I thought the articles by Dexter Filkins and Caitlin Dickerson were both excellent. The Filkins article gave a really good overview of the problems from a US policy perspective: congress is in stalemate for partisan reasons, so the President rules through executive orders, which can then be challenged in court. As Filkins illustrates, the US asylum process and changing border policy are very dysfunctional. The fact that asylum seekers can stay for 10 years without having their asylum cases settled is a huge problem because it means that migrants can de facto stay and are likely to slip away and become undocumented at any point in the process. Better the certainty of being undocumented and staying than risking being deported for the sake of being legal. It was also interesting that the US had relied on Title 42, archaic public health legislation,  to turn away migrants at the border within 15 minutes of processing them for so long but cannot anymore. I thought the profiles of the local politicians Lozano and Gonzales were really interesting because they highlighted the gulf between the Washington narrative and the experience of communities close to the border. Both politicians gave the impression they were now totally disillusioned with the federal government’s ability to respond. There was a suggestion at the end of the article that what the US needs to do is invest more in South American economies. I don’t think that will stem the flow of migrants. I remember reading in Patrick Kingsley’s book The New Odyssey that increases in GDP lead to short to medium-term increases in population outflow as more people have the means to leave the country. I was also struck by the many similarities to the migrant crisis in the EU and in the UK: I haven’t read the book that we read the review for, but I did note that the review mentioned how the author didn’t consider US migration policy in a global context. Thinking about the issue in the context of a looming Trump presidency, I am increasingly convinced that the more liberal solutions to the migration crisis are nebulous and uncertain: facilitate assimilation and mutual understanding and increase overseas aid spending etc. On the other hand, the more right-wing suggestions on the right are very concrete: close the border, end the asylum system, have a hard cap on migration. My sense is that these suggestions are increasingly appealing to the median voter in many western democracies. The main obstacle for implementing these policies in Western countries so far has been international law, but how long will it be before a major western country ends its asylum system and which other countries will follow? The UK was the first to try to ship its migrants away and failed, but now the Netherlands and Germany are trying.

I found Dickerson’s piece fascinating and very compelling. It was a topic that I knew nothing about but that I now feel I know a good amount about. It’s crazy to me that a region that was thought of as impassable for centuries had 800 thousand people cross through it last year, with the fastest growing group being under 5s. My overall takeaway from the piece was that deterrence does not work: people have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Elimar’s situation at the end of the piece, living and working in Dallas, with her asylum hearing not for another 5 years shows how you can win big even though you gamble. I thought the story of Bé and Kánh was heartbreaking and allowed the human toll of the criminalisation of migration to cut through. It provides a useful counter example to Elimar’s success. It also points to the  long term traumatisation of even the people who do manage to make it to the US.