Questions
According to video and article, what main reasons are contributing to people migrating or seeking asylum from these countries and whether the people are refugees or migrants? (3 points)Country/CountriesReason(s)Migrant or Refugee?Northern TriangleSyriaVenezuela
Readings and video:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/world/migrants-refugees-europe-syria.html
Global Migration
By: Sarah Glazer
Pub. Date: January 17, 2020
Access Date: January 27, 2020
Source URL: http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2020011700
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc.
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
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Introduction
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Overview
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Background
………………..
. . . . . . . Situation
Current
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Outlook
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Pro/Con
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Chronology
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. . . . . .Features
Short
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
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Bibliography
………………..
. . . . Next
The
. . . . .Step
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
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Contacts
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Footnotes
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. . . . . . the
About
. . . Author
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
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Page 2 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
The world is witnessing the highest numbers of migrants on record, nearly 272 million in 2019, more than triple the
number in 1970. Advocates of immigration restrictions say migrants steal jobs and sometimes abuse a system
designed to provide asylum for the truly persecuted. But human rights advocates say nations are shirking their
responsibility to provide refuge to those experiencing persecution and violence. Citing a broken system in which
asylum-seekers sometimes disappear into the United States, the Trump administration is limiting those who can
seek asylum. It also is taking aggressive steps to end what President Trump calls a “very serious crisis” at the
U.S.-Mexico border. Migrant advocacy groups say Trump has manufactured a crisis, and statistics show illegal
immigration from Mexico is in a long-term decline. Governments often seek to stem migration by providing aid to
improve the economies of origin countries. Experts say the solution is not so simple, because it takes at least a
generation before rising income encourages people to remain at home.
Overview
Ricci, a 25-year-old farmer from Honduras, and her 4-year-old son arrived at the U.S. border after a harrowing
ordeal.
Two asylum-seeking migrants from
Central America cross the Rio
Grande into the United States on
June 12. The global migrant
population totaled nearly 272 million
in 2019. (AFP/Getty Images/Herika
Martinez)
A member of an indigenous group that has long faced discrimination and violence, Ricci fled Honduras after her
husband was murdered in December 2018 and she received death threats.
But her troubles were only beginning. While she was in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico in March, a man
tried to kidnap Ricci’s son, and she told U.S. asylum officers she feared it would happen again if she did not
receive asylum in the United States. (Her last name is being withheld to protect her privacy.) The Trump
administration, however, had just introduced its “Remain in Mexico” policy, requiring asylum-seekers to stay in
Mexico while their case is adjudicated.
An American soldier helps fortify the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego in 2018.
President Trump has called illegal border crossings a “very serious crisis,” but
immigration advocates say the administration’s policies are partly responsible
for the problems. (AFP/Getty Images/Guillermo Arias)
Ricci says she was sent back to Juárez, considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world, to await a decision in her asylum case — a wait that
would last five months. Under U.S. and international law, refugees have a right not to be returned to a country where their life or freedom would be
threatened, but Ricci says it was not until her third interview that she was allowed to enter the United States.1
Then-Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration introduced the policy because migrants were trying to “game” the system and
disappearing into the United States. Discouraging this “catch and release” practice would reduce incentives for illegal immigration, Nielsen said in
announcing the policy in late 2018.2
Ricci’s story illustrates a political divide over immigration that is playing out across the globe. On one side, President Trump and populist politicians in
Europe say immigrants are overrunning their countries, changing the culture and abusing laws aimed at providing asylum for the truly persecuted. On the
other side, human rights advocates say governments are shirking their obligation under international treaties to provide refuge for those fleeing
persecution or violence.
Page 3 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Inherent in this debate is the anxiety expressed by workers and politicians that migrants depress wages and steal jobs. “They’re taking our jobs. They’re
taking our manufacturing jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us,” Trump, speaking of undocumented Mexican immigrants, said at a Phoenix
rally during his presidential campaign.3
At the same time, many experts say migrants are needed to fill labor shortages in aging populations in Europe and Asia. By 2050, fewer than half of
Europeans over 18 will be working — down from about two-thirds now — because Europe’s population is graying, according to Michael Clemens, director
of migration at the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “That’s a drastic shift,” he says.
The world is witnessing the highest numbers of migrants on record, nearly 272 million in 2019, more than triple the number in 1970. However, the share
of migrants as a percentage of world population remains small at 3.5 percent.4
“The population of foreign-born people living outside the country of their birth is still at the same level it’s been historically,” a share that has generally
ranged from 2 to 3 percent since 1890, says Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy and government at George Mason University and co-author
of a 2018 book analyzing how 30 countries regulate immigration.5
“That’s why it’s not really a crisis; the crisis is in governance,” he says, pointing to the failure of Europe and other nations to deal with the more than 6
million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.
Michael Doyle, a political scientist at Columbia University, agrees the global response has been inadequate. “Migrants have not been vilified in these
ways since the 1920s,” he says. “The refugee system is failing to respond to the needs of millions.”
The global migrant population includes:
• Asylum-seekers — those who have traveled to another country seeking protection from persecution but whose cases have yet to be
adjudicated;
• Refugees — those who have met the requirements for protection under international law, according to the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, which identifies, screens and in some cases resettles refugees with partner governments to provide protection; and
migrants — those who change their country of permanent residence, although there is no accepted definition of migrant in international
• Other
6
law.
Capturing most of the headlines are refugees fleeing violence, war or persecution — 70.8 million, according to the United Nations — the highest number
since it began tracking refugee movements after World War II. Most refugees have been internally displaced within their own countries — some 41.3
million — while another 20.4 million (not counting Palestinian refugees) have crossed borders, according to the U.N.7
Just three countries account for the majority of refugees, all places where war has dragged on for years: Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan, the latter
an African country racked by civil war since 2013.8
Despite attracting most of the attention, refugees are a small minority of all migrants. Most migration is through legal pathways for economic reasons,
Gest says, whether it’s an American white-collar employee of a multinational firm assigned to London or a Nigerian driving a taxi in Paris. “Most
immigration is orderly, safe and regulated,” he says.
Page 4 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
After the failure of most Western nations to give refuge to Jews during the Holocaust, international compacts sought to help refugees. Under U.S. law, a
refugee is a person who is unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” due to one of five reasons:
race, religion, membership in a particular social group, political opinion or national origin. That definition is based on the United Nations’ 1951 refugee
convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.9
However, some experts say this definition, with its individualistic notion of persecution, is too narrow to encompass all who are fleeing more generalized
violence or the breakdown of order. For example, the U.N.’s tally of 70 million displaced persons does not include most of the 4 million Venezuelans who
have fled the economic collapse and political turmoil in their country.10 (See Short Feature.)
“The 1951 convention standards were designed for the Cold War very explicitly, and they were a political compromise that rested upon a very narrow
reed of who is fleeing for emergency purposes — persecution,” says Doyle, who recommends the global community broaden the definition of refugees to
include those fleeing from any external threat to their life, including climate change.
But most experts, including Doyle, concede that today’s anti-immigrant political climate makes a broadened definition unlikely, and some immigrant
advocates fear tinkering with the convention would weaken it.
Under current laws in Europe and the United States, people can only apply for asylum from within the destination country, which often means taking
perilous journeys and paying thousands of dollars to smugglers to sneak them across borders. Like Ricci and her son, 70 percent of migrants who cross
the Mexico-U.S. border this year will intentionally seek out the U.S. Border Patrol, treating it as an immigration office, and wait to be apprehended, writes
David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.11
“The international refugee regime is fundamentally broken,” said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, who served as the U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees
from 2010 to 2015 and now directs the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School in New York City.12 He points to European countries
like Hungary that have erected fences against refugees.
“We’ve moved from an era where nations talk about cooperating to shelter refugees and are now talking about cooperation to keep refugees away,” says
Susan Gzesh, executive director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.
In addition, most refugees are “locked in a second exile,” languishing in their country of refuge because they are not permitted to work, Aleinikoff says.
The majority of refugees live at least five years outside their home territories; half stay over 20 years, according to the U.N.13
Today’s refugees are often fleeing “forever unsolvable conflicts” based in deep-seated antipathies between people who live side by side but seek power
for their ethnic group or religion, says Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington and
Brussels.
Papademetriou points to the Syrian civil war, the largest single cause of the migration crisis that sent 1 million people flooding into Europe in 2015.
“Suppose [Syrian President Bashar] Assad wins the whole pie?” he asks, “Do we really think Syria will become a society where people will live in
harmony?”
Although migrants’ share of the world population has risen only slightly since 1960, the number of people moving from the poorer countries of the global
south to wealthier Europe and North America more than doubled between 1990 and 2015. Sixty percent of those moving to Europe came from outside
the continent.14
Increasingly, Doyle says, climate change is influencing the other two main drivers of migration: poverty and civil war. “The Syrian civil war was not caused
by drought, but the drought contributed to instability, pushing small farmers into cities [and] delegitimizing the regime. In Central America, the drought has
made the viability of small farms much more problematic.”
