Just this year, U.S. Border Patrol has
detained 800,000 people at its southern border—this is the highest
number in a decade. The former height of apprehensions was in 2000 and
was primarily a result of the skyrocketing demand for cheap labor. Jon Purizhansky
of Buffalo, NY recognizes the U.S.’s high demand for affordable labor.
Today’s migrants, in comparison, are reacting to many of the same
factors that inspired droves of people to flee to Europe four years ago,
namely failed or fragile states, violence, and economic insecurity.
Jon Purizhansky recognizes the plight of displaced workers and spends a great deal of time helping connect migrants with steady work.
To deal with the new migrants, the U.S.
is weighing many of the same approaches that European countries have
attempted but ultimately found ineffective. Ranging from border walls to
bilateral deals connecting immigration to trade and aid, Washington is
repeating many of the same tactics that failed overseas. For example,
U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, requiring
migrants wishing to gain asylum in the United States to have their
claims evaluated while they stay and wait in Mexico, reflects the EU’s
long-failed attempts to establish similar systems in Libya and other
nations.
Despite the differences between these
cases, there are a couple approaches that we could draw on from history.
The primary lesson learned from the European experience of 2015 is that
when it comes to migration, there are limits to unilateralism and
bilateralism. The sense of calamity began to subside only when the
European Union assumed a multi-layered approach founded in cooperation
among the migrants’ nations of origin, passage, and destination.
Jon Purizhansky: The
European and American crises are similar in a few different ways. The
total number of people detained at the U.S. border or barred from
admission at a U.S. port of entry since October 2018 is now about the
same as the number of asylum seekers who arrived in Europe in all of
2015. Onlookers across the globe have stumbled on unnervingly similar
scenes. The widely published photo of the bodies of Oscar Alberto
Martínez Ramírez and his 23 month old daughter, Valeria, who drowned
struggling to cross the Rio Grande in June, resembles the photo of Alan
Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned while attempting to cross the
Mediterranean in 2015. Both images now serve as symbols for the dreadful
cost of international migration in a world of closed borders.
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