Immigration and Migration

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering June 9 to June 15, was compiled with support from Lucia Petty and Rebecca Turkington.

Sessions’ ruling in Matter of A-B- not only blocks a pathway to safety for domestic violence victims, it also undermines the United States’ reputation as one of the few true beacons of hope and liberty in the world and a country bent on preventing and responding to violence against women. 

At a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conference in Abuja, Abika Dabiri-Erewa—the senior special assistant to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on diaspora and foreign affairs—warned that Germany will likely deport between twenty-five and thirty thousand Nigerian asylum seekers. She said many claims for asylum were spurious: “some who are from the East and West are saying they are running away from Boko Haram while others say they are gays and were having challenges expressing themselves in Nigeria.” She said the Nigerian foreign ministry is working with German authorities “to see how the entire process [of deportation] can be made easier.” She did not indicate when deportations would begin. The announcement from Dabiri-Erewa comes on the heels of a meeting between a German envoy and Minister of Foreign Affairs Geoffrey Onyeama last month to discuss Nigerian migrants in Germany. Resettling Nigerians deported from Europe will be challenging for Nigerian authorities, hence the call for Nigerians not to participate in “irregular” migration. However, rather than convincing would-be migrants to stay put, European efforts to reduce migrant flows are simply forcing them elsewhere. At the same conference, another Nigerian official lamented that Nigerians are now migrating to “unpopular” countries like Morocco, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Mali.  Nigeria’s large population, tradition of migration, and stagnant economy suggest significant emigration will continue. But a successful asylum applicant must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and other legally defined criteria. It will therefore be difficult for most Nigerians to obtain asylum in European countries. Even so, Dabiri-Erewa’s suggestion that “gays” are unqualified to seek asylum in Europe is ironic; Nigeria’s deep-seated homophobia can expose gay Nigerians to persecution that may in fact qualify them for asylum.  

European politics have been roiled by waves of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. Many Europeans are deeply concerned that the next wave will be primarily from Africa. But, an African immigration wave might go considerably farther than just Europe. The Associated Press reports that, for the first time, a group of twenty-five African migrants attempted to sail in a catamaran from the West African archipelago of Cape Verde to northeastern Brazil, a distance of just under two thousand miles. The catamaran’s engine failed, the mast broke, and the vessel was adrift for some four weeks until rescued by a Brazilian fishing vessel off the northeastern Brazilian coast. It was the first time a group of migrants had arrived in the Brazilian state of Maranhao. Earlier illegal migrants to the state had been one or two stowaways.  The twenty-five migrants were from Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. According to AP, each passenger paid around $1,180 (€1,000) to make the voyage. The Brazilian authorities have arrested two Brazilians from the vessel on the suspicion that they were smuggling the group. Smuggling networks between South America and West Africa, especially Guinea, have been steadily developed by narcotics traffickers. They then transship narcotics from West Africa to Europe and North America. Up to now, the smuggling has been from South America to Africa. In the future, these networks may be exploited to move economic migrants in the opposite direction, from Africa to South America. The high price apparently charged by the catamaran operators may be an indication that they were part of an existing smuggling outfit that is now looking for markets beyond narcotics. Brazil has long had close ties with West Africa and may well be an attractive destination for West Africans seeking greater economic opportunity or security.  

Yesterday I joined Dany Bahar, David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Francisca Vigaud-Walsh, Senior Advocate for Women and Girls at Refugees International, at the Inter-American Dialogue for an event co-sponsored with CFR's Center for Preventive Action on Venezuela's migration crisis. You can watch our discussion of the increasingly dire situation and potential roles the United States, regional governments, other donor countries, and multilateral bodies can and should take here. 