This movement has helped turn public support against immigration, according to University of London migration expert Eric Kaufmann. “Public opinion on
immigration tends to sour when [immigrant] numbers increase” and immigrants’ ethnicity differs from the nation’s majority, he said.15
The “appification” of migration is enabling movement.16 With today’s connectivity, “people can see other people’s lives and there is much better access to
immigration information,” says Marie McAuliffe, head of migration policy research for the International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-linked
organization in Geneva.
Politicians and critics pushing back against immigration argue that most arrivals are “economic migrants” who fabricate stories of persecution so they can
fit the profile of an asylum-seeker.
“Foreign nationals who are seeking irregular entry into the United States are doing so, in most cases, to be able to live and work in this country. A
credible fear [of persecution] or asylum claim provides an avenue for them to do so indefinitely,” said Andrew R. Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy
at the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization in Washington that advocates for fewer migrants.17
But Alexander Betts, professor of forced migration and international affairs at the University of Oxford in England, and Paul Collier, an Oxford economist,
have argued there is one good way to tell the difference: Migrants lured by economic hope reach for “honeypots” — rich cities such as New York — while
refugees, driven by fear, seek whatever haven they can find.
Page 5 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Except for Germany, the top 10 havens in 2018 were some of the world’s poorer nations, chosen for proximity, not economic opportunity: Turkey, Jordan,
Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, Uganda, Sudan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Germany.18
As migration continues to roil international politics, here are some of the questions the international community, politicians and migration experts are
debating:
Is there really a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border?
“Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” President Trump tweeted on April 1, 2018, about groups of migrants, many of them mothers with children,
traveling together from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.19
By June of that year, he was describing illegal immigration at the southern border as a “very serious crisis.” By October, he said “criminals” were in a
caravan and announced he would send the U.S. military to close the border.20
The administration and immigration critics noted that arrests of undocumented migrants along the border were surging, reaching nearly 1 million for fiscal
2019, 88 percent more than 2018.21
But immigrant advocacy groups and some immigration experts say Trump manufactured the crisis. They note that Trump’s crisis declaration occurred at
a time when illegal Mexican immigration at the southern border was in a long-term decline, which most experts ascribed to improving economic conditions
in Mexico together with a drop in the growth rate of working-age Mexican men.22
In 2017, the number of undocumented immigrants at the southern border reached a more than 40-year low. In 2018, U.S. agents arrested 396,579
people along the border, a 30 percent increase over 2017 but still far below the annual peaks of over 1 million arrested in the 1990s and early 2000s.23
“I certainly wouldn’t call what’s happening at our border a crisis,” says Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton
University. “We could deal with what’s happening at the border pretty readily if we just admitted them as refugees and asylum-seekers and processed
them, just as we did with the Vietnamese boat people who came in the 1970s to ’90s. We took in about 1.3 million people. They’re all integrated into
American society and getting along pretty well.”
What created a sense of crisis was not so much the numbers but the change in the kinds of migrants, says Cristobal Ramón, a senior policy analyst at
the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that seeks bipartisan solutions to immigration. Central American families with children, a population
the U.S. border detention and asylum system was not built to handle, replaced the traditional flow of Mexican male workers, he says.
In addition, a shortage of immigration judges worsened the backlog of cases, which was estimated at more than 1 million as of November, up from about
600,000 in 2017.24 “That’s why the recent arrivals pushed us to the brink,” Ramón says.
One reason for the ballooning number of cases is the decision by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to effectively put back on the docket more than
320,000 cases previously closed by judges, under a new policy that limits judicial discretion, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration court data.25
Under the Obama administration, immigration agencies and judges were directed to prioritize cases that posed threats to border security, national
security or public safety from felons.26 However, the Trump administration removed prosecutorial discretion to decline to prosecute low-priority cases and
judicial discretion to close such cases; this change increased waiting times, says David FitzGerald, co-director of the Center for Comparative Immigration
Studies at University of California, San Diego: “U.S. government policy is largely responsible for producing that crisis.”
Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies praises the Trump administration’s shift away from the Obama approach of closing cases administratively.
“All too often under the Obama administration, this procedure became nothing more than a ‘back-door amnesty’ for aliens who entered illegally,” he
wrote.27
Page 6 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Ariana Sawyer, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog group, says the Trump administration was wrong to frame the influx as a
security crisis of dangerous criminals. “But there is a crisis of families fleeing really serious violence and persecution in Central American countries,” she
says, citing people she has interviewed who were plagued by gangs that terrorize shopkeepers and their families.
A caravan of Honduran migrants crosses the Guatemalan border on its way to
the United States in January 2019. While President Trump tweeted in 2018,
“Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” human rights advocates say
migrants are fleeing persecution at home. (AFP/Getty Images/Orlando Sierra)
In addition, the administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy has exacerbated the crisis, according to Human Rights Watch. Many families and children are
living in unsanitary tent camps while they wait weeks or months in Mexico for their asylum court date. Along the Mexican side of the border, Sawyer says,
“we’ve seen a rise in violence” from criminal Mexican cartels vying for power or territory.
Cartel members will kidnap asylum-seekers, then scroll through their cellphones for numbers of U.S. relatives or friends from whom they demand
ransoms of thousands of dollars, she says. “The Trump administration is almost directly enriching these cartels.”
The vast majority of Central American asylum-seekers have family members or friends in the United States willing to shelter them in their homes,
according to Sawyer, and under previous administrations they could have awaited their court dates with them.
However, the Trump administration contends that policy just led to more undocumented immigrants disappearing into the United States and never
showing up for their court dates. Trump condemned the previous process: “Somebody comes into our country … and we have to catch them…. We then
take their names and we bring them to a court — can you believe this? — and we release them…. And they go into our country, and … then you say,
‘Come back in three years for your trial.’” Trump claimed that only 2 percent of those released show up for their immigration hearing. However, Trump
administration officials say about 50 percent do, while immigration advocates and some researchers put the figure higher.28
“The data show they do show up at pretty reasonable rates,” says Ramón, the Bipartisan Policy Center analyst.
Arthur says the main draw for the recent wave of families is the 1997 federal court settlement in Flores v. Reno, which limited the time that children could
be kept in detention to 20 days and was extended to parents with children. “So it encourages migrants to bring a kid in anticipation of release,” he says.
“We need to close the Flores loophole.” A federal judge in September rejected a Trump administration rule that would have put an end to the Flores
settlement.29
Page 7 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
In December, the number of migrants crossing the border dropped for the seventh straight month — by 75 percent from its high point in May, a declining
trend for which the administration has claimed credit, although some experts say the drop may reflect usual seasonal trends. “The administration’s
strategies have brought dramatic results…. We have essentially ended catch and release along the southwest border,” Customs and Border Patrol
acting commissioner Mark Morgan said in October.30
Many migrants arrive for economic reasons, not legitimate asylum claims, Arthur says, because the U.S. wage advantage can be as much as 16 times
what they can earn at home.
Cato’s Bier agrees that many in the current surge are coming for economic reasons, but said the fundamental reason is that asylum is “the only legal
process available to them” because waiting for a green card takes up to 65 years.31
The solution, he argues, would be to increase the number of temporary work visas, as the United States did under the bracero program for seasonal
Mexican farmworkers, which together with tough enforcement led to a dramatic drop in illegal immigration between 1954 and 1964.32 Until that happens,
he says, Central American immigrants will continue to “pound square pegs into round holes” by claiming asylum to gain access to the U.S. job market.
Are Europe’s efforts to reduce migration a model for the U.S. and other countries?
The photographs are eerily similar. In one, Oscar Martinez’s 23-month-old daughter clings to him as they float in the Rio Grande River after both
drowned while trying to cross into the United States in June. In the other, Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian, lies face down on a Turkish beach after
drowning while trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2015.33 It was the photo of Alan, some say, that awakened Germany’s conscience and led Chancellor
Angela Merkel to open Germany’s doors to Syrian migrants — if temporarily.
A woman holds a picture of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the
Mediterranean in 2015, during a rally that year for refugees in Marseille,
France. The boy’s death produced an outpouring of international sympathy
and helped publicize the plight of migrants. (AFP/Getty Images/Anne-Christine
Poujoulat)
Page 8 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Oxford’s Betts said Europe’s experience holds lessons for the United States, both negative and positive.
Mexico’s agreement to help enforce the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy mirrors Europe’s failed attempt to set up a similar system to
process asylum-seekers outside Europe in Libya and elsewhere, Betts said.34
At its embassy in Beirut, Italy annually screens about 1,000 Syrian asylum-seekers who are then flown to Italy if they meet Italian standards, according to
the University of California’s FitzGerald. “The purpose is to create an illusion that it’s possible for refugees to travel safely,” he says of these small
numbers.
Over the past two and a half years, the European Union (EU) has paid the Libyan coast guard to intercept tens of thousands of migrants and asylumseekers at sea who were trying to reach Italy. Libya has housed them indefinitely in detention centers with “inhuman and degrading conditions,” including
sexual exploitation, according to Human Rights Watch.35
Betts argued that other policies helped to end Europe’s migrant crisis by 2017, and these policies could be a positive model for the United States, notably
a 6 billion euro ($6.7 billion) package for Turkey in exchange for its hosting 3.7 million Syrian refugees and preventing them from continuing to Europe.
