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The Long History of the U.S. Immigration Crisis: Compare the Global Embrace of Ukrainian Refugees and the U.S. Government’s Harsh Treatment of Central American Migrants

By immigrationprof

 

Refugees fleeing the invasion of Ukraine have attracted global attention and sympathy.  A couple weeks ago, I spoke on Capital Public Radio about the Ukrainians who are fleeing the country in response to Russia’s invasion, and how racial and religious discrimination can influence the reception to different groups of refugees.  By comparison, European Union nations were much stricter in the treatment of refugees who fled war in Syria a few years ago.  I also contrasted the generous treatment of Ukrainians  with the United States’s consistently tough responses to asylum seekers from Central America.

Historian Ana Raquel Minian for Foreign Affairs identifies the historical discontinuities between the U.S. words and deeds about migrants fleeing conditions in their homeland:

“Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, millions of Americans have commiserated with the plight of Ukrainian refugees who are being forced to flee their country. But many of these same Americans remain oblivious or unsympathetic to the continuing horrors faced by the refugees arriving at their own shores. In December 2021, the Biden administration announced that it would be relaunching the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), best known as the Remain in Mexico policy. This policy, which began in 2019 under the Trump administration, allowed U.S. authorities to send asylum seekers to wait out the duration of their U.S. immigration proceedings on the Mexican side of the border.

The Biden administration explained the policy’s reinstatement by citing a Texas district court decision that ordered the government to `reinstate MPP in good faith.’ But the Biden administration . . . . expanded the program to include migrants from Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean, as well as the Mexican and Central American asylum seekers to whom it initially applied. The Biden administration has also continued to enforce Title 42, an obscure public health law that the Trump administration used to allow U.S. officials to summarily expel migrants without providing them the opportunity to seek asylum in the United States. Although Biden’s rhetoric on immigrants is unquestionably different than Trump’s, his policy is similar to that of his predecessor, and is based on a strategy with roots in a deeper history of U.S. immigration policy.”

Click the link above to check out the article, which is well worth reading.

 

KJ

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