On the border with Mexico, several municipalities in Texas and Arizona are anticipating a chaotic situation and have declared a state of emergency… Two thousand more soldiers have been deployed by Washington to support some 24,000 security service officers. immigration mobilized. But the task is herculean, while tens of thousands of visa-free migrants, mainly from Central and South America, but also from China, Russia or Haiti, jostle at the border.
“It is an extremely complicated crisis and it is global, look in Europe, you have the same thing, notes Maria Blacque-Belair, the director of RIF, a New York organization for aid to asylum seekers. The situation reminds me of a boiling lid on the pot. We should be able to go beyond ideologies, but everything is blocked, starting with the Congress…”
A new device being developed urgently
“Millions of people in Latin America are leaving their homes, alarms the New York Times in an article that has been making noise here, in numbers not so big for decades and heading towards the United States”.
The Covid pandemic, a severe economic recession, political repression in several countries, violence by armed groups and gangs, the inflation of basic foodstuffs caused by the conflict in Ukraine, all of this has created a “perfect storm”. (literally, a perfect storm, the conditions of a crisis) in the southern United States, observe the specialists. In addition, false information about a possible amnesty, relayed by networks of smugglers and traffickers, has been circulating on social networks for weeks, fueling the crisis.
In three years, Title 42, a measure which dates from the 19th century and whose lifting was to take place this Thursday, May 11 at midnight, had enabled the United States to turn back 2.8 million migrants, most often men, some more than once. As the pandemic has declined sharply, the administration is urgently trying to set up a new migratory system, the outlines of which are still unclear. Objective: to restore legal immigration channels. Apparently, candidates for exile will be accepted at the border and have their case processed by the courts, a process that can take years.
A heated political debate
Images of crowds of migrants med at the border, of entire families crossing the Rio Grande have invaded the American media, and the debate on illegal immigration has reached its climax in recent days. The Republicans, led by ex-President Donald Trump, are firing red balls at President Joe Biden, accused of incompetence and weakness. They know that immigration is a thorny, if not unsolvable issue right now for the White House.
But even the Democrats are divided. More than 3,000 km north of the border, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, accused the White House of turning its back on his city. Just like in Chicago, Philadelphia or even Denver, the reception systems of the metropolis are already overwhelmed by the arrival of migrants. Two days ago, the mayor demanded from the municipalities of the distant suburbs that they in turn accept to welcome migrants. He came up against an end of inadmissibility and took legal action. And in the face of the expected influx of migrants, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency.