Immigration to the USA: panic on the US-Mexico border

On the Mexican border, several municipalities in Texas and Arizona are expecting chaos and have declared a state of emergency… Washington has sent another two thousand troops to support some 24,000 security officers. But the task is Herculean, while tens of thousands of visa-free migrants are jostling at the border, mainly from Central and South America, as well as from China, Russia or Haiti.

“This is an extremely complex crisis, and it is global, look in Europe, you have the same thing,” said Maria Blak-Belair, director of RIF, a New York-based organization to help asylum seekers. The situation reminds me of a boiling pot lid. We should be able to go beyond ideologies, but everything has been blocked since Congress…”

A new device is being developed urgently

“Millions of Hispanics are leaving their homes,” alarmed The New York Times in an article that made headlines here, “in numbers not as large in decades, heading to the United States.”

The Covid pandemic, a severe economic recession, political repression in several countries, violence by armed groups and gangs, inflation of basic foodstuffs caused by the conflict in Ukraine have all created a “perfect storm”. storm, crisis conditions) in the southern United States, experts say. In addition, false information about a possible amnesty, spread by networks of smugglers and traffickers, has been circulating on social media for weeks, fueling the crisis.

In three years, Section 42, a measure that dates back to the 19th century and was scheduled to be repealed this Thursday, May 11 at midnight, allowed the United States to return 2.8 million migrants, most often men, some of them more than once. . . As the pandemic subsides sharply, the administration is urgently trying to create a new migration system, the contours of which are not yet clear. Objective: to restore legal immigration channels. Apparently, candidates for expulsion will be accepted at the border, and their cases will be tried in the courts, which can take years.

Hot political debate

Images of crowds of migrants crowding at the border, entire families crossing the Rio Grande, have flooded the American media, and the debate about illegal immigration has reached a fever pitch in recent days. Republicans led by former President Donald Trump are shooting red balloons at President Joe Biden, accused of incompetence and weakness. They know that immigration is a difficult, if not intractable problem for the White House right now.

But even Democrats are divided. More than 2,000 miles north of the border, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, accused the White House of turning his back on his city. Like Chicago, Philadelphia, or even Denver, the metropolitan area’s reception systems are already overwhelmed by the arrival of migrants. Two days ago, the mayor demanded that the municipalities of the outlying suburbs agree to accept the migrants in turn. He faced the end of inadmissibility and went to court. And in the face of an expected influx of migrants, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency.