Alexander Betts
124 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
Despite some dierences between the two cases, there are a few
strategies that the New World could draw on from the Old World. The
key lesson from the European experience o 2015 is that when it comes
to migration, there are limits to unilateralism and bilateralism. The
sense o crisis began to abate only when the ¤ adopted a multipronged
approach grounded in cooperation among the migrants’ countries o
origin, transit, and destination.SEEING DOUBLE
The European and American crises are alike in a number o ways. The
total number o people apprehended at the U.S. border or deemed in-
admissible at a U.S. port o entry since October