Hostile rhetoric toward Latin Americans in the US election campaign doesn’t seem to be deterring people from making their way to the US. Not even former President Trump could stop them.
Who’s afraid of Donald Trump returning to the White House? In Latin America, it seems, not many. The US election is apparently having little impact on migration.
“It’s not 100% irrelevant who’s in the White House, but pretty much,” said Benjamin Schwab, program officer for Mexico with Misereor. The Catholic aid organization supports a number of local partner organizations in Mexico that provide social and legal assistance to refugee families from Latin America.
In Schwab’s assessment, “presidential candidate Trump is not a panic factor in terms of migration.” After all, people already have experience of Trump as the US president. Although it was repeatedly announced, it’s well-known that the Trump administration — in government from 2017 to 2021 — did not complete the much-vaunted wall along the US–Mexico border, and despite Trump’s promises, Mexico did not contribute to paying for any of what did get built.
Immigration to US at all-time high
“Even Trump wasn’t able to close the border,” said Schwab. “The lesson we’ve learned is that it is not possible to close the southern border of the US 100%. That’s despite it being one of the most militarized and best-secured borders in the world.”
According to a June survey by the Pew Research Center, a US nongovernmental research institute, there were around 46 million immigrants living in the US in 2022, some 13.8% of the total US population.
The Pew survey found that 77% of these 46 million immigrants were in the US legally. The largest national group, 10.6 million people, was from the country’s southern neighbor, Mexico, constituting 23% of the total.
Border crossing ‘limit’ will make asylum harder to access
Recent figures from US Customs and Border Protection show that, although his rhetoric is milder, President Joe Biden has also taken a restrictive approach to immigration. The agency’s report shows that recent security measures for border protection resulted in a 29% reduction in illegal border crossing arrests in June, compared with the previous month.
Mexico expert Indi-Carolina Kryg of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies also thinks Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are pursuing a tough immigration policy. There have been a large number of deportations from the United States, she said, and asylum has been made harder to access.
“There’s a limit on the number of regular border crossings that can be made each day to apply for asylum,” she explained. “The border is to be closed to asylum-seekers if there’s a weekly average of 2,500 unauthorized border crossings per day.”
According to Schwab, the Democrats are trying to send a message during the election campaign that they are doing something about the increase in immigration. However, he added, these measures make no difference to the so-called pull factors — the reasons why people migrate to the US in the first place.
Exodus from Venezuela boosts migrants
These “factors” include family reunification and crises in countries like Venezuela or Haiti. Refugees from Asian or African countries are also increasingly making their way to Mexico and trying to enter the United States from there.
According to the latest World Migration Report by the International Organization for Migration, 10% of all those who crossed what is known as the Darien Gap in 2022 came from African or Asian countries. The Darien Gap is a jungle region about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) wide that straddles the border between Panama and Colombia.
However, according to the IOM report, 6 million of the 7 million Venezuelan refugees around the world found refuge in neighboring Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil and Ecuador — not in the United States.
Mexico expert Kryg predicts ongoing crises in Latin America will continue to spur more people to migrate north.
“As long as people are fleeing violence and poverty, and there are not enough legal ways of entering the United States, I don’t see any end to these irregular border crossings,” she said.
