From our correspondent in the United States,
“The crisis at the border will destroy New York. The city we love, we are on the verge of losing it. » The author of these remarks is not Donald Trump but the Democratic mayor of the Big Apple, Eric Adams. At the beginning of September, he sounded the alarm over the arrival of 110,000 migrants over the last twelve months, with New York social services on the “verge of collapse”.
He is not the only one. As the number of illegal entries across the southern border reaches record levels – nearly 2.5 million over the last twelve months, according to figures released on Sunday – several cities have declared a state of emergency, in Texas and California. So much so that Joe Biden is facing a humanitarian – and inevitably political – crisis a little over a year before the presidential election in November 2024.
Record figures but need to be put into perspective
Over the last 12 months therefore, 2.47 million illegal entries – a figure different from the number of people, because it includes repeat offenses – were recorded at the border with Mexico. This is a new record, surpassing 2.3 million in 2022. This is five times more than in 2020, and three times more than in 2019 – the administration’s final pre-Covid year. Trump.
Migration crises are cyclical and affect Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Their levels are relative to the American population and were almost comparable in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, then at the end of the 1990s under Bill Clinton. There was then a sharp decline during the Obama-Trump years, before a sharp rise over the last three years. Until 2020, these were primarily Mexican nationals coming alone to look for work. Today, there are entire families fleeing poverty and violence, particularly from the “Northern triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador), with a recent influx from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, but also refugees from “atypical” countries (Syria, Ukraine, Russia) which transit through Central America.
Border towns and metropolises under pressure
In early October, more than a thousand migrants arrived on the roof of a freight train in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in an attempt to reach El Paso, Texas. They pass over barbed wire, between two sections of wall or cross the natural obstacles of the desert and the Rio Grande river, to “surrender” to the border police. A few hundred kilometers to the southeast, in Eagle Pass, where Elon Musk came to play “citizen journalists”, 4,000 migrants arrived in 24 hours, and three times more in a week, or almost half of the population of this town of 29,000 inhabitants.
In California, San Diego, located opposite Tijuana, declared a “humanitarian emergency” to obtain more resources from the federal state. The Democratic mayor of El Paso did so in the spring. In this political standoff, several Republican governors have sent buses and planes of migrants to Democratic strongholds. Cities like New York and Chicago are struggling to respond, and many migrants are finding themselves homeless.
What changed with the end of the health emergency
Until last May, the Biden administration could, like that of Donald Trump, turn back the majority of migrants, including asylum seekers, under the health emergency declared in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. But with the end of “Title 42” and the return to the ancestral “Title 8”, the system is saturated. And this is even with the introduction of the CBP One mobile app, via which asylum seekers must first request an appointment.
Crossing the border illegally remains a crime punishable by expulsion, but migrants must first go before a judge, which can take several months or even years. A minority waits in detention in a customs police cell (ICE) but for the most part, migrants are released on American territory while awaiting their appearance. According to an estimate of Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)an NGO which defends migrants from Latin America, around 1 million people have been able to stay in the United States over the last twelve months, for a country with 332 million inhabitants.
An “untenable” situation, according to an Arizona sheriff
Dave Rhodes, Republican sheriff of Yavapai County (a suburb of Phoenix), in the border state of Arizona, shares his field experience with 20 minutes :
The situation is untenable. This is the worst I’ve seen in my twenty-seven year career. Not just for illegal entries, but also for fentanyl seizures, forced labor and human trafficking, and we are starting to see the effects on insecurity. The border has been commodified by cartels and smugglers, who make billions of dollars. And Arizona law enforcement has no means of acting because securing the border depends on the federal government.
Rhodes criticizes the “rhetoric” of Joe Biden who, upon taking office, “wanted to relax the rules imposed by his predecessor and sent the message to the whole world that the American border was open”. And to emphasize that actions of the governors of Texas (a floating barrier on the Rio Grande) or Arizona (a wall of containers) were attacked in court by the Biden administration.
The United States “not on the verge of rupture”, responds an NGO
“There are 21 million people migrating across the American continent: the entire region is experiencing difficulties integrating them,” estimates Adam Isaacson, director for defense monitoring at WOLA. However, he rejects the idea that the United States is “on the verge of collapse”, with a “historically low unemployment rate and a labor shortage”.
According to him, the main problem comes from outdated immigration laws that no Congress has managed to reform since 1986. The expert cites “the low number of people who can apply for a green card or a work permit temporary, which makes the right to asylum the only possible recourse.” But also a 1996 law which prevents asylum seekers from working during the first six months, which therefore become a burden on public services for food or housing. With a House of Representatives currently without a Speaker, and a presidential election in a year, nothing will change.
Vulnerable, Biden toughens his policy with a view to the presidential election
Two out of three Americans criticize the American president’s management of the border, so much so that Republican elected officials – and Donald Trump – are taking advantage of it with permanent attacks. Joe Biden seems to be attempting a shift towards greater firmness. In recent weeks, he has relaunched direct expulsions to Venezuela for illegal immigrants – a practice long suspended because of the economic and security crisis in the country.
At the same time, the Minister of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, indicated that a new portion of the wall launched by Donald Trump would be erected in the Rio Grande Valley, on the border with Mexico. Annoyed, Joe Biden clarified that he still thinks that a wall “is not the solution”, but that he is forced to do so because he has not succeeded in convincing Congress to reallocate these funds for another project .
“These announcements show that the Biden administration is aware that the border will be one of the points on which Republicans will focus [pour la présidentielle]and the Democrats, vulnerable (in Congress), will need tangible results,” believes Kate deGruyter, from the center-left think tank Third Way. “After almost three years in office, President Biden is finally realizing the level of frustration with his policies. Americans, beyond the border states, realize the cost of an open border,” agrees Barrett Marson, Republican strategist from Arizona, a state won by Joe Biden with barely 10,000 votes difference in 2020. For Marson, “if Biden fails to reestablish some control over the migration situation, he will pay the price in 2024.”