This deal, together with aid packages to Africa and Jordan to create jobs for refugees, “removed some of the ‘push’ factors” that caused migrants to flee
home and transit countries, he said.36
But former U.N. official Aleinikoff calls the Turkey deal “shameful.”
“This was business as usual — the global north buying off the global south to keep refugees where they are,” he says. “It’s a poor model.” Instead, the
EU and other countries should have agreed that each country would take a share of Syrian refugees, before migrants risked their lives to reach Europe’s
shores, he argues.
The Turkey deal “has definitely become the model” for the Trump administration’s recent “safe third-country” agreements negotiated with Guatemala,
Honduras and El Salvador, three nations known collectively as the Northern Triangle, says Columbia University’s Doyle, who is critical of those accords.
Under the agreements and new Trump administration rules, migrants will not be permitted to apply for asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border unless they
have applied for asylum to the first “safe” country they traveled through — namely in the Northern Triangle.37
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and human rights groups are challenging those rules in court. The Trump policy “effectively ends asylum at
the southern land border, because everyone but Mexicans transits through a third country,” says ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. “When you learn that
Guatemala has only five asylum officers, and the same gangs that persecuted people in El Salvador are there in Guatemala, you understand why that’s
not a realistic option.”
The logic behind a safe third-country agreement is that “it’s reasonable to expect a refugee to go to the first country where their life is not in danger,”
says Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, who supports Trump’s policy. “Otherwise you’re forum-shopping for the best country, and if you pass
through a number of countries, that suggests you’re an economic migrant” — not a refugee.
But none of those Northern Triangle countries meets the definition under international or U.S. law of a “safe” country, which must have a fair asylum
process and be a place where a refugee’s life would not be threatened by persecution, according to Gzesh of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.
38
“Those are all countries people are trying to get out of because of fundamental failures of the state to protect human life,” she says, noting high levels of
government corruption. El Salvador has the highest homicide rate of any country in the world, and Honduras the fourth highest.39
Although superficially similar, the U.S. agreements with Central American countries actually bear little resemblance to Europe’s agreement with Turkey,
says the Migration Policy Institute’s Papademetriou. Most of the money for Turkey, he says, went to the refugees themselves — for example as debit
cards to pay for rent and groceries — which “demonstrates to the local population that these newcomers are contributors, not just fakers” and helps
integrate them into Turkish society. By contrast, critics say, the estimated $143 million in foreign aid that Trump first threatened to withhold and then
released in exchange for the Northern Triangle countries’ signing the agreements likely will not go to the refugees.40
The Trump administration defends the agreements as an effort to share the distribution of hundreds of thousands of asylum claims. “The U.S. asylum
system remains overtaxed,” the administration said, noting that people from the Northern Triangle countries account for half of asylum claims.41
Europe may be facing a new migration crisis, Germany recently warned, stemming from migrants traveling from Turkey to Greece, where migrant camps
are already overloaded. Arrivals to Greece in 2019 rose more than 30 percent from 2018. Europe has been unable to come up with an allocation system
everyone can agree to, despite the urging of Germany’s previously anti-immigrant Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.42
The spike may be the result of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “again demonstrating he holds the key to how many people can leave,”
Papademetriou says. Erdogan’s government has long complained that it has not received enough money to support its more than 3 million refugees and
has disputed that it received all 6 billion euros promised.43 Erdogan has twice threatened publicly to send refugees on to Europe, most recently as he
invaded Syria in October to create a Turkish-controlled zone there.
“It seems like Erdogan’s getting what he wants in money, safe haven and lack of monitoring” of his abuses of democracy, says the University of
California’s FitzGerald. “That’s a pretty high political price that the EU is paying.”
Erdogan’s behavior demonstrates the danger of such agreements, says the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Ramón: “These countries that are buffers may hit
a point where they say, ‘We can’t do this anymore unless you give us more resources.’ That’s the real issue the Trump administration will face.”
Are developed countries doing enough to address the causes of increased migration?
Ever since the 2015 migration crisis, European political leaders have talked increasingly about giving foreign aid to migrants’ countries of origin as one
way to reduce the “push” factor of poverty and other root causes of emigration.
But the Migration Policy Institute’s Papademetriou says Europe’s foreign development aid has been too small to make a difference.
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And it takes at least a generation before such aid will reduce migration, he and other experts say. The development of a middle class, which requires
improved government services, is vital to improving an economy to the point where fewer workers leave — something that has already occurred in the
decades-long drop of Mexican migrant workers to the United States.
Yet during this developmental period, Papademetriou says, emigration continues to be a rite of passage for young people who take the view, “‘My father
left 30 years ago and found a job in the U.S.; my brother left five years ago…. I’m waiting to become 14, 15, 16 to follow the same path.’”
A young migrant who fled Africa and was rescued by the Italian coast guard
waits to be processed in Pozzallo, Italy, in October. The European Union has
paid Libya and Turkey to keep migrants and asylum-seekers in their countries.
(Getty Images/SOPA/LightRocket/Danilo Campailla)
The conundrum is that rising incomes in poor countries almost always lead to more migration, researchers at the Center for Global Development, a
Washington think tank, concluded in a review of 71 poor countries whose per capita income has grown since 1960.44
When people have more money in their pockets, they invest it in whatever they calculate will improve their lives the most, and sometimes that is
migration, says the Center for Global Development’s Clemens. That calculation can have surprising results. For example, low-income Guatemalans are
using microfinance loans not for their intended purpose of starting small businesses, but to pay smugglers to get them to the United States.45
Improving economic conditions also usually leads to better health, with more children surviving to working age, Clemens notes. But the population rise
can outstrip the growth in jobs. As countries get wealthier and develop economic links with richer countries, young working-age people are “more likely to
have an uncle in Paris or a cousin in Lisbon,” Clemens says, and are more savvy about the opportunities abroad.
However, a German study of 25 donor countries and 129 recipient nations found that a different type of aid — improving public services, such as
schools, health care and air quality — was associated with falling emigration rates. At the same time, the researchers warned, an “unrealistically large”
doubling of aid for public services would be needed to lower emigration rates by 10 to 15 percent.46
In Central America, where gang violence is an important spur to the exodus, “there are definitely opportunities to reduce migration pressure,” Clemens
says. He points to a U.S.-funded neighborhood mentoring program that helped keep youths out of gangs. The program halved the rate of reported
homicides in neighborhoods where it operated, according to the study.47
Youth jobs programs can reduce emigration modestly in the short term in countries that remain poor, a survey of research by Clemens and his
associates found. But no study has found such programs capable of reducing youth unemployment on a large scale, according to the Center for Global
Development’s review of the literature.48
The more than $2 billion sent by the United States and other donors to Central America over the last few years has not slowed migration, according to
Sarah Bermeo, associate director of the Duke University Center for International Development. Much of that aid has been aimed at the donor
governments’ more immediate self-interests, such as countering narcotics traffic, she said. Even if governments seek to reduce organized crime and
corruption, improvements probably will not happen fast enough for parents who “worry about children being raped or killed on the way to school,” she
wrote.49
Efforts to help farmers by, among other things, combating drought and climate change could also reduce pressure to migrate, but those areas have
received little foreign aid: Of all the U.S. aid to Guatemala from 2015 to 2017, only 16 percent went to agriculture; the figure in Honduras was 14 percent,
and in El Salvador, it was less than 1 percent.50
Even more skeptical of aid is Nayla Rush, a researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, who wonders whether the funds ever reach their intended
targets because of corruption. “The West is good at signing blank checks, but it should be more careful about accountability,” she says.
Experts say reducing migration caused by civil war or suppression of human rights is difficult. In a review of 19 studies on the impact of aid on violence in
countries affected by civil war, Christoph Zürcher, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, concluded, “Aid in conflict
zones is more likely to exacerbate violence than dampen violence.” He cited instances where those invested in violence have sabotaged aid projects in
order to disrupt cooperation between the local population and the government or have even stolen the aid.51
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Development aid can positively affect human rights and democracy, but the impact “dissipates quickly,” according to the Center for Global Development.
52
Clemens has calculated that raising economic growth by just 1 percentage point a year in an average poor country would require aid equal to 10 percent
of the country’s GDP, and that a high level of growth would need to be sustained for three generations before it would begin to discourage migration.
“The evidence we have implies that aid would need to act in unprecedented ways, at much higher levels of funding, over generations, to greatly affect
some of the most important plausible drivers of emigration,” Clemens and co-author Hannah M. Postel wrote.53
Background
European Emigration
In the 19th century, both colonialism and the desire to secure a better life spurred the movements of people.
By the late 1800s, France, Britain and the Netherlands had gained control over much of the world’s Muslim territories: France conquered Algiers in 1830
and later took control of Morocco and Tunisia, along with eight predominantly Muslim countries in West Africa. The British colonized Nigeria and India,
which included modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Dutch dominated trade in Southeast Asia.54
During this period, France began importing low-paid workers from Algeria and other African territories, while other European countries recruited workers
from their colonies and territories.
