Another year of 'limbo on earth' for immigrants, refugees

Friday, Dec. 09, 2022

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Many active war zones have been referred to as hell on earth. Former Go-Go’s lead singer Belinda Carlisle scored a No. 1 pop chart hit in 1987 with a tune called “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.”

But for millions around the world, they have been stuck in “camps” for so long that they’ve taken on the appearance of towns and small cities. Others are in detention facilities for no other reason than needing to leave the country where they’d lived all their lives; that includes, according to the New York Times, Russian dissidents now locked up in a Louisiana detention center.

Still others eke out an existence on one side or another of a multinational border, hoping that something will change, either politically or operationally, to change the limbo on earth that they are in.

U.S. policy on immigration contributes to the stasis. There is hope that Congress, in its lame-duck session, will finally pass a “Dreamers” bill to allow hundreds of thousands of young adults, who came to the United States with their families, to move about freely without risking arrest and possible deportation under the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals policy announced a decade ago by then-President Barack Obama.

But with Republicans set to run the House of Representatives in the next Congress, there seems little appetite for tackling that kind of legislation. As a result, the number of those in America without legal documentation has climbed into eight figures.

Meanwhile, those escaping the horrors of war in Ukraine, or who fled the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, are welcomed into America with relatively open arms.

Ukrainians and Afghans are “perceived as not being able to arrive at the border as easily,” said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico director for the Washington Office on Latin America.

Meanwhile, more people try entering the U.S. on foot from Mexico. They are not all Mexicans. Most come from the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, after deciding they must leave due to some combination of drugs, gangs and a lack of jobs. Still others have come from Venezuela, escaping a dysfunctional government.

Some hail from Haiti, although rarely do they arrive directly into the U.S. Many Haitians, having fled poverty, earthquakes and gangs, headed to Latin America to find work, Brewer told Catholic News Service. However, with national economies in tatters due to the coronavirus pandemic, those jobs have gone away, so Haitians head north like so many others have done.

“Mexico has become a gateway,” Brewer said.

U.S. government efforts to deter immigration have largely failed. That wall that former President Donald Trump said he was going to build? Enterprising people have built ladders that are taller. Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for would-be asylum seekers? That’s “finally over,” Brewer said.

There’s still a thorny problem with Title 42, which allows the U.S. to expel a noncitizen in the interest of public health. Those expelled aren’t carrying guns or knives, the reasoning went, but they may be carrying the coronavirus.

The Biden administration wants to end the use of Title 42, instituted by his predecessor as a quick way to deny the use of asylum to those seeking it.

A federal district judge in mid-November threw out the policy. However, 15 states have since sued to seek its reinstatement.

Mexico’s immigration authorities recently said it would allow Venezuelans expelled by the U.S. to stay within its borders. Yet Brewer cited a report issued in late November that showed that, while Mexican policy is to prevent the expulsion of children, that’s precisely what’s happening.

Despite “what appears to be pretty progressive protection for children,” the study’s authors were “finding, of course, that these norms have not been applied.”

In a year that had little good news for immigrants in a nation of immigrants, there were some wins.

Temporary protected status was granted by the U.S. to immigrants from Cameroon and Ethiopia. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network worked with Network, the Catholic social justice lobby, in a group calling itself the Coalition Against Racism in Immigration, to convince the Biden administration to grant the TPS designation, according to CLINIC’s executive director, Anna Gallagher.

Another win came in the final “public charge” rule. The Trump administration offered a new rule in 2019, replacing the 1999 version, that would have denied lawful permanent resident status to more immigrants by setting the personal wealth bar higher. But the Biden administration withdrew that rule within two months of taking office, and the final rule now looks much closer to the 1999 version than the 2019 version.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t troubled waters.

The Center for Migration Studies issued a report in May about New York City’s immigrants, who make up about 37 percent of the population, but 44 percent of the labor force and 63 percent of its construction workers. Of the last group, about 41 percent are undocumented, leaving them “especially vulnerable to exploitation and dangerous conditions,” according to the report’s executive summary.