NBC News: “Number of migrants crossing border hits another record, with surges in migration by nationalities once rarely seen”

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With the midterm elections in the background, news reports on immigration take on greater significance.  Stories about the latest “caravan” of migrants traveling through Mexico regularly generate public reactions, often drumbeats about the need for greater border enforcement along the U.S./Mexico border.  Reports of record levels of migrants seeking to cross the border trigger similar reactions.  Such reports are a regular feature of the news cycle.  Here are a couple of recent examples.

Along similar lines, Julia Ainsley for NBC News this week reports that “[t]he number of undocumented immigrant crossings at the southwest border once again broke record highs in May, prompted in large part by surges in migration by nationalities that were previously rarely found at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Customs and Border Protection data obtained by NBC News.”  Here is the data.

CBP stopped migrants at the U.S/Mexico border more than 239,000 times in May.  Many were stopped more than once.  

In an interesting twist, migrants “from India, Turkey, Russia, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia and Nicaragua increased in part because it is harder for border agents to subject some of those nationalities to the Covid-19 border restrictions known as Title 42 that let the U.S. quickly send migrants back to their home countries or into Mexico.” 

KJ