With migration increasing throughout the Americas, “border policy is no longer a sufficient means to control immigration,” writes Andrew Selee, President of the Migration Policy Institute in a recent opinion piece published in the New York Times.
“The United States must enlist other countries in the hemisphere to become partners in measures to prevent recurrent political and humanitarian crises that force people to flee their homelands,” writes Selee.
He notes that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Colombia’s foreign minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez, convened a hemispheric conversation in October to begin this process.
“The temptation will be to create a new regional arrangement to make borders harder to cross by increasing enforcement and deportations,” writes Selee.
But cooperation around deterrence “is particularly hard to sustain among countries with varying capacity to welcome migrants and distinct concerns about migration,” he notes.
Selee floats the idea of countries in the region seeking to reach a common understanding of what cooperation around migration means. “However, these almost certainly have to be broad principles rather than specific agreements, which will have to be negotiated around much more specific issues with countries that share similar concerns and approaches.”
The Migration Policy Institute is a nonpartisan think tank that seeks to improve migration policies.
Selee is the author of “Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together.”
The Immigration and Refugee News Digest 