rapidly, it remains below historic highs. A major problem is that U.S. processing facilities are not set up to handle the large numbers of children arriving at the border, either with a parent or alone. Most U.S. border facilities are set up to process single men, who have made up the bulk of would-be immigrants for years.
Children and families are being held at make-shift facilities — including in a tent compound under a bridge in Texas that was emptied over the weekend. Because there are too many people to process, many are moved to holding facilities around the country, some far from the border.
Critics say that the Trump administration was long ago warned that a surge was coming — migration to the southwestern U.S. is seasonal with fewer making the journey in the heat of summer — and failed to plan for it.
“The current surge was totally predictable and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times.
The overflow is compounded by a Trump administration policy change that requires that each migrant be processed, with a hearing, before being allowed to enter the U.S. or turned back to their home country. This has resulted in the detention of more than 40,000 migrants on a daily basis. Under an Obama administration policy often called “catch and release,” migrants who were deemed not to be a safety threat and were likely to appear in court for a hearing, were allowed to enter the U.S. as immigration officials focused on immigrants who were a higher priority.
The Trump administration thought a “get tough” approach would deter migration from south of the border. It has not.
Like most migrants, those from Central America are often leaving their home country to seek a better life and to escape violence. A parent motivated to walk 2,000 miles with their child is pretty driven to leave misery behind and to take a chance on safety and opportunity in America.
The best way to change this dynamic is to improve conditions in their home country through the aid that the Trump administration is beginning to withhold.
A key goal of foreign aid is to improve economic conditions in the countries that receive that aid, says Kristin Vekasi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maine. In Honduras, for example, American investment aims to create more economic opportunity for Hondurans so fewer of them will want to leave the country. If the U.S. stops its aid, these countries will have less money to make needed improvements that could improve their economies and decrease violence — and they will resent the U.S. if conditions deteriorate.
“It defies logic to think that [taking away foreign aid] would decrease the number of migrants” from these countries, Vekasi told the BDN in December, when the president threatened to pull aid from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
There are serious problems at the southern U.S. border, caused by an influx of migrant families and children, and a lack of U.S. planning. Solving these problems will require policies that are proven effective — such as hiring more judges to hear immigration cases, monitoring some immigrants rather than holding them in detention camps and continuing humanitarian investments in Central American countries.