Many Europeans also emigrated to the United States. Spurred by the potato famine of 1845-49, more than 2 million Irish left for North America between
1845 and 1855 in overpacked cargo ships, some dying along the way.55
By 1853, Boston’s population was 40 percent Irish, and a majority were foreign-born. In response to this change, native-born Protestants founded the
anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant party dubbed the “Know Nothings” because members took an oath of secrecy. Their goal was to reduce immigration and
introduce a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship.56
But the first legislation to embody anti-immigrant sentiment was aimed at Chinese laborers, who were recruited by railroad magnates in the 1860s to help
build the transcontinental railroad, at one-third the pay of white workers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, pushed by the Irish Catholic-led
Workingmen’s Party in California, suspended Chinese immigration for 10 years and declared Chinese immigrants ineligible for citizenship.57
Aside from this prohibition, however, open immigration prevailed until the 1920s, says the University of California’s FitzGerald. Today’s distinction
between refugees and economic migrants did not exist, because “if anyone could come in, there was no reason to have a separate refugee policy,” he
says. At Ellis Island, the immigration station that began operating in New York Harbor in 1892, “the inspectors didn’t care if you were fleeing persecution
or wanted a better job or were coming to join your family,” he notes.
This period saw waves of Italian, Polish, Jewish and other European immigrants arrive in the United States.
But as anti-immigrant sentiment rose, Republican President Warren Harding in 1921 signed the Emergency Immigration Act, which set quotas for
European countries at 3 percent of their representation in the 1910 immigration population, thus slashing immigration from Poland by 70 percent and
from Italy by 82 percent.58
In 1924, the National Origins Quota Act was even more favorable to Northern and Western Europeans by pegging quotas to the 1890 immigration
population: one-half of the quota went to immigrants from Britain.59
A major justification for these restrictions was the pseudoscience of eugenics, which had captured the imagination of some leading intellectuals and
politicians by confirming ethnic stereotypes and ranking people from Eastern and Southern Europe as genetically inferior to Western Europeans.60
Republican President Calvin Coolidge, who signed the Quota Act, had previously declared as vice president: “America must be kept American. Biological
laws show … that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”61
1930s, World War II and the Aftermath
The Great Depression made the United States a less attractive destination in the 1930s. Support for the quotas remained strong, even as German
leader Adolf Hitler began his campaign of persecution against Jews that ended in genocide. In one of the most shameful incidents, the United States in
1939 refused to let the St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 mainly Jewish refugees from Germany, land on American shores, and the vessel was
forced to return to Europe. More than 250 passengers eventually died in the Holocaust.
Jews trying to flee Europe were restricted by the national origin quotas; three months before the St. Louis sailed, a bill had died in Congress that would
have permitted 20,000 German Jewish children to enter in an exception to the existing quota.62
During World War II, which was fought from 1939 to 1945, some 175 million people were displaced in both Asia and Europe, amounting to almost 8
percent of the world’s population, according to historians.
Six million European Jews died in the Holocaust. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews emerged from concentration camps and hiding
places to a world where they no longer had homes. The failure to protect Jews from the Nazis, combined with growing Western concern about Soviet
suppression of dissidents during the Cold War, galvanized the global community.
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In 1951, the recently formed United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which has
been signed by 145 nations, outlining the rights of refugees and nations’ obligations to protect them. For the first
time, refugees received a distinct legal status. The convention defined refugees as people with a “well-founded
fear of being persecuted” who are unable or unwilling to return to their former country. Member countries cannot
return refugees against their will to a country where they would be in danger, under a provision known as “nonrefoulement.”63
However, those nations did not agree to a binding legal obligation to receive a certain number of refugees in their
territory. “The absence of any such mechanism is a driving force behind the … present-day dysfunction” of the
refugee system, former U.N. official Aleinikoff and co-author Leah Zamore wrote.64
The United States did not sign the 1951 convention, instead adopting its own laws protecting selected groups of
refugees. The 1953 Refugee Relief Act allowed in approximately 190,000 refugees, many from Communist
regimes, before it expired in 1956.65
Refugees crowd the deck of the St.
Louis as it sailed to the United
States in June 1939. Jewish
refugees were seeking a haven
from Nazi persecution, but the ship
was denied entry and it returned to
Europe. (Getty Images/Hulton
Archive/Keystone)
In 1965, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. It replaced quotas
based on national origin with preferences based largely on family connections. At the time, the bill’s sponsors
assured members of Congress that the legislation would not lead to any change in the composition of immigrants,
who were then mainly European. “Few imagined that the legislation would lead the country to become increasingly
non-European in origin in the ensuing decades,” writes the University of London’s Kaufmann.66
In 1960, nearly 75 percent of U.S. immigration was from Europe, but by 2010 more than 80 percent was from Latin
America or Asia.67
The United Nations Refugee Protocol in 1967 established current international refugee standards for 146
countries, including the United States. It expanded the definition of refugee beyond those who had been displaced
in Europe before 1951, but allowed member nations to define for themselves how they would evaluate refugee
status. By ratifying the protocol, the United States bound itself to the 1951 Refugee Convention.68
Postwar Immigration Trends
Europe did not become a major immigrant destination until the 1950s, when it began recruiting workers from abroad to rebuild cities and economies
ravaged by World War II. West Germany, Belgium and Sweden initiated guest-worker programs, recruiting laborers first from Italy and Spain and later
from North Africa and the Middle East. However, many of the workers recruited to West Germany wanted to stay, and corporations pressured the
government to make guest-worker contracts renewable and allow family members to join them.69
By the late 1960s and early ’70s, Europe’s industries were declining, and its need for overseas manpower was dwindling. As unemployment rose, antiimmigrant sentiment grew.70
During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States took in selected groups of immigrants fleeing Communist regimes. In 1975, the fall of South Vietnam to
the Communist North sent a surge of Vietnamese and Cambodians to the United States, many fleeing in flimsy boats. In response, Congress passed a
law in 1975 permitting 130,000 Vietnamese to enter the United States. In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter allowed 15,000 of these “boat people”
to become permanent residents. The Refugee Act of 1980 laid out procedures for admission of refugees and remains in effect.71
In April 1980, Cuban leader Fidel Castro announced that all Cubans wishing to leave the Caribbean island for the United States were free to board boats
at the port of Mariel west of Havana. Thousands took boats to Florida, but the Mariel boatlift became a political problem for Carter once it was revealed
that Castro had freed many of the immigrants from jails and mental hospitals. The exodus ended in October 1980 by mutual agreement between Cuba
and the United States.72
In 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It combined tougher border enforcement and penalties for
employers who hired undocumented people with legalization for unauthorized immigrants. The legalization section, often described as an amnesty,
allowed undocumented immigrants who had been in the country for five years or more to apply for temporary legal status, which could lead to permanent
legal status. A separate program also permitted those who had performed seasonal agricultural service during the previous year to legalize their status.
In signing the bill, Reagan said it would permit undocumented workers to come out of the shadows and “step into the sunlight.”73
Rising Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
The dramatic increase in U.S. immigration from 300,000 per year in 1965 to more than 1 million by the 1990s — together with an increasingly Latin
American and Asian population seen as culturally distant from the nation’s white Christian majority — led to rising anti-immigrant sentiments, according to
Kaufmann. In 1965, Gallup polls showed 33 percent of Americans wanted a decrease in immigration; by 1993 that figure had risen to 65 percent.74
Terrorist attacks, particularly by Islamic radicals, fueled new fears of migrants in both Europe and the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on
the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, Republican President George W. Bush suspended refugee admissions for
several months. Caps on refugees accepted by the United States remained around 80,000 per year from 2001 to 2015.75
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Anti-immigration protesters rally near the courthouse in Santa Maria, Calif., in
2015 after an undocumented immigrant pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
By 2010, some 370 American jurisdictions had passed ordinances cracking
down on illegal immigration in their communities. (Getty Images/Los Angeles
Times/Anne Cusack)
By 2010, 370 American jurisdictions had passed Illegal Immigration Relief Ordinances, many of which required police to check the immigration status of
those apprehended or questioned. Many of these areas had experienced rapid ethnic change with the arrival of Hispanic immigrants. At the same time,
nearly 100 state and local governments declared their support of unauthorized immigrants by establishing “sanctuaries,” places where they refused to
check immigrants’ documents.
In Europe, politics turned more quickly anti-immigrant than in the United States. By the early 2000s, anti-immigrant political parties had gained enough
support from voters to bargain for concessions from coalitions of mainstream parties in Austria, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Italy.
