Is Biden to blame for the border crisis? How US policies arent keeping up with global migration trends. Grid News

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Something remarkably fairly happened on the US-Mexico border in August of this year. For the first time ever that month, migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador accounted for less than half of those encountered by US authorities at the border.

The numbers from those four countries have declined somewhat, but the much more significant trend is the increasing number of people reaching the border after much longer journeys, driven primarily by four countries: Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Haiti .

All these countries to varying extents share political dysfunction and economic stagnation.

Since around 2015, state fragility has been the key driving force of migration, Manuel Orozco, director of the migration, remittances and development program at Inter-American Dialogue, told Grid.

Migration from Cuba to the United States is nothing new, but theres been a recent surge since the nationwide protests of 2021, which were sparked by public anger over food and medicine shortages and the governments response to the pandemic, and met with a harsh crackdown by authorities. Unlike previous migration waves, when Cubans fled the island by boat, Cubans are increasingly traveling through Central America and Mexico, aided by Nicaraguas decision late last year to drop visa requirements for Cubans. In April of this year, CBP documented a record 34,930 Cubans at the border. In April 2020, there were only 164.

For decades, the number of Nicaraguans seeking asylum in the United States was negligible compared with other Central American countries, but the numbers jumped sharply after 2018, when President Daniel Ortega responded to protests against living standards and benefits cuts with a harsh crackdown on political dissent that killed hundreds and continues to this day. Around 111,000 Nicaraguans were detained trying to enter the United States in the 2022 fiscal year, an increase from 50,722 in all of 2021 and just 3,164 in 2020.

No country has seen as dramatic an out-migration in recent years as Venezuela, which has been caught in a doom loop of economic collapse, political repression and rampant violent crime since around 2014. Around 6.8 million Venezuelans have fled the country since then more than 20 percent of its population. The vast majority fled to other countries in Latin America but have since chosen to head north amid economic instability in many parts of the region in the wake of the pandemic.

Flying to Mexico and then heading to the US border used to be the preferred route, but since Mexico imposed, at the request of the Biden administration last year, visa requirements on Venezuelans, an increasing number, including many families with children, have been traveling overland on foot through the Darin Gap, a notoriously dangerous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama.

Yael Schacher, Americas and Europe director at Refugees International, spoke with Grid from Guatemala, where she has been touring migrant shelters. She said that a shelter she visited near the Honduran border was just filled with Venezuelans.

Venezuelans are on every border on every part of the journey toward the United States, Schacher said, adding that the demographic profile of these migrants has also recently changed. What were now seeing is the poorest and the people without any means are leaving. If you had the ability to get out earlier, you already would have.

The fact that these three countries are ruled by leftist, anti-American governments has given a palpable but somewhat contradictory ideological cast to the current crisis. When releasing its September numbers, CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus even explicitly blamed failing communist regimes for the current wave of migration. But those fleeing have not always received the warmest welcome from the United States staunchest anti-communists.

The vast majority of those bused or flown to blue states by Republican governors in Arizona, Texas and Florida in recent months have been Venezuelans.

So much of the growth in migrants is coming from countries that US conservatives paint as socialist hellscapes, Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, told Grid. So why in the world would they be yelling at the Biden administration for not sending more people back to those regimes?

For all the difficulties they have in reaching the US, once they get here, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans are for the most part not sent back to the countries they fled. This is in part because the US has few diplomatic relations with those countries governments.

Haitians, another significant recent migrant population, do not have that same advantage. The number of Haitians encountered by US authorities at the border reached a high of 17,638 in September 2021 but plunged to just 908 the following month after the Biden administration aggressively ramped up its use of deportation flights. Last May brought another round of deportation flights, though many migrants remain undeterred. Some 85 percent of the migrants currently waiting to claim asylum in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas, are Haitian.

The situation back in Haiti has certainly not improved. Long plagued by endemic poverty, Haiti has been in a state of acute political chaos since the assassination of President Jovenel Mose last year. Gang violence and hunger have reached a level where the government last week took the extremely unpopular step of calling for international military intervention to restore order. The aggressive deportation of Haitians compared with other Latin American nationalities has led to accusations of racist double standards, particularly after the notorious incident last year when Border Patrol agents on horseback were filmed chasing Haitian migrants. The complaints of double standards have only grown in light of the relatively warm welcome given to Ukrainian refugees, more than 20,000 of whom have crossed the Mexico-US border and only a fraction of whom have been turned away.

What happened over the last year or two is that weve gotten so far from any kind of uniform asylum policy, Schacher said. We have one that is completely dependent on nationality. How youre going to be treated at the border completely depends on where you came from.

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