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Salzburg Global Fellow Mark Wenig writes about borders and humanitarian challenges in migration to the US and Europe
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This op-ed was written by Mark Wenig, who is a member of the Salzburg Global American Studies Advisory Committee and attended the program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.
Borders definitely contribute to national identities, as without them, there would be no concept of nationhood. A country can only be sovereign if it can control who comes into it and who is allowed to leave. In short, all countries in the world have and need borders.
What makes this concept of borders so controversial at the moment is the mass migration of people, brought about by political, economic, and climactic changes. Europe is grappling with a huge influx of illegal migrants, of whom many or most are actually economic migrants, escaping poverty and economic hardships in their own countries. But they are also fleeing from repression in places like Syria and Afghanistan. Most are willing to risk their lives to pay traffickers to get them to Europe or from Europe to the UK.
The southern border of the United States has also been inundated with mainly Central American migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and other places. Added to this mix are now people from Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, as well as people from other South American countries. Most of these people are also economic migrants seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Most will only be able to qualify for admittance if they can claim and qualify for asylum, but most will also not meet the criteria to qualify for it.
What must the US and Europe do to address this migration crisis? What must happen so that people no longer take risks to cross the Mediterranean Sea in rickety boats provided by paid traffickers, or to cross the dangerous Darien Gap in Panama as they head north to the US? These are the central questions of our times.
I think this will continue as long as these migrants believe that once they cross the threshold and set foot in a European country or the US and ask for asylum, they will be allowed to stay. If the majority of economic migrants who don’t qualify for asylum realize they may not be allowed to stay and risk being sent back to their home countries, they would not make these dangerous journeys. The laws that govern asylum under the auspices of the United Nations were written at a different time, meant to give protection to those who face persecution and even death at home. But these laws have been exploited by traffickers and others who offer hope to would-be economic migrants, who pay them huge amounts of money to help them cross physical barriers. I believe these laws need to be updated to clarify who is an economic migrant and who is a bonafide asylum seeker. This change would allow countries to accept those who are genuinely facing danger and to reject those who only seek a better life, as laudable as that goal is.
We had been used to seeing mainly young men trying to get to Europe, in order to send money to their families after obtaining work. But in the past year or two, we’ve seen entire families with women and children trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Hundreds died recently when their overcrowded boat was left adrift and not sufficiently assisted by authorities, although the reasons for what happened remain unclear. African migrants have been imprisoned in places like Libya, as they try to get themselves into boats to get to Europe. Thousands of would-be migrants remain trapped in Mexico without the possibility of getting to the US to even request asylum, so they cross the Rio Grande and try to make it there illegally.
These are huge problems brought about by borders, but the EU and the US, the prime destinations for these migrants, must take some actions to try and reduce the pressure of illegal migration. In the case of Europe, countries like Greece, Italy, and even Spain, due to their location, are the ones receiving most of the illegal migrants. Spain’s two enclaves within Morocco, Melilla and Ceuta, have been “rushed” by people crashing into and taking down the border fences to get into Spanish territory, believing that once they get in, they’ll be allowed to make it into Europe. Obviously, this cannot continue and solutions need to be found. What can those solutions be?
First, the EU as a body must come to the aid of these southern European countries to help them deal financially with the influx of people. Migrants housed in places like the Greek island of Lesbos, which is near Turkey, or the island of Lampedusa off Italy, or places in southern Spain must be treated properly while those countries shouldn’t bear the entire burden of caring for them.
Greater efforts should be made by the EU to stop traffickers from putting would-be migrants on rickety boats and sending them adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. These traffickers are operating all along the North African coast from Egypt to Morocco and this is big business. EU navies must also be deployed to stop those boats. Ultimately, most of these migrants who don’t qualify for bonafide asylum reasons will have to be repatriated back to their own countries. The message has to go out that even if you get there, you haven’t “gotten there”. Any result that doesn’t achieve that goal will not succeed and the result will only be more people willing to risk their lives.
In the US, more money needs to be spent to differentiate bonafide asylum cases from those who are coming for purely economic reasons. More courts, more judges, and more resources to deal more quickly with these cases are all needed. Right now, asylum claims take years to adjudicate, giving those requesting asylum time to settle in the US and making it more difficult to expel them later. It is important not to forget that most of these migrants will accept jobs that many Americans don’t want and they are willing to work for far less money than people who have legal status. Let’s also not forget that legal immigration to America has always been part of the country’s history.
The US should also improve its relations with the countries from which these people come. The US boycott of Cuba needs to be ended, as it has never worked to force regime change there and is only driving more Cubans to attempt to leave the country, almost all of whom are economic migrants. But the bottom line is finding ways to speed up the processing of asylum requests and coming up with an immigration program that works. As this problem has lingered for decades in the US and is now a partisan issue, I don’t expect any solutions anytime soon.
European countries have typically not been immigrant countries, and so their governments and people are more reluctant to accept any immigration. The war in Ukraine has upended this history in places like Poland and Romania, less so in Hungary. Austria has accepted its share of Ukrainians, mainly those with more resources and family links in the country. We should not forget that most of the Ukrainian migrants will return to their country once the war is over, and these host countries know that. Even so, these same countries have been resistant to accepting migrants from poorer, developing countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
In conclusion, borders have been front and center in the current world migration crisis. Given the current political polarization in both the US and Europe and the resulting public backlash against waves of illegal immigrants, we shouldn’t expect this issue to go away anytime soon.
Mark L. Wenig is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer with the United States Department of State and before its consolidation, with the United States Information Agency, having served in his last posting as cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo from 2014 to 2017. Mark's previous assignments, all in public diplomacy working in press and cultural sections, included tours in Warsaw, Poland; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Wellington, New Zealand; Leipzig, Germany; Bucharest, Romania; Port Louis, Mauritius; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as in Washington, D.C., for a total of 23 years in the Foreign Service.
Mark attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism” from September 19-23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.