Across Europe, the crisis of 2015, when more than 1 million asylum-seekers reached European shores from the Middle East and Africa, gave populist
right-wing parties “a shot in the arm,” Kaufmann said. But anti-immigrant feeling had already been building on the continent. In nine of 10 European
countries, support for populist right-wing parties closely tracked rising immigration rates.76
In the United States, divisions in Congress stymied efforts at immigration reform. In 2005, a bipartisan bill that would have combined stricter border
enforcement with a temporary worker program, a path to citizenship and the so-called Dream Act to legalize the status of immigrants who entered the
country as children failed to pass Congress. Democratic President Barack Obama took office in 2009 promising to forge an immigration compromise. But
in 2010 and 2013 immigration reform bills were defeated again.77
In September 2016, Obama hosted a meeting on the global refugee crisis at the U.N. General Assembly. He called for world leaders to double the
number of refugees they resettled and to provide more aid. The nations signed the New York Declaration, expressing their intent to initiate two new
conventions, one on refugees and a second on migration, to foster more sharing of burdens, but neither was legally binding.78
In 2016, real estate tycoon Donald Trump campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-immigrant platform, blaming Mexican
immigrants for a crime wave (contrary to evidence) and claiming many of them were “drug dealers, criminals and rapists.”79
After Trump’s election, his administration refused to sign the U.N. Global Compact on Migration, which was adopted by representatives of 164 nations in
December 2018, or the Global Compact on Refugees, adopted that same month by 181 countries.80
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, Nikki Haley, wrote later that the deal breaker for the administration was the migration compact’s
advocacy for international law, rather than individual countries, to govern migration. “Only we will decide how best to control our borders and who will be
allowed to enter our country,” she wrote, adding the compact was “headed toward creating an international right to migration, which … is not compatible
with U.S. sovereignty.”81
Current Situation
New European Crisis
Fears of another European migration crisis are growing following a spike in the number of migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey. Nearly 44,000
migrants traveled that route between January and November of 2019, about one-third more than all of 2018 but still far below the levels of 2015 and
2016.82
Expressing frustration with the EU’s inability to come up with a system to allocate asylum-seekers country-by-country once again this year, German
Interior Minister Seehofer said in October, “If there is no common European asylum policy, there is a danger that uncontrolled immigration will once again
take place throughout Europe.”83
More Afghans are fleeing their country after 2018 turned out to be the country’s deadliest year to date, and Turkish policies are making it harder for
refugees to stay there. Turkey has carried out mass deportations of Afghans in the past two years, tightened residency requirements and changed its
asylum procedures to make it harder for Afghans to gain legal status. Many are making their way to Greece.
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With tens of thousands of Afghan and Syrian migrants packed onto the Greek islands in miserable conditions, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for
human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, called the situation “explosive.” Over human rights groups’ objections, the Greek government passed legislation on Oct.
31 that would speed up asylum procedures and permit it to return more migrants to Turkey.84
In recent months, Turkey’s Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to “open the gates” of migration to pressure Europe to support his goal of a “safe zone”
in northern Syria that would be free of Kurdish fighters, a threat he made again in October in the face of European opposition to his invasion to create
such a zone. Thousands of Syrian Kurds have fled to Iraq; the Turkish military campaign displaced some 200,000 people.85
Turkish forces seeking to create a “safe zone” in Syria fire a missile toward Ras
al-Ain on Oct. 15. The invasion displaced thousands of Syrian Kurds and
others. (AFP/Getty Images/Ozan Kose)
In September, German’s interior ministry urged Greece to step up deportations to Turkey and called for a more comprehensive implementation of the
2016 EU-Turkey deal, under which Turkey agreed to stop migrants from leaving its shores for Europe in exchange for 6 billion euros. The EU-Turkey
deal was set to expire at the end of 2019, and a new deal is being negotiated.86
In Libya, the other country that Europe tasked with holding migrants, the United Nations announced a second airlift of children and other vulnerable
migrants in October out of detention centers to Rwanda. Earlier in July, the U.N. called for all Libyan detention centers to be closed, describing conditions
as “awful.”87
The European Court of Justice, Europe’s highest court, is expected to rule early this year on its Advocate General’s opinion that three countries —
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — broke EU law when they refused to participate in the EU’s 2015 quota scheme for migrants. The court
usually follows the advocate’s opinions.88
As the EU continues to struggle with efforts to allocate migrants among its members, the Migration Policy Institute’s Papademetriou says it should take a
lesson from its “Pyrrhic victory” in passing an allocation formula in 2015: “Those who lost told everyone to take a walk.” He says a refugee-sharing
solution should not be imposed but negotiated country-by-country so governments can select the migrants they want. For example, “If countries don’t
want to take Muslims, maybe they can take Christians,” he says.
U.S. Developments
President Trump continues to take a hard line on the entry of both refugees and migrants, but several of his most controversial changes face legal
challenges.
Under the U.N. refugee resettlement program, the United States plans to admit a maximum of 18,000 refugees in fiscal 2020, down from a presidentially
imposed ceiling of 30,000 for the fiscal year ending in September 2019 — the third consecutive year the administration has lowered the cap. This would
be the fewest number of refugees resettled by the United States in a single year since 1980, when Congress created the resettlement program.89
The Trump administration has cited “enormous security challenges” posed by refugees and said it needs to focus on the influx of asylum-seekers at the
Mexican border. However, refugee groups say under the resettlement program, U.S. authorities are turning away thousands of refugees who have
already been screened and vetted by the U.N. and the State Department. Refugees under the U.N. resettlement program apply from outside the United
States, whereas asylum-seekers apply from inside the country.90
In November, U.S. officials began deporting some asylum-seekers at the Mexican border to Guatemala, including families and children, under a new rule
preventing anyone from seeking asylum in the United States if they have passed through Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador without seeking asylum
there first.91
Although the ACLU and other civil liberties groups are challenging the rule, the Supreme Court said in September that the administration can enforce it
while the legal fight works its way through other courts.92
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In Guatemala, new President Alejandro Giammattei had criticized the Trump administration agreement with the outgoing government to accept deported
asylum-seekers and make them seek asylum there first. He took office on Jan. 14, and has said he will review the agreement.93
Under the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy, more than 50,000 asylum-seekers at the southern border have been returned to Mexico to
await the adjudication of their cases. A federal appeals court in May ruled that the government may continue to implement that policy while the court
reaches a decision on the merits of legal challenges. Immigration advocacy groups challenging the policy presented arguments in October before the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals.94
Human rights groups also have criticized the government’s policy of limiting the number of people who can apply for asylum each day at the southern
border, adding to squalid conditions at encampments in northern Mexico. The policy, known as metering, kept an additional 21,398 asylum-seekers on
waitlists in 11 Mexican border cities in November, the University of Texas’ Strauss Center for International Security and Law and the Center for U.S.Mexican Studies reported.95
In December, the U.S. House passed the bipartisan Farm Workforce Modernization Act to give thousands of undocumented migrant farmworkers
temporary work permits and a pathway to citizenship. Undocumented workers make up about half the farm workforce. The bill passed 260-165, with 34
Republicans supporting it. Although it has backing from both liberals and conservatives, the legislation could face opposition in the Republican-controlled
Senate.96
Experts agree that comprehensive immigration legislation stands little chance of enactment. The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Ramón says the recently
passed farmworker bill shows “there is support for reform that is employment-based.” But, he says, “when it comes to the Mexico border issue, it doesn’t
seem there is much consensus. There’s a lot of conflict over whether people should get asylum or there should be restrictions on asylum to deter them.”
Outlook
Demographic Changes
Most experts expect more movement as young people in poorer countries feel greater economic pressure to find work abroad. So far, much of the world
has been focused on the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan that have spurred some of the biggest waves into Europe and the Middle East.
But demographic changes, particularly in Africa, could shift the direction of migration significantly. As wealthier societies age and produce fewer children,
demand in the West for workers to care for the elderly and to perform manual labor will provide a strong “pull” factor, while the combination of a
population boom and low wages in poorer countries will provide a strong “push” factor for migration.97
Sub-Saharan Africa will see 800 million new workers entering the labor force over the next 30 years — about 24 times the current labor force in Britain,
the Center for Global Development’s Clemens calculates.98
“It’s not possible for such an epic demographic change to happen and for people to simply remain in Ethiopia or Chad,” he says. Clemens points to
Japan, traditionally anti-immigrant, which recently changed its laws to allow hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to fill labor shortages and is
bringing in 300,000 Indian workers to work in elder care and manufacturing.99
“That’s a harbinger for Europe in the future,” Clemens says.
George Mason University’s Gest predicts that rich nations may try to satisfy both anti-immigrant attitudes and their need for more labor by handing out
temporary work visas while being more restrictive about citizenship. This “uberization” trend in immigration policy is already evident in the 30 nations he
analyzes in his book Crossroads. 100
The United States is the exception to this trend, relying on its undocumented immigrants for additional labor rather than legal work permits. “If 12 million
undocumented immigrants suddenly disappeared overnight, it would probably paralyze the United States,” Gest says. “We have a policy system stuck in
formaldehyde.”
While the United Nations has proposed more global cooperation in hosting refugees, there does not seem to be much political appetite among nations to
invite significantly more foreigners to settle permanently. In Europe, if mainstream center-right parties fail to control immigration levels or another flood of
refugees results, “the populist right could surge yet again, perhaps winning outright majorities,” the University of London’s Kaufmann has predicted.101
At the same time, Kaufmann said, young Europeans, who have grown up in more ethnically diverse societies than their elders, tend to be more tolerant of
immigration, and their entry into the electorate could lead to a liberalization of attitudes.
“It’s an opportunity of epic proportions that there are all these energetic young workers available” from regions like Africa, says Clemens.
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Pro/Con
Is the Trump administration justified in accepting fewer refugees than in the past?
Pro
Con
Nayla Rush, PH.D.
