US braces for pandemic to drive largest illegal alien wave ever to the border
'Unprecedented': US braces for pandemic to drive largest refugee wave ever to the border
by Joel Gehrke
| May 12, 2020 07:00 AM
Economic calamities caused by the coronavirus pandemic could trigger a historic wave of migration from Latin America to the United States, according to officials.
“If there is economic collapse in a given country, it is only natural that there will be migration flows to places where the economy is more robust,” U.S. Agency for International Development acting Administrator John Barsa told the Washington Examiner. “Are we concerned about the economic impacts that this might have, which could lead to migration? Absolutely.”
President Trump won the White House in part due to a pledge to stop illegal immigration, an issue that returned to the center of domestic politics following a 2014 border crisis that many Republican lawmakers and voters blamed on former President Barack Obama. That crisis featured tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children fleeing gang violence at home, but the cascade of social ills occasioned by the pandemic in multiple countries could dwarf that migration surge.
“You're going to have millions and millions of Latin Americans out of jobs, with governments too broke to provide even the meager social safety nets they have,” a second senior U.S. official told the Washington Examiner. “How do you measure the number of refugees that come out of that level of devastation? You can't put a number on it, but it's reasonable to say that it would be completely unprecedented.”
Barsa said that his team already is thinking ahead about how to mitigate the human suffering and political degradation that otherwise might drive people from their homes.
“I'm looking to ensure that we don't just focus on the problem right in front of our noses, which is the global health aspect, because this is absolutely going to challenge us on the economic development aspect,” he said. “The activities we're doing already address economic development issues. So what we're seeing with the COVID pandemic, as countries have greater economic challenges, we may have to double down and help them more on an economic development front.”
If the U.S. escapes the pandemic without a major migrant crisis, it may be due to the damage done to the U.S. economy. "If you've got 20% or 30% unemployment in the United States, basically Great Depression levels or worse," that might blunt some of the interest in traveling from Latin America, the second senior official said. "There would be pressure for immigration, but depending on how bad things are perceived to be in the United States, it would be either more or less pressure than you would think."
Such forecasts illustrate the “thunder and lightning” quality of the problems presented by the pandemic, as Barsa put it. “You'll see the flash first, and then, later on, you'll hear the thunder,” the USAID chief said. “So the here-and-now challenge is on the global health systems and keeping people alive. But the after-effects, the second- and third-order effects, the economic effects, may be the more lasting ones.”
There will be a time lag between the emergence of the virus and the potential for Latin American eyes to look north for hope, the second official predicted, setting the table for new migrants to arrive early in 2021. So the victor of the 2020 presidential election will face a choice “that’s never been quite this stark,” the second official said.
“Confronted with unprecedented violence and chaos in the region that we are directly tied to, do you try to wall yourself off from the region?” the senior U.S. official said. “Or do you launch unprecedented amounts of aid and assistance to try to rebuild the region and rebuild its institutions so that you basically don't have to live in fear of the consequences in the region?”
Barsa suggested that policymakers have less room to choose than they might think. “This pandemic is having effects on fragile democracies, societies, and economies,” he said. “So the world, whether we like it or not, is going to have some different challenges before us.”
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