The rising wave of global migrants has washed away the White House’s effort to blame the migration crisis on “root causes” in Central America’s Northern Triangle (NT) region.
The business-funded Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) recently reported:
In fiscal year 2021, the most dramatic increases in migrant arrivals are from countries in Central Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. … Even though migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries make up nearly 75% of the encounters so far in FY2021, they are not the only countries contributing to the record-setting number of migrant encounters.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) categorizes origin countries of non-NT/Mexican migrants encountered along the southern border as “other,” without elaborating further on which countries that category covers.
Non-NT/Mexican migrants are also identified as “extra-continentals,” government jargon for border crossers from far away countries, including in South America.
The Biden administration emphasizes addressing the alleged “root causes” of migration to the U.S. from the NT countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as a solution to the border crisis fueled by a record migrant surge in recent months not seen in two decades.
Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador remain the traditional top drivers of migration trends to the U.S. southern border.
However, the origin countries for migrants behind the most significant increase in arrivals at the U.S. southern and northern borders between June 2020 and June 2021 are Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Haiti, BPC noted last month, citing the most recent Customs and Border Protection (CBP) nationwide encounters data.
The growth in migrants from those countries substantially exceeds increases in U.S. arrivals from Mexico and the Northern Triangle during the same period.
Still, the Biden Administration has placed migration from the NT countries at the center of its plans to tackle the record surge of migrants, with little attention to other countries.
In March, the president placed Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of the Northern Triangle effort, vowing to devote billions in American taxpayer funds to that end.
Months later (last Thursday), VP Harris finally unveiled a strategy to address the alleged migration “root causes” in the NT region, including climate change, sexual orientation discrimination, financial woes, corruption, cartel, and gang-perpetrated violence, and human traffickers.
The CBP does provide detailed information on nationwide encounters from 20 countries, including from outside the Americas, as far as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. There is also an undefined “other” category in the nationwide encounters.
BPC noted:
Even though the Department of Homeland Security [DHS] provides detailed information on CBP encounters from 20 different countries, there is a need for further data transparency. In 2020, the undefined “Other” category represented the second largest category of migrant encounters. With more than double the number of encounters in June 2021 than were a year ago, the need for more information regarding these migrants’ origins is apparent.
To date, there have been 37,908 nationwide encounters in FY2021 from this unspecified “other” group, which cannot be traced in any meaningful way.
The number of “other” migrants has grown nearly ten-fold since January, Breitbart news learned.
Panamanian and U.S. border officials have caught terrorists trying to blend in with the wave of migrants heading to America’s southern border.
Last year, the first national threat assessment released by the DHS warned against a significant surge of migration from outside the Western Hemisphere to the southern border.
A large influx of migrants from outside the Americas could “create an illegal migration environment that FTO’s [foreign terrorist organizations] could exploit to facilitate the movement of affiliated persons toward the United States,” it cautioned.
Breitbart News noted the increase in CBP encounters of non-NT migrants could be signaling a shift in migration trends.
Echoing that observation, BPC reported the rate of Romanian migrants choosing to cross the U.S.-Mexico had increased significantly from 19 percent of 1,486 migrants in fiscal 2020 to over 80 percent of 4,369 so far this year.
It appears Biden’s overwhelmingly welcoming message to all migrants and information about his lenient migration policy has reached countries across the globe, prompting a growing number of global migrants trying to enter the U.S.
Republicans and other critics blame Biden’s decision to undo his predecessor’s immigration policies for triggering an ongoing border crisis that has intensified under his tenure.
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