Jen Smyers
Senior Researcher, Center for Immigration Studies. Written for
CQ Researcher, January 2020
Director of Policy and Advocacy, Immigration and Refugee
Program, Church World Service. Written for CQ Researcher,
January 2020
Those outraged by lower refugee ceilings under the Trump administration
are less mindful of its efforts to assist millions of refugees overseas and
address the lingering U.S. asylum backlog.
Away from alarming stands, let’s try to put matters (or numbers) into
perspective.
Out of some 26 million refugees worldwide, and the 1.2 million refugees in
need of resettlement according to the U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), only 81,337 were referred for resettlement in 2018
(0.3 percent of all refugees and 7 percent of those considered to be in
need of resettlement).
Despite dropping admissions, the United States under the Trump
administration remains the top country for refugee resettlement in the
world.
Resettlement is just the tip of the iceberg of refugee protection. The
United States remains the leading donor of humanitarian assistance. In
fiscal 2018 alone, the U.S. contribution to UNHCR reached a high of $1.6
billion.
U.S. humanitarian efforts include assisting thousands of asylum-seekers
already present on American soil. These are vulnerable people seeking
relief under the same standard as refugees. The United States received
the greatest number of new asylum applications worldwide in calendar
years 2017 and 2018 and anticipates receiving 350,000 new asylum
claims in fiscal 2020.
The current debate about resettled refugees often revolves around
numbers (how many should be allowed in?) while little attention is given to
the fairness of the selection process and the scope of U.S integration
practices (what happens after they get here?).
Resettlement must be a ticket out only for refugees who are genuinely at
risk in the countries hosting them. But contrary to common claims, for most
resettlement is not a matter of life and death. Only 17 percent of UNHCR
global resettlement submissions in 2018 were urgent or emergency ones.
A refugee ceiling of 18,000 would cover most if not all the U.N.’s urgent
and emergency submissions worldwide this coming year.
Moreover, resettled refugees should be provided with every tool possible
for successful integration. Admitting fewer refugees but spending more on
each one can ensure they receive the appropriate help necessary to build
a successful life in the United States. This is not a negligible expense; the
government spent an average of $32,533 on resettlement for each
refugee brought here in fiscal 2019 and will spend $49,555 in fiscal 2020.
Refugee resettlement should not be used as a political tool or a
conscience alleviator. Focusing instead on the best way to help refugees,
whether inside or outside the United States, is the commendable thing to
do.
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For centuries, advocates of immigration restrictions have relied on the
same four arguments to keep out generations of immigrants: scare tactics,
economic scapegoating, perceived scarcity and false choices. These tired
excuses, used in an attempt to justify drastic cuts to refugee resettlement,
are just as factually inaccurate and morally bankrupt now as when they
were used to slander the ancestors of the majority of people reading this
essay.
By definition, refugees have fled their country due to persecution based on
their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group.
Resettlement is the last resort for refugees who cannot safely return home
or rebuild their lives where they first fled, and less than 1 percent of
refugees will ever be resettled.
Each year President Trump has set a new historic low for refugee
resettlement: 45,000 in fiscal 2018, 30,000 in fiscal ’19 and 18,000 in fiscal
’20. This is an 81 percent reduction from the average refugee cap of
95,000 since Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act. And the president
also has issued an executive order requiring states and localities to
provide consent for refugee resettlement to continue in their jurisdictions.
There drastic cuts come precisely when the world is facing the largest
displacement crisis in history. There is no legitimate justification for the
dramatic cuts this administration has made to the lifesaving refugee
program.
The U.S. government handpicks the refugees who are resettled here,
knowing precisely who they are and verifying their information before
issuing them a travel loan and booking their flight. Each refugee is
thoroughly screened by government agencies before they arrive, including
biometric screenings, medical exams, interagency checks and in-person
interviews with specially trained Homeland Security officers.
Once they arrive here, refugees start working right away, contributing to
local economies, filling labor shortages, paying taxes, starting businesses
and revitalizing neighborhoods.
The U.S. effort in this area pales in comparison to countries that are
hosting hundreds of thousands — in some cases millions — of refugees,
including Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan. Canada,
Sweden and Germany all welcome significantly more refugees per capita
than the United States.
Some might say we should resettle fewer refugees because there are
more asylum-seekers at our southern border. But the administration is
keeping them out too, forcing them back to Mexico and other dangerous
countries. We’re actually admitting far fewer refugees and asylum-seekers
than we were in the 1980s. Last year, the administration admitted 30,000
refugees, showing that the asylum backlog is a false excuse, and proving
that xenophobia and politics are what truly underlay the cruel cut to
18,000.
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Chronology
19th Century
European colonialism presages later migration.
1830
France conquers Algeria; its North African colonization lays groundwork for 20th-century migration of Algerian, Moroccan and
Tunisian workers to France seeking better living conditions.
1845
Potato famine leads to migration of more than 2 million Irish to North America over the decade.
1882
Chinese Exclusion Act suspends Chinese immigration to United States for 10 years.
1920s–1970s
After global failure to protect Jews during Holocaust, treaties seek to shield refugees from persecution.
1921
In the United States, Emergency Immigration Act sets quotas for European countries at 3 percent of 1910 immigration population,
slashing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
1924
U.S. Quota Act limits migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe even further, favoring immigrants from Britain and Northern
Europe.
1939
The U.S. refuses to let the St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 mainly Jewish refugees from Germany, land on American
shores; after the vessel is forced to return to Europe, more than 250 passengers die in the Holocaust.
1951
United Nations adopts Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed by 145 nations, outlining rights of refugees.
1953
U.S. Refugee Relief Act admits refugees, many from Communist regimes.
1965
U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act eliminates national origin quotas and introduces preferences based on family connections,
resulting years later in an upsurge of immigration from Latin America and Asia.
1967
U.N. Refugee Protocol establishes current international refugee standards for 146 countries, including the United States;
expands the definition of refugee beyond those displaced in Europe before 1951 but allows member nations to define how to
evaluate refugee status.
1975
Vietnamese refugees arrive in United States after fall of South Vietnam to the Communist North.
1980s–2000s
Terrorist attacks, rising immigration raise opposition to migrants in Europe and United States.
1980
Cuban leader Fidel Castro allows thousands to leave for the United States in Mariel boatlift.
1986
Republican President Ronald Reagan signs Immigration Reform and Control Act, combining tougher border enforcement with
amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
2001
Al Qaeda attacks World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, killing 3,000. Republican President
George W. Bush suspends refugee admissions for several months.
2005
U.S. Congress rejects bipartisan bill combining more border enforcement with a temporary worker program and path to
citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
2009
Democrat Barack Obama becomes president, pledging immigration reform.
2010–Present
Syrian civil war spurs refugee flight to Europe, which aims to stem flow.
2010
Ordinances in 370 U.S. jurisdictions require police to check immigrant status of those stopped…. Anti-immigration parties make
unprecedented electoral gains in Europe…. Immigration reform bill fails again in U.S. Congress.
2011
Syrian exodus begins as civil war intensifies…. Libya becomes hub for smuggling refugees.
2013
Immigration reform fails once again in U.S. Congress.
2014
Refugee crossings of Mediterranean to Europe increase.
2015
European migration crisis intensifies as thousands of refugees drown in Mediterranean. Hungary announces it will build fence on
border with Serbia…. European Union (EU) adopts refugee quota scheme, but Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic refuse to
participate.
2016
Under deal with the EU, Turkey agrees to stop refugees heading to Europe…. New York Declaration signed at U.N. presages
2018 Global Compacts to cooperate on migration and refugees…. Republican Donald Trump wins presidency on anti-immigrant
platform…. For first time, more non-Mexicans than Mexicans are arrested trying to cross southwest U.S. border illegally.
2017
EU declares European migration crisis over…. Mexicans are no longer the majority of undocumented immigrants living in the
United States, but are still the dominant group, followed by Central Americans and Asians.
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2018
President Trump declares “crisis” on Mexican border; the administration refuses to sign U.N. Global Compacts on migration or
refugees, saying they violate U.S. sovereignty. In December, family members make up more than half of arrests at southern
border, most of them from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
2019
U.S. plans to admit only 18,000 refugees in fiscal 2020, a historically low number…. Civil rights groups challenge Trump
administration rules restricting asylum-seekers at Mexican border and sending most to wait in Mexico…. House passes bill giving
migrant farmworkers path to citizenship.
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Short Features
Working-Class Alienation Sparks Anti-Immigrant Mood
Feelings of displacement drive support for right-wing populism.
“All these Eastern Europeans that are coming in, where are they flocking from?”
Gillian Duffy, a white working-class woman from Rochdale, one of England’s poorest towns, asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown that question during the
2010 election campaign. After their broadcast conversation had ended, Brown forgot to turn off his microphone and described Duffy to an aide as “a
bigoted woman.”
