Category: Migration, Refugees, and Asylum

“G.O.P. Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to East Coast” (New York Times, yesterday):

Lever Alejos arrived in the nation’s capital last week on a bus with dozens of fellow Venezuelans who had journeyed more than 1,300 miles from their broken country to the United States. Most had braved poisonous plants and thugs as they trudged through dense jungle on the Colombian border and waded in water up to their chins to cross the Rio Grande into Texas, some clutching babies.

After being processed by U.S. border authorities, the undocumented migrants were released into South Texas, free to go where they wanted. Mr. Alejos, 28, said he was offered two options: a $50 bus ride to San Antonio or a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., paid for by the State of Texas. “I wanted San Antonio, but I had run out of money,” said Mr. Alejos, who has no family in the United States. “I boarded the bus to Washington.”

With no money and no family to receive them, the migrants are overwhelming immigrant nonprofits and other volunteer groups, with many ending up in homeless shelters or on park benches. Five buses arrived on a recent day, spilling young men and families with nowhere to go into the streets near the Capitol.

Since April, Texas has delivered more than 6,200 migrants to the nation’s capital, with Arizona dispatching an additional 1,000 since May. The influx has prompted Muriel E. Bowser, Washington’s Democratic mayor, to ask the Defense Department to send the National Guard in. The request has infuriated organizations that have been assisting the migrants without any city support.

“The infrastructure in New York is not built for this,” she said. “We are not on the border.”

The situation has become acute in recent weeks with the arrival of so many Venezuelans, who cannot be expelled under Title 42 because Mexico will not take them and their own government does not have an agreement with the United States to accept deportation flights. And unlike most migrants from Mexico and Central America who have family and friends in the United States, Venezuelans often arrive with no money and nowhere to go.

The “migrants welcome” lawn signs all over Northwest D.C. were not sufficient, apparently, to handle even 1 percent of the undocumented migrants who come to the U.S. (compare the 7,200 migrants mentioned above to the roughly 22 million who lived in the U.S. as of 2018 (Yale)).

From April 2022 in D.C., No Human Being is Illegal:

Related:

• Now that Texas is sending migrants to D.C., are some humans illegal?
• D.C.-based technocrats decide where to park the Afghan migrants

“Australian traveller strip-searched, held in US prison and deported over little-known entry requirement” (Guardian):

An Australian traveller was denied entry to the US, cavity searched, sent to prison alongside criminals and subsequently deported 30 hours after arriving, due to a little-known entry requirement for the US.

The Victorian student Jack Dunn applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He had been warned about the need to prove his plan to exit the US, but was unaware of the rule that requires those entering on the waiver to have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.

After arriving in Honolulu Dunn was refused entry to the US and detained at a federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.

Dunn, 23, had spent more than half a year saving for his trip, and by May had enough for a three- to four-month adventure. He planned to start in the US to see the NBA playoffs, then spend most of his trip backpacking across Mexico and South America.

After landing at 6am on 5 May, he was interrogated by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, who refused him entry after determining that he had not booked onward travel beyond Mexico.

He was put in an interrogation room with no wifi. Because he did not have a local sim card, had no access to the internet.

At one point, Dunn claims, an airline worker offered him his phone to book a flight from Mexico to a third country.

Dunn tried booking a flight to Panama, but did not have enough money in his debit card account, and as his own phone was not connected to the internet, he could not transfer money from his savings account, which held several thousand dollars. He then tried to book a cheaper flight to Guatemala, but the CBP officer re-entered the room and ordered the airline worker to take the phone back, Dunn claimed.

It’s a sad story because he would have been able to stay if he’d simply said “My parents are beating me up and I request asylum” or “there is a gang in my neighborhood that has targeted me for execution” (see “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies”: “Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew key rulings that his predecessor issued in 2018 limiting asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang threats.”).

What were the consequences of this failure to claim asylum?

Dunn said about six hours after landing he was handcuffed and taken to the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu, where he was told to strip naked and was twice searched under his scrotum and anus for contraband before being admitted.

Separately, I’m not sure why we need this rule. Since anyone can stay in the U.S. more or less indefinitely merely by saying “I don’t feel safe at home,” why are Australians whose trip terminates in Mexico or Canada a threat to our society?

Related:

• “A migrant caravan of almost seven thousand people in southern Mexico has been dissolved” (CNN)

From May: Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?

From June 6, a NYT article regarding migrants with a “high reproductive output”:

Lionfish are native to the Pacific and Indian oceans. But in the past few decades, the animal has established itself in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, where its invasive presence poses a serious threat to tropical Atlantic reefs and their associated habitats.

The effects are staggering. One study by scientists from Oregon State University found that, in only five weeks, a single lionfish reduced the juvenile fish in its feeding zone by 80 percent. And their reproductive output is remarkably high: Females can release around 25,000 eggs every few days. In some places, including the Bahamas, the density of lionfish may well be causing the most significant change to biodiversity of reef habitats since the dawn of industrialized fishing.

Noted!

An article from Belgium, translated from French by The Google, “Eight objectives to streamline the approach to unaccompanied foreign minors”:

Today, 2670 young people are welcomed in the Fedasil network and by the communities, compared to 1029 in 2019. In 2021, Belgium saw a total of 3351 young people who declared themselves minors. The Guardianship Service of the FPS Justice carried out 2515 age tests to verify these declarations. In total, 2435 decisions were made: at the end of the test, 69% were declared major and 31% were declared minors.

If migrants are undocumented, how can an “age test” be performed?

(Based on the folks whom I’ve talked to, the U.S. doesn’t try to do this. A migrant who identifies him/her/zir/theirself as a minor is a minor.)

The U.S. features a growing population and a fixed supply of housing and thus has become a textbook Econ 101 example of how rising demand lifts prices. Who has figured out how to increase housing supply dramatically? “Turkey’s Plan to Draw Refugees Back to Syria: Homes for 1 Million” (New York Times, May 4):

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Turkey will build homes, schools, hospitals and more in northern Syria, but experts question whether refugees will return willingly.

Mr. Erdogan’s announcement on Tuesday came amid a grave economic crisis that has hit the wallets of many Turks and fueled widespread anger toward the large number of people displaced from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere who now live in Turkey.

As the anger has grown, Turkish social media has lit up with furious posts about foreigners flying their flags in Turkish cities, enjoying themselves while Turks struggle to make ends meet and changing the cultural fabric of Turkish communities.

Mr. Erdogan’s announcement on Tuesday provided an update on those efforts and expanded their scope. So far, more than 57,000 out of 77,000 planned homes in Idlib Province in Syria’s northwest have been completed and now house 50,000 families, he said.

In the future, that number will grow to 100,000 homes, and a new project will be started, he said, to build enough homes for an additional 1 million Syrian refugees to move to other parts of northern Syria where Turkey holds sway.

In addition to homes, the project will provide schools, hospitals and “all the needs of daily life and self-sufficient economic infrastructure, from agriculture to industry,” Mr. Erdogan said.

All of the above happens to some extent in Florida, but the new houses are tough to characterize as “affordable.” Obviously, the Chinese have achieved dramatic results in building new cities, but the Chinese way of doing things doesn’t seem to work here (see Netflix: American Factory for example, unless you’ve desubscribed as I have!).

(Separately, we are informed that low-skill migrants make existing residents of a country wealthier. Yet the Turks are willing to spend whatever it costs to build hundreds of thousands of houses in order to rid themselves of migrants. It is a mystery!)

The backyard of a Turkish-built house that I visited in 2007: