In December 2023, the United States processed a record 300,000 asylum seekers at the southern border with Mexico. This wave of desperate people from throughout the Global South has created a political crisis for the Biden administration and for cities and states around the country which were unprepared for this influx. This huge increase reveals a broken immigration policy passed down from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The pandemic era Title 42 expelled asylum seekers under the guise of addressing a public health emergency, required them to remain in Mexico, and denied them the right to request asylum. The result was a bottleneck of thousands of people hoping to have their cases heard. While the numbers remaining in Mexico grew, the U.S. continued its tradition of racist immigration policy which treats migrants from the Global South differently from white Europeans.
The U.S. and its neighbor Canada have both given preference to citizens of Ukraine. Russia’s 2022 Special Military Operation sent thousands of Ukrainians out of their country in search of safety from warfare. That fact isn’t unusual; wars always create displacement. Both the U.S. and its junior partner Canada have been responsible for huge waves of migration internationally with their policies of intervention and so-called wars against terrorism. It is seldom reported that U.S. led wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya displaced some 38 million people beginning in 2001. Those people in need of refuge were ignored because their suffering was a direct........