The Washington Post
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 billon 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.
Send comments to [email protected].
