On Friday, President Joe Biden will announce the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration with regional leaders at the Summit of the Americas. This is an attempt to address the problems many countries face with increasing migration.
A senior administration official stated that the declaration is a regional partnership designed to address historical migration flows that affect most countries in the region. It requests governments along the migration route to strengthen and establish asylum processing. They are also asked to ensure that their borders are enforced by screening and removing those who do not qualify for asylum.
“The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection focuses on responsibility sharing and economic support to countries most affected by refugee and migrating flows,” stated a senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters before the official announcement.
It aims to address migration in a coordinated manner and focuses on stability and assistance for communities as well as legal pathways, humane border management, coordinated emergency response, and legal pathways.
“This is an historic moment for our nation. The official stated that no previous administration had assertively engaged the region in order to secure concrete commitments from them to share responsibility and address the regional challenge.
This week’s summit in Los Angeles promoted a variety of themes, including economic investments and security for health. The most difficult and complex theme at the summit was the one dealing with migration.
This is despite a sharp increase in U.S. migration. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there were 1.7 million encounters at the Southwest land border in the 2021 fiscal year and 1.3million in the first seven months of the 2022 fiscal years.
Experts agree that stemming the flow of migrants to the U.S. requires persistence and complexity. Donald Trump, the former president, halted economic aid to El Salvador and Guatemala, which have seen large numbers of migrants from these countries for decades.
Eric Farnsworth (Vice President of the Council of the Americas Think Tank and former State Department Official) stated that consistency matters as well as messaging.
He stated that unless there is a lot of job creation in the formal economic sector, it will be hard to encourage people to stay in their country.
It’s unlikely that it will be resolved at the summit in Los Angeles. Farnsworth stated that he hoped to make progress and create a respectful dialogue about these issues. It is clear that everything in America becomes politicized and difficult to deal. It’s not an easy task. It’s a difficult task, and I salute the administration for trying to find solutions.
The U.S. is not the only country affected by immigration. More than 2 million Venezuelan refugees fled to Colombia, putting pressure on resources. Peru also hosts large numbers of Venezuelan migrants.
At the summit, Colombia’s President Ivan Duque announced that his government had granted temporary status to 1,000,000 Venezuelans within a little more than a year.
There are no signs that migration will slow down. According to the World Bank, the global economy could be heading for years of low growth and rising prices. This could lead to instability in countries already trying to recover from the pandemic.
Notable absences were noted at the summit. To protest the exclusions of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba from the summit, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican President, and Xiomara Castro, the Honduran President, did not attend. Guatemalan and El Salvador presidents did not attend. Instead, the foreign ministers of each country sent them.
Most of the migrants arrested at the Southwest border are from countries whose leaders either did not attend the summit or boycotted it in protest.
Domestically, immigration is becoming a more contentious topic. Biden’s administration made some changes to manage the flow of migrants and process asylum seekers who crossed the border. Title 42, which restricts asylum-seekers’ entry to the U.S. because of the pandemic has not been repealed.
Biden’s promise to complete immigration reform is unlikely to be fulfilled in a midterm election.
Advocacy groups are trying draw attention to the issue of migration. Biden and officials were urged to sign a series of commitments regarding migration beyond the declaration by over 100 civil society organizations. These included “protecting refugees’ rights” and “protecting immigrant workers in the U.S.”
Mich Gonzalez, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, stated that the U.S. has placed more emphasis on the bureaucracy involved in containing immigrants.
“In this country, we have a penal system for handling migration. The government claims that the way that we deal with the incarceration at the border is to make sure that people don’t run into hiding and don’t go to their hearings.” It’s used more to deter people from migrating and has led to criminalization of the concept. People immediately associate the word “immigrant” with criminality or illegality.
Advocates claim that a migrant caravan of several thousand migrants started walking out of Southern Mexico on Monday to draw attention to their dire situation. This group consisted of 4,000-5,000 migrants mostly from Central America, Cuba, and Venezuela. Many are unhappy with Mexico’s strategy to contain them in the southern part of the country, where there is very little work, and this hinders their goal to reach the U.S.
