Luke Chey
Kellyville High School
Immigration has always been a subject of controversy, especially in the United States. Since the first Immigration Act of 1882, questions have been raised about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to enter the country. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese immigration to the United States was halted for ten years, but nowadays immigration from Asia is largely ignored, even though over a third of immigrants coming to the United States are from Asia. Instead, politicians and citizens alike have been focused on the countries South of the border, where nearly half of immigrants come from.
In recent years, the number of immigrants coming from these countries has been steadily increasing, but in March of 2021, the number of migrant encounters from Southern countries was up 71% from the previous month, an unprecedented statistic. There are multiple ways to interpret these statistics and form an explanation for why there are more migrants coming to the United States than ever before. Many people believe that the rise in immigration is a direct result of the government switching from the Trump to the Biden administration. Trump was often put on blast for his immigration policies, but that does not mean people are happy with the Biden administration’s handling of it either.
In a poll conducted on political independents, 67 percent disapproved of the new administration’s handling of immigration, while only 30 percent approved. However, when asked specifically about Biden’s rejection of Trump’s approach to immigrants, the results were less negative, implying that changes in policy are not the biggest factor.
In fact, the increase in immigrants likely has nothing to do with changes in policy at all. It’s hard enough to decipher what’s going on as a lifelong citizen of the United States, let alone in a Latin American country a thousand miles away. Instead, a series of factors have all combined together over the past year or two to cause so many immigrants to leave their home countries at once.
To begin with, there are always more migrant encounters during the Spring, because the weather is more hospitable than the winter, so some increase is expected due to that. Secondly, there has been an increase in armed conflict and overall chaos in Latin American countries recently. Lastly, the Coronavirus pandemic that has affected the entire world has been poorly managed by some of the largest and most powerful nations in the world, so one can only imagine the effect on an already unstable country.