The UN is right to underscore the benefits of broad-based international cooperation on migration, particularly regarding measures that could, over time, reduce migrant flows by improving conditions in source countries. But, to be politically acceptable in virtually any country, such cooperation must respect national sovereignty. MILAN—There are four pillars of globalization and economic interdependence: trade, investment, migration, and the flow of information, whether data or knowledge. But only two—trade and investment—are founded on relatively effective structures, buttressed by domestic consensus and international agreements. The other two—migration and information—are badly in need of similar frameworks. Both amount to pressing challenges, though migration may be the most urgent issue, given the surge in recent years that has overwhelmed existing frameworks. And, indeed, efforts are underway to produce a new shared framework to manage the cross-border flow of people. In September 2016, the United Nations launched a two-year process to produce the Global Compact on Migration by the end of 2018. “This will not be a formal treaty,” says UN Secretary General António Guterres, “nor will it place any binding obligations on states.” What it is, he claims, “is an unprecedented opportunity for leaders to counter the pernicious myths surrounding migrants, and lay out a common vision of how to make migration work for all.” But not everyone was on board with this approach. Last December, President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew the United States from the Global Compact process. According to Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, the declaration’s approach “is simply not compatible with US sovereignty.” Americans, and Americans alone, “will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country.” Europeans, by contrast, don’t have that option. Even if the European Union withdrew from the Global Compact process, its members would still have to grapple with the fact that the free movement of people within the single market—regardless of differences in, say, language or licensing and credentialing—is a fundamental requirement of EU membership. The perceived clash between that rule and national sovereignty was a salient issue in the Brexit vote. The EU’s labor-mobility provisions were not put in place to facilitate migration per se; rather, they were aimed at bolstering the EU economy by supporting integration, expanding the labor market, and strengthening economic adjustment mechanisms. But, if inbound documented migrants can settle anywhere in the EU, some well-defined collective process for deciding on the numbers and portfolios of migrants does presumably need to be established. At present, there are quotas for individual countries, though some, like Italy, have more than exceeded them, as desperate refugees continue to flow across their borders, while others, such as Hungary, have refused to accept refugees at all. In any case, a quota is too blunt a measure by which to characterize a country’s absorptive capacity. The composition of immigrants, together with their likely final destination, also matters. Consider migration from an economic perspective. There is surely always excess demand on the part of workers from lower-income countries to migrate to high-income or dynamic middle-income countries. And while elements of some countries’ immigration policies function like prices (wealth or investment requirements, for example), no country, as far as I know, allows “price” alone to equilibrate supply and demand. This is for good reason: using wealth as the chief criterion for citizenship controverts the values of virtually any society. As a result, immigration is to some extent rationed, based on some combination of time spent waiting, family ties, education and skills, and even lotteries. The problem of excess demand becomes more serious—and ethically challenging—when it involves refugees and grows suddenly, owing to factors ranging from natural disaster to civil war. In particular, if the increase in demand is not accommodated by a supply-side response, illegal and often risky migration will tend to grow. For this and other reasons, the UN is right to underscore the benefits of broad-based international cooperation on migration. It is also right to advocate measures that could, over time, reduce excess demand by improving conditions in leading source countries. These measures will require international cooperation and investment in development, peace keeping, humanitarian assistance, and migration management. But there are limits to the extent of such cooperation—or rather, the extent to which common rules can be enforced. Whatever the merits of the US position on the Global Compact process, the principle of national sovereignty remains critical to any politically feasible migration policy. The best way to build a solid foundation for international cooperation is to urge countries to develop coherent and adaptive policies for migration that ensure the admission of a balanced portfolio of migrants each year. To that end, countries would have to pursue multidimensional assessments of the economic (including fiscal) and social costs and benefits, as well as the domestic distributional impacts, of migration. Without such a foundation, anti-immigrant political headwinds and storms will continue to impede international cooperation. Crucially, each country would need to design its own policies, depending on a host of country-specific factors. These include demographics, fiscal conditions, social policies that affect income distribution, access to public services, the extent of upward mobility, the backlog of past extra-legal immigration, the ethnic composition of the country, and the values that define national identity. There is certainly no one-size-fits-all solution. The excess-demand problem cannot be eliminated fully. Even if a wide range of destination countries each implemented a coherent set of immigration policies, the chances that total supply would rise sufficiently to meet total demand is highly unlikely. The only way to achieve that would be to increase the price of admission or override national sovereignty to increase the total number of slots—both politically untenable options. But the supply side can be much better managed in many countries, without violating national sovereignty. The result would be a more solid basis for international cooperation aimed at reducing abuses and suffering, managing economic migration, protecting refugees, and, eventually, reducing excess demand by fostering development and growth in source countries. This originally appeared on project-syndicate.org.

President Donald Trump’s January 11 comments denigrating African countries has produced a fierce, continent-wide reaction. The concern must be that Africans will take the president’s comments as reflecting the views of most Americans, rather than merely his own and that of his small political base. In the aftermath of the president’s comments, the Department of State’s Africa bureau tweeted that “the United States will continue to robustly, enthusiastically and forcefully engage” with Africa, a weak response to African anger that reflects the reality that it is a part of the Trump administration, not independent of it. It becomes imperative that Americans who do not share the president’s views and are independent of the administration make explicitly clear the value of Africa to the United States. To that end, seventy-eight former U.S. ambassadors to African countries (including me) have signed a public letter to the president. (There were an additional seven signatures after the letter was delivered to the White House on January 16.) The letter affirms the importance of the multidimensional partnerships the United States has with most African states, which range from business to security to conservation. It makes the point that a close partnership with Africa is a matter of U.S. national security. The letter calls on the president to reassess his views of Africa and to acknowledge the importance of African contributions, and those of the African diaspora. As of January 18, there has been no substantive White House response. Those who signed the letter represent much of the Africa expertise once found at the U.S. Department of State. The letter is already being carried by some American and African media outlets, and it is to be hoped that more will do so in the coming days, especially those with an African audience. The letter has been distributed to the relevant majority (Republican) and minority (Democratic) congressional members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle had strongly criticized the president’s comments.  