Then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown (left) talks with Gillian Duffy in April 2010 in
Rochdale, England. After Duffy expressed concerns about migrants in the
United Kingdom, Brown referred to her as “bigoted,” a comment for which he
later apologized. (Getty Images/Jeff J. Mitchell)
When that comment became public, Brown was widely criticized, and he later apologized to Duffy. The episode was a sign that the cultural mood was
shifting away from the view that criticism of immigration was always bigoted, and toward a more sympathetic portrayal of white working-class concerns,
wrote Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London, in his 2019 book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White
Majorities. 1
Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy and government at George Mason University and the author of a 2018 book called The White Working
Class, says working-class whites are “aware of their political abandonment by the parties on the left, which once championed unions and the white
working class — and no longer do so.” He says many center-left parties turned away from their traditional advocacy of economic justice for workers and
focused more on racial and social justice for minorities. “As a result, it is only natural that some white working-class people may perceive that they’ve
been displaced by people of immigrant origins.”
Kaufmann’s and Gest’s books are among several recently published that try to explain why much of the white working class has shifted to the right
politically. Kaufmann analyzes research showing that in continental Europe, Great Britain and the United States, change in the ethnic makeup of a
neighborhood or region — not economics — “nearly always predicts increased anti-immigration sentiment and populist-right voting.”2
In a city, region or country, support for right-wing populism tends to rise as the immigrant or minority share of the population increases, 27 studies found.
A majority of studies said native white opposition to immigration or support for the populist right was linked to ethnic change over time, according to a
meta-analysis co-authored by Kaufmann.
For individuals Kaufmann describes as “psychological conservatives” — those who judge their nation according to the world they knew growing up —
“ethnic changes are particularly jarring as they disrupt the sense of attachment to locale, ethnic group and nation,” Kaufmann wrote.3
In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote backing the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union (EU), journalist David Goodhart tried to explain
the outcome of the referendum to shocked liberals in his book The Road to Somewhere.
He calls pro-Brexit voters the “Somewheres” — people “nostalgic for a lost Britain,” rooted in their place of birth, who identify as a Scottish farmer or
Cornish housewife and place a high value on familiarity, he wrote. They often lack higher education, “have lost economically with the decline of well-paid
jobs” for people without a college degree and “feel uncomfortable about many aspects of cultural and economic change,” such as mass immigration, he
said. By contrast, “Anywheres” are voters who support remaining in the EU and tend to be university-educated with white-collar jobs. They feel
comfortable living in almost any cosmopolitan city abroad — and they are not bothered by immigration.4
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©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
When liberals propose to make it easier for young Africans to move to Western Europe to supply its aging population’s labor needs, Goodhart has
argued, those liberals ignore the fact that good societies are typified by high levels of trust, and that “increasing diversity can also reduce the readiness
to share” — particularly in societies with generous social welfare programs.5
Oxford University economist Paul Collier, who grew up in the dying English steel town of Sheffield, recalls how a neighbor lost his job and a relative ended
up with a job cleaning toilets. In his 2018 book The Future of Capitalism, he sees widening economic inequality and high youth unemployment behind the
growing power of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the National Rally party in France headed by Marine
Le Pen.6
But some researchers say racism, rather than fear of losing jobs, explains white working-class support for anti-immigration policies and politicians. In
England, white working-class support for Brexit was linked more to hostility toward black and brown immigrants than to opposition to immigrants from
other EU countries, some polls indicate.7
An anti-migrant poster unveiled by the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party (UKIP) during the Brexit campaign showed a stream of Middle Eastern and
other mostly nonwhite migrants and refugees. The poster urged voters to “break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” Trade union
officials branded it as “an attempt to incite racial hatred.”8
Collier said the working class has been left out of the “fashionable ‘victim’ groups” for which the left has advocated assistance, adding that what he calls
traditional working-class values, such as respect for meeting obligations and “a shared sense of belonging to place,” have fallen out of policy
discussions.9
To avert a far-right takeover, countries should try to find a balance in immigration policy, Kaufmann argued. “Immigration will need to be slower than is
economically optimal, but the result should be a more harmonious society,” he wrote.10
A century from now, Kaufmann says, societies that are currently majority-white are likely to become more multiethnic through intermarriage and the
successful integration of minorities. In the United States, where half of newborns are Latino, Asian or black, the nation is projected to become “majority
minority” in the 2040s.11
His prediction: “When the majority sees itself as having a largely mixed-race future, it may become more open to immigration.”12
— Sarah Glazer
[1] Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019), pp. 179-180.
[2] Ibid., p. 18.
[3] Ibid., pp. 218-19, 69.
[4] David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (2017), p. 19.
[5] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[6] Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties (2018), pp. 5, 7.
[7] Kaufmann, op. cit., pp. 182-183.
[8] Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, “Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to police,” The Guardian, June 16, 2016,
https://tinyurl.com/zhj5m8a.
[9] Collier, op. cit., pp. 16, 212.
[10] Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 28.
[11] William H. Frey, “New Projections Point to a Majority Minority Nation in 2044,” Brookings Institution, Dec. 12, 2014, https://tinyurl.com/y9c4qgy3.
[12] Kaufmann, op. cit., p. 28.
Venezuelan Exodus Could Become World’s Largest
More than 4 million flee failing economy, dire social conditions.
When her parents arrived in Westchester County, N.Y., from Venezuela for a visit two years ago, Angelica Arrayago was shocked by their physical
condition. Her father was “almost blind” from diabetes that had gone untreated because the country’s hospitals had run out of insulin; her mother was
skinny and “blackened from the sun” after spending as long as six hours in line waiting for government-subsidized rice.
Conditions in Venezuela have only worsened as the country has suffered from record inflation rates of 1.7 million percent. Under the authoritarian rule of
socialist Nicolás Maduro, who became president in 2013, the economy has collapsed and violence has increased.13
Some 4.6 million people, about 16 percent of Venezuela’s population, have fled the country over the past four years, and that figure could rise to 6.5
million by the end of 2020, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world body’s refugee agency.14 Ninety percent of the
country lives below the poverty line, and only 3 percent of Venezuelans can afford to eat three meals a day. Hospitals have run out of the most basic
supplies — even paper on which to take medical notes.15
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CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
A supermarket manager in Venezuela surveys empty shelves in Maracaibo
after the store was looted on March 14. Record inflation and widespread
shortages, among other economic problems, are causing residents to flee the
country. (Getty Images/Bloomberg/Carlos Becerra)
“There’s no medicine; babies die, and pregnant women come [to Peru] because there’s no postnatal care,” says Luisa Feline Freier, assistant professor
of political science at Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru, who recently interviewed 2,000 Venezuelans in Peru. “Many children have not been in
school for months or years because all their teachers have migrated. This is survival migration. These are middle-class people who sold all their
belongings maybe to get a bus ticket — in order not to have to walk.”
So far the Venezuelan exodus has received far less attention and foreign aid than other refugee crises around the world, even though experts at the
Brookings Institution think tank in Washington have predicted it could soon outpace the Syrian crisis and is “one of the worst humanitarian crises this
hemisphere has ever seen.”16
That is partly because neighboring South American countries, which have been receiving most of the refugees, have been comparatively welcoming. The
Economist magazine calculated that outside donors have given just $100 for each Venezuelan migrant compared with $5,000 for each of the 5.6 million
refugees from the conflict in Syria.17
But recently, anti-immigrant sentiment has been rising in neighboring countries. Crimes committed by Venezuelan immigrants have been sensationalized
in the media, and many recent migrants are poorer than earlier arrivals. In August, Ecuador became the latest country to tighten entry requirements,
joining Peru and Chile in requiring most Venezuelans to present a passport and evidence of a clean criminal record.18
However, passports are almost impossible to obtain in Venezuela, Freier says. Applicants have to pay up to $5,000 under the table, wait times are long
and there is not enough paper on which to print documents, she says.
Nearly 80 percent of Venezuelan refugees are in Latin American and Caribbean countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency; the top four
destinations are Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile.19
Brazil and Colombia have kept their borders open so far. However, Daphne Panayotatos, an advocate at Refugees International, a refugee advocacy
organization, calls Colombia “a ticking time bomb,” pointing to recent street protests against corruption, government-proposed cuts in pensions and
police violence as well as the prominence of drug and trafficking groups on the border who prey on migrants.
South American countries have been more generous than Europe or the United States in dealing with migrant surges. But “they’ve been less generous
than they should have been,” Freier says, citing the broad refugee definition South American countries adopted under the 1984 Cartagena Declaration
on Refugees. The definition includes people fleeing “circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”20
Under that declaration, governments cannot deport anyone who qualifies for refugee status until the situation in their home country improves, and
refugees would have access to health care and education. However, Venezuela’s neighboring governments have not applied the Cartagena declaration
due to a “huge increase in xenophobic sentiment” among the public and politicians’ fears about a political backlash, Freier says.
The Cartagena definition is broader than the one used by most countries, including the United States, under the United Nations’ 1951 Convention on
Refugees. That treaty restricts the definition to those who fear persecution. Nevertheless, under pressure from human rights activists, the U.N. refugee
agency in May said it considered most Venezuelan migrants to be refugees in need of international protection.21
In November, the U.N. agency began a campaign to raise $1.35 billion to help Venezuelan refugees and their host countries with health care and
education, calling on nations to donate. However, previous funding efforts have fallen short.
