This fact should reshape the immigration debate in Washington. If the Biden administration and Congress want to manage the crush of asylum seekers and help the unprecedented number of migrants moving across the Western Hemisphere, they might focus less on hardening the border and more on dealing with the regional dimension of the challenge.
Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, points out that countries along migrants’ path to the United States have few choices. Stopping migrants and sending them back home is the least realistic. (Honduras, for instance, has seen immigrants from China, Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, India and Uzbekistan. Where should Hondurans “send them back” to?)
So countries along the way are either openly letting migrants in transit through — busing them north as Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras have done — or, like Mexico, performing a sort of Kabuki of cooperation with Washington, occasionally deploying the National Guard, which detains and expels some migrants, to keep Washington happy.
Several have tightened visa restrictions to stanch the flow. Almost every country north of Colombia now requires a visa for Venezuelans. Following Nicaragua’s decision to allow visa-free entry for Cubans to continue their journey north, Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico started requiring transit visas to stop the air route from Havana to Managua that had layovers in their countries.
Still, nobody is happy with how anybody else is handling the issue. The United States wants more help stopping migrants along the route. It has provided substantial aid — committing some $2.9 billon since 2017, according to USAID — to help South American countries address the humanitarian crisis caused by mass Venezuelan migration.
But aid groups assess that financing represents only about one-fifth of what is needed. The Colombian government has been calling for more. Overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, in May it stopped offering temporary residence to Venezuelans, so new arrivals have less reason to stop their journey north.
Just as the United States would like more help from countries on the migration route, Latin American nations complain about U.S. policies, too.
The Palenque Declaration signed by regional leaders at the migration summit in southern Mexico in October asked for the Biden administration to stop imposing “inconsistent and selective” policies that give official status to migrants of some nationalities, such as Venezuelans, but not to others, which “arbitrarily produce appealing effects and deterrent effects.”
Immigration processing centers set up by the United States in Ecuador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia might one day help reduce the disorganized flows of migrants, offering options for migrants to apply for asylum far from the southern U.S. border. So far, they have done next to nothing to slow the migrant flows. And they will not help economic migrants, probably the majority of those making their way up from South America across Panama’s Darién Gap.
Human rights advocates are right that the most straightforward way to dissuade hundreds of thousands of desperate people from setting off to seek asylum in the United States would be to open more legal paths into the country, even beyond the additional work permits made available and the limited humanitarian parole visas offered to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, which have proved no match for migrants’ urge to come.
This approach, unfortunately, is likely dead on arrival in Congress, where the GOP’s idea of a sensible immigration policy seems to be one that stops immigration. But the next-best idea is doable: to work with Latin American countries to offer migrants a broader set of opportunities to start new lives.
If lawmakers spent less time worrying about border enforcement and devoted more energy to helping to build an institutional framework enabling countries south of the border to absorb migrants, it could help the Americas cope with what is becoming a crisis for everybody.
Washington should not expect Latin American countries to perform the job of a border wall, blocking migrants coming to the United States. But with enough assistance from Washington, they might become a sponge.
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