Far from dissipating, African anger is building over President Donald Trump’s negative characterization of Africa on January 11. African leaders are rejecting President Trump’s denials that he used gutter language, and a media review shows there is an emerging consensus among African opinion leaders that he is a flat-out racist. There is indignation among Africans when Americans seem to tip-toe around what they regard as the overwhelming evidence of his racism. Over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, Botswana, Ghana, Haiti, Namibia, Senegal, and the African Union have made formal diplomatic protests. Botswana, with among the best social and economic statistics on the continent, has asked the administration “to clarify if Botswana is regarded as a ‘shithole country.’” Cyril Ramaphosa, the new president of South Africa’s governing African National Congress, has characterized the president’s remarks as “really, really derogatory, and highly offensive.” Nigeria’s foreign minister has called in American diplomats to explain the president’s remarks, characterizing them as “deeply hurtful, offensive and unacceptable.” Over the coming days, there are likely to be more official African responses. Nigeria and South Africa are the continent’s economic and political powerhouses. With Botswana, Ghana, Namibia, and Senegal, the five are on a democratic trajectory, albeit at different stages. U.S. cooperation with Nigeria in the fight against terrorism had been growing. While the bilateral relationship with South Africa is no more than “correct,” relations among the other four with Washington have been close—up to now.  According to the New York Times, the State Department has instructed its missions not to deny that the president made the remarks attributed to him, but merely to listen. Given African fury, that approach is wise. In Africa as in the United States, there is skepticism that the president tells the truth, and his denials are discounted. The president’s comments have damaged the interests of the United States in the world’s second largest continent with more than one billion people. The political and security consequences are likely to be negative, especially in multilateral fora such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization. Alienation of Africans can have consequences on issues where the administration is seeking to rally world opinion, like North Korea, for example. Further, this racist and anti-African rhetoric is likely to strengthen the hand of those in Africa that would see their countries turn away from the West and towards more authoritarian governments, like those of Russia and China. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was expected to travel to Africa sometime in the near future, even though there is still no assistant secretary of state for Africa in place. If he does make the trip soon, his reception is likely to be frosty.

American media is reporting that, during a bipartisan meeting with members of Congress on immigration matters on January 11, President Donald Trump asked why the United States should accept immigrants from Haiti and African states, which he characterized as “shithole countries.” Instead, he said he wanted more immigrants from countries such as Norway (he had met with the Norwegian prime minister the previous day). As the New York Times pointed out, this presidential discourse was similar to that in 2017, when he allegedly said that Haitian immigrants all had AIDS and that Nigerians in the United States would never go back to their “huts.” In the 2017 case, the White House denied that the president ever made those alleged remarks. This time, the White House did not deny what he said on January 11, and it has been confirmed by some members of Congress present. However, in tweets, the president is now saying that “this was not the language used.” His Deputy Spokesman, and the president himself in  after-hours tweets, sought to portray the episode in the context of “America First.” Predictably, the president’s comments have produced a storm of criticism and indignation from both parties. Some members of Congress directly characterized the president’s remarks as racist. Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) said, “We can now say with 100 percent confidence that the president is a racist who does not share the values enshrined in our Constitution or Declaration of Independence.” Congresswoman Mia Love of Illinois, a fellow Republican and who is of Haitian descent, said that the president’s comments were unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of the nation’s values. “This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation.” The White House deputy spokesperson is trying to put the president’s comments in the context of the debate over changes to the immigration system. There are proposals, most from the Republican Party, to shift immigration criteria from family unification to skills, the latter sharing similarities with the Canadian system. There are also proposals, supported by the president, to eliminate the visa lottery. The immediate context is the debate over the future of the “Dreamers,” children who came illegally to the United States with their parents. That issue is also connected to federal financial issues, which, if unresolved, risk shutting-down the federal government next week. The president consistently advocates the reduction of immigration to the United States. For the record: African immigrants have higher levels of educational attainment than Americans and much lower crime levels. Often arriving with little other than their education, they move rapidly into the middle class. I have written before about African immigration to the United States, here and here. Also for the record: there is virtually no Norwegian immigration to the United States. Norway consistently outranks the United States in most measurements of national economic and social well-being, and its per capita income is higher. Americans would be naïve if they thought that Africans would pay little attention to what the president said or put it in a more favorable or understandable context. Popular African outrage—which is likely to be all but universal—is bound to have a negative impact on the image of the United States in Africa and on American political, security, and even economic interests. It is fair to say that the United States has suffered a serious setback in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Trump administration's decision to repeal Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Salvadorans presents them with a difficult choice, writes Edward Alden.

In an op-ed recently published in The Hill, I examine the misconception behind President Donald J. Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN conference on migration. On Friday, President Trump decided that the United States would boycott this week’s United Nations conference on migration in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. That meeting is intended to advance a global compact for migration, a set of principles to ensure more humane treatment for the world’s swelling population of migrants and refugees. But the Trump administration saw something more nefarious afoot: a U.N. power grab to usurp control over U.S. borders. “Our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone,” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley declared in a statement released Saturday. “We will decide how to best control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country. The global approach…is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.” The administration’s decision is based on a false premise. At the core of this worldview is a defensive and distorted view of U.S. sovereignty, according to which even non-binding agreements infringe unacceptably on U.S. independence and freedom of action. This siege mentality is antithetical to the very concept of American greatness, much less U.S. global leadership. Read the full op-ed here.