The End of America’s Title 42
The UK is not the only country facing immigration challenges. In fact, our problems are dwarfed by those facing the US, which for years has grappled with a steady inflow of migrants along the US-Mexico border.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own figures, illegal border crossings in the past fiscal year surpassed 2.3 million, the highest number ever, while America is also grappling with an unprecedented backlog of nearly 850,000 asylum cases waiting to be adjudicated.
These high numbers prevail, despite the existence for the past few years of a Trump administration immigration policy known as Title 42, introduced during the pandemic. This allowed the US Government to expel nearly 2.5 million migrants who have arrived at the southern border since 2020 on health grounds, before they had a chance to apply for asylum.
These numbers may be about to explode today, when Title 42 is set to expire. Under Title 42, many migrants were blocked from requesting asylum at all. With it lifted, the US will return to a policy in which migrants are screened to determine the validity of asylum applications and only deported once it is determined that they do not qualify.
Despite Republican-led appeals for the measure to be extended on an emergency basis, the Biden administration has decided that the measure can no longer be justified, given that the pandemic is now officially over. Across the southern border, local governments and federal authorities are bracing themselves for a massive new influx of migrants.
US officials are reportedly expecting arrivals to rise to more than 10,000 per day in May, up from about 5,000 per day in March.
Several cities further away from the border have declared states of emergency. This includes New York and Chicago, where thousands of migrants have been bussed from the state of Texas, and which are now expecting to receive more.
The Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has argued that cities like New York and Chicago, led by Democrats who like to champion the cause of migrants, need to do their share in support of overrun border communities. If they don’t like it, he contends, they should put more pressure on President Biden to come up with better solutions to control the border…
