Migration Patterns

The title of this article on the caravan of migrants heading towards the southern border of the US rather neatly sums up one of the things I was thinking about the issue: "This Isn’t the First Migrant Caravan to Approach the U.S. What Happened to the Last One?"

After all, if this caravan really is supposed to be a threat to our sovereignty, or anything similarly hyperbolic, then how did we survive the last one?

As tempting as it is to just let that rhetorical question stand on its own, it's probably best if we look at the details a bit more closely. What happened to previous caravans suggests that only a fraction of this one will actually end up at the US border (although a fraction of a caravan this size will still be somewhere around two thousand people). Most of those people will request asylum, and a majority of the people that start that process will get past the first step. At that point, most of them will end up living and working in the US while they wait for their cases to work their way through immigration courts. Most of those asylum seekers will eventually be denied; I don't have particularly good data about how many of those will try to stay in the US anyway, but even if all of them did, it wouldn't increase the number of illegal immigrants entering in a given year by very much.

It's possible that this iteration will be slightly different - maybe the larger size of this group just means there are more people that won't qualify for asylum, so there'll be a smaller percentage that gets past that first step, for one example - but I doubt it'll be significantly different.

I can see how someone looking at that chain of events might be a little bit annoyed, given that it clearly offers chances for people to stay here longer than our laws permit, but I also don't think the opposition I've seen to the caravan has really thought through what our options are to stop that from happening. For better or for worse, our law does have provisions for people to request asylum, and most of the people in previous examples have followed those provisions. Finding technicalities and excuses to deny them entry, or forcing them to go through additional hardships while they're in the US, or any other method that preserves that option to request assistance on paper while removing that option in practice, just makes us look like we're not willing to keep our promises. Or makes us look like we're not brave enough to admit that we actually want less immigration, period.

Of course, we could just change the law so that people like this can't request asylum, or make the standards for granting asylum stricter (as Attorney General Sessions did). It's not quite that simple, though... that does basically say that we want to allow fewer immigrants (legal or not) and provide aid to fewer people. There are plenty of people in the US who don't want that to be the message we send to the rest of the world, and who are quite willing to both advocate for and vote based on that opinion.