Washington, DC – In a stark departure from the previous administration’s approach to immigration, US President Joe Biden, together with leaders of 20 nations in the Western Hemisphere, unveiled a declaration intended to guide a coordinated response to growing migration pressures in the region. The Los Angeles Declaration, announced on Friday at the end of the ninth Americas Summit, includes giving aid to communities most affected by migration, expanding legal pathways for migrants to enter countries, humane border management, and coordinated emergency responses. Migration experts have said the Biden administration’s focus on multilateral regional cooperation and its recognition that migration is a phenomenon that needs to be managed, rather than stopped, is far removed from the stance of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Still, experts have said, there are questions about how the terms of the declaration – which are non-binding – will be executed, and whether the migrant programmes that were announced will do enough to address the needs in the region. “There are more carrots and fewer sticks,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. “There are promises of investment in the region and trying to help countries that are hosting migrants with financial and other resource support,” Cardinal Brown told Al Jazeera. “But it’s one thing to promise more visas, and it’s another thing to process more visas,” she said, in reference to the US’s inflated backlog of visa applications. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has sought to reverse Trump’s legacy on migration. As a candidate on the campaign trail, Trump vilified migrants. As president, he focused on reducing migration in the US by slashing visa and refugee programmes, and building a wall along the US-Mexico border. In 2019, he threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico if it did not do more to stop migrants from travelling to the US. “In terms of the strategy, the goals and the manner in which migration is being undertaken, it is a light and day departure from the Trump administration’s bat-wielding unilateralism,” David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera. “But this administration does not want to spend a lot of time highlighting immigration domestically,” Bier said. “They haven’t found a way to make it a winner.” Republican leaders have seized on the topic of migration as an election issue, specifically at the southern border where numbers have reached record levels. The stakes are high for Biden as the US heads for midterm elections in November, where Republicans are vying for control of Congress. In a fact sheet published on Friday detailing the declaration’s main points, the White House laid out measures that the US has already implemented in recent months, as well as adding some new commitments. The Biden administration said it was committed to resettling 20,000 refugees from the Americas during the next two years and to providing $314m in aid for countries that are hosting refugees and migrants, which includes Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. The administration also said it would resume efforts to reunite Haitian and Cuban families in the US. “It’s certainly a step up from what we’ve done in previous years, when only a few hundred or a few thousand refugees from Latin America have been admitted each year,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “But it is also about four days’ worth of border encounters,” Reichlin-Melnick told Al Jazeera. In the fiscal year 2021, just 11,411 refugees were resettled in the US from all around the world after Trump slashed the refugee admission programme. Meanwhile, Mexico has committed to integrating 20,000 refugees into its labour market during the next three years. While Costa Rica will give protection to migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela who arrived in the country before March 2020.
“Each of us is signing up to commitments that recognise the challenges we all share and the responsibility that impacts on all of our nations,” Biden said during the ceremonial unveiling of the pact. “This is just a start, he said. “Much more work remains, to state the obvious.” So far, migrant groups have commended the commitments in the declaration, saying they echo some of their demands and provide a good starting point for regional cooperation. But they also voiced concern about implementation and funding, and whether there would be any follow-up before the next summit in four years. “It is unclear how these commitments will be monitored and evaluated,” Julio Rank Wright, deputy regional director for Latin America at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement on Friday. “Without long-term funding and political will to protect those displaced throughout the region, the IRC is fearful that the Declaration’s intentions will fall flat and leave millions of people in the Americas behind,” Wright said. The UK has taken in fewer Ukrainian refugees per capita than all but one of 28 European countries, a Guardian analysis of official figures from across the continent has found.
Seven million people have fled Ukraine for other European countries since Russia invaded on 24 February, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR). The Home Office put the number of Ukrainians who had arrived in the UK as of 29 May at 65,700 – equivalent to about 10 refugees per 10,000 population. As of 11 May, 720,000 Ukrainian refugees had arrived in Germany, which has a population of similar size to the UK’s, working out at 87 per 10,000 population. France is the only European country with a roughly equivalent per capita figure to the UK’s, with just over 57,500 arrivals as of 25 May, or nine refugees per 10,000 population – although figures from individual prefectures indicate that 93,000 have now arrived in the country, significantly more than the most recently available official figure. Some much smaller countries by population, including Austria, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, have admitted many more refugees in both absolute and relative terms, according to their governments. Bulgaria, for example, was the initial destination for more than 290,000 people fleeing the war, equating to 423 per 10,000 population. The countries bordering Ukraine have, as would be expected, admitted many more still: UNHCR data shows that a combined 5 million refugees have entered Poland, Romania and Hungary. Poland has admitted the highest rate of Ukrainian refugees of any EU country, taking in 957 refugees per 10,000 population. While it is the case that many refugees move on to other countries, and some return to Ukraine – an Austrian official indicated that as many as 80% of arrivals had not stayed – the figures highlight the restrictiveness of the UK’s schemes, applicants to which are directed to wait for visas to be granted before they travel. The UK’s visa schemes have been widely criticised for the lengthy delays experienced by many applicants. Hundreds of Ukrainian families have chosen to withdraw their applications to come to the UK because of these delays, according to a recent Observer report. Beginning in April, after the Biden administration announced plans to terminate the controversial Trump-era immigration policy known as Title 42, immigration attorney Lindsay Toczylowski spent weeks telling migrants that they would finally get a fair shot at asylum. “We had been telling them that May 23 was the day when hope was on the horizon,” Toczylowski said. “It was the day that the racist and xenophobic Title 42 policy was set to be lifted.” But instead the day dawned with another unfulfilled Biden promise on immigration policy. A federal judge in Louisiana appointed by former President Donald Trump blocked Biden’s order. Ruling in a case brought by Texas and Arizona, the judge said the administration failed to go through the required notice and comment process before terminating the policy. Trump enacted Title 42 during the early days of the pandemic under the guise of public health. It allows border officials to turn away asylum seekers without a court hearing. It’s been used nearly 2 million times. As a result, many migrants have been stuck in Mexican border towns where they end up being robbed, beaten, raped or kidnapped, according to Toczylowski and other advocates. Monika Langarica, an attorney at the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy, argued in court that it was unjust for two states to dictate federal immigration policy. “Our argument is simple,” Langarica said. “Why should Arizona and Texas and other hostile anti-immigration states get to dictate national immigration policy for the entire border and the entire country?” Langarica said the judge’s decision will almost certainly result in more violence. “That order will endanger thousands of lives of people who just want to seek asylum and protection for themselves and their families,” she said. Haitian nationals continue to be among the most impacted by Title 42, advocates say. Over the weekend, the Biden administration used Title 42 to deport hundreds of Haitians from El Paso. |