“The Syrian crisis is much more immediate for Europe — it is much closer than the Venezuelan crisis for them,” said Eduardo Stein, the joint special
representative for Venezuelan refugees and migrants for both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for
Migration, an intergovernmental organization that aids migrants and governments.22
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CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Since 2017, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions to choke off revenues to Venezuela’s government in an effort aimed at toppling the Maduro
regime.23 In August, President Trump imposed new sanctions freezing the property and assets of the Venezuelan government, citing the “continued
usurpation of power” by Maduro and his attempts to undermine opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who last year declared himself interim president with the
support of the Trump administration.24
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently asked whether U.S. sanctions on Maduro’s government were making the situation worse. He cited an
economic analysis that found decreases in oil revenues produced by the sanctions led to a loss of $17 billion a year for the economy and deteriorating
living conditions. Although the sanctions were intended to undermine the Maduro regime, Kristof wrote, they “have failed to drive Maduro from power,
inflicting anguish instead on vulnerable Venezuelans.”25
Gustav Brauckmeyer, a Venezuelan business consultant living in Lima, disagrees: “There’s no stopping the migrant crisis unless there’s a change in
government, and that’s why there has to be more regional pressure. The feeling people have in Venezuela is, if we don’t do it soon, we’ll be stuck for a
long time.”
— Sarah Glazer
[13] Alexander Betts, “Nowhere to Go,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2019, https://tinyurl.com/r6aa9e2.
[14] Danny Bahar and Meagan Dooley, “Venezuela refugee crisis to become the largest and most underfunded in modern history,” Brookings Institution,
Dec. 9, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uvlq7sv.
[15] “Joint IOM-UNHCR Press Release: USD 1.35 billion Needed to Help Venezuelan Refugees and Migrants and Host Countries,” International
Organization for Migration, Nov. 13, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/qqs6h34; Betts, op. cit.; and Nicholas Kristof, “Venezuela’s Kids Are Dying. Are We
Responsible?” The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vq2w7os. Also see, Luisa Feline Freier and Nicolas Parent, “The Regional
Response to the Venezuelan Exodus,” Current History, February 2019, pp. 56-61, https://tinyurl.com/w5vm7ve.
[16] Bahar and Dooley, op. cit.
[17] “Millions of refugees from Venezuela are straining neighbours’ hospitality,” The Economist, Sept. 12, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y2rykatc.
[18] Ibid.
[19] “U.S. $1.35 billion needed to help Venezuelan refugees and migrants and host countries,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Nov. 13, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/uzxqj3e.
[20] Betts, op. cit.
[21] “Majority fleeing Venezuela in need of refugee protection — UNHCR,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, May 21, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/ru58v36.
[22] “Venezuelan migrants will need $1.35b in 2020 for basic services, say aid groups,” Reuters, Nov. 14, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ry3qqgb.
[23] “Venezuela: Overview of U.S. Sanctions,” Congressional Research Service, Oct. 16, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uf2m3c2.
[24] Michael Crowley and Anatoly Kurmanaev, “Trump Imposes New Sanctions on Venezuela,” The New York Times, Aug. 6, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/sl3xh72.
[25] Francisco Rodríguez, “Trump Doesn’t Have Time for Starving Venezuelans,” The New York Times, July 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/uu9yfm3;
Kristof, op. cit.
Bibliography
Books
Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, and Leah Zamore , The Arc of Protection: Reforming the International Refugee Regime , Stanford University
Press, 2019. A professor specializing in migration at The New School in New York City (Aleinikoff) and a senior policy analyst at New York University’s
Center on International Cooperation (Zamore) examine today’s refugee system, which they call “dysfunctional.” They propose a global sharing of
responsibility for refugees.
Betts, Alexander, and Paul Collier , Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System , Penguin Books, 2018. A migration expert at the
University of Oxford in England (Betts) and Oxford economist (Collier) say support for asylum in developed countries has collapsed and a stronger effort
is needed to provide jobs to refugees languishing in camps and countries to which they have fled.
Davis, Julie Hirschfeld, and Michael D. Shear , Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration , Simon & Schuster, 2019. Two New York
Times reporters trace President Trump’s immigration policies from early closed-door meetings with his advisers.
Kaufmann, Eric , Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities , Abrams Press, 2019. A professor of politics at the
University of London surveys the history of immigration and the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, Britain, Europe and Canada, finding that
rising immigration fuels the rightward shift of white majorities.
Articles
Apostolou, Nikolia , “Briefing: How will Greece’s new asylum law affect refugees,” The New Humanitarian, Nov. 4, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/yxy8ba69. An Athens-based journalist reports on a new law in Greece, passed as rising numbers of refugees arrived in the country,
which would speed deportations of asylum-seekers to Turkey. Human rights groups say the law will violate refugees’ rights.
Page 22 of 28
Global Migration
CQ Researcher
©2020 CQ Press, An Imprint of SAGE Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
Bermeo, Sarah , “Could foreign aid help stop Central Americans from coming to the U.S.?” The Washington Post, June 18, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/rltxqhm. The more than $2 billion sent by the United States and other donors to Central America over the past few years has not
stemmed migration, writes the associate director of the Duke University Center for International Development.
Betts, Alexander , “Nowhere to Go,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2019, https://tinyurl.com/r6aa9e2. A professor of forced migration
and international affairs at the University of Oxford says Europe’s handling of its 2015 migration crisis holds lessons for the United States as it confronts a
crisis at the Mexican border.
Bier, David , “Legal Immigration Will Resolve America’s Real Border Problems,” Cato Institute, Aug. 20, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/ucluse7.
An immigration policy analyst at Cato, a libertarian think tank in Washington, argues that the United States could control the influx of migrants at the
Mexican border if it expanded guest-worker programs and other paths to legalization.
Gzesh, Susan , “‘Safe Third Country’ Agreements with Mexico and Guatemala would be Unlawful,” Just Security, July 15, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/rself23. The executive director of a human rights center at the University of Chicago says agreements the United States has been
negotiating to deport asylum-seekers to Central America would violate U.S. and international law.
Hayden, Sally , “The U.N. Is Leaving Migrants to Die in Libya,” Foreign Policy, Oct. 10, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/u4oz23t. A journalist reports on
deaths and victimization among refugees and migrants in Libya’s detention camps, quoting aid officials who say the United Nations is “ignoring or
downplaying systemic abuse and exploitation” there.
Reports and Studies
“Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2020,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, July 1-2, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/yxy6ttgs.
The U.N. refugee agency projects that the refugees most at risk and in need of resettlement in 2020 are Syrians (40 percent), followed by South
Sudanese (14 percent) and those from the Democratic Republic of Congo (11 percent).
“World Migration Report 2020,” International Organization for Migration, November 2019, https://tinyurl.com/w7j2mt7. This comprehensive
report published by a U.N.-linked organization that provides migration services and information has the latest figures on global migration and refugees,
with sections covering climate change, asylum, child migration and other topics.
Clemens, Michael, and Hannah Postel , “Deterring Emigration with Foreign Aid: An Overview of Evidence from Low-Income Countries,”
Center for Global Development, Feb. 12, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/tl57pj4. A Washington think tank analyzes research on foreign aid to low-income
countries and concludes that it generally does not deter migration.
The Next Step
Foreign Aid
Lamble, Lucy, and Karen McVeigh , “Less than 10% of EU aid reaches world’s poorest countries, study finds,” The Guardian, Nov. 21, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/twl9jy7. The European Union and its member states, which have been seeking to head off migration to the continent, supplied over
half the foreign aid in the world in 2018, but the world’s 16 poorest countries received only 8 percent of European aid.
Larson, Ren , “Trump’s plan to cut aid to Central America could push more migrants to come to US,” USA Today, Sept. 23, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/uktdcom. Some experts say more people will flee Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras if the United States cuts aid to those
countries.
Mashal, Mujib , “Afghanistan Needs Billions in Aid Even After a Peace Deal, World Bank Says,” The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/rjkf9k8. Experts at the World Bank warn that Afghanistan’s economy could collapse if the United States stops providing foreign aid
to the country, which has one of the largest refugee populations.
Internally Displaced People
“Nearly 100 displaced by ISIS return home to Iraq’s disputed Kirkuk,” Kurdistan 24, Dec. 17, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/v6ta98p. Two years
after the defeat of the Islamic State terrorist group in an Iraqi province, dozens of refugees will finally return home.
Bilak, Alexandra , “Africa is the crucible of the global internal displacement challenge,” The Africa Report, Dec. 18, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/tkapkmo. The displacement of Africans due to violence or conflict has reached unprecedented levels, according to new research by
the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a Geneva-based group that studies migration.
Bouscaren, Durrie , “The world closed its doors to Syrian refugees. Now Turkey wants to send them back,” PRI, Oct. 29, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/st5cpyz. Turkey, which hosts more Syrian refugees than any other nation, plans to resettle the refugees in a Turkish-occupied
section of Syria.
U.S.-Mexico Border
Attanasio, Cedar, and Philip Marcelo , “Brazilians arrive in waves at the US-Mexico Border,” The Associated Press, Dec. 13, 2019,
https://tinyurl.com/srdcx24. Some 18,000 Brazilians were apprehended after crossing the U.S-Mexico border in fiscal 2019, a 600 percent increase
from the previous high in 2016, as many fled unfavorable economic conditions, corruption and violence in their home country.
Laporta, James , “Exclusive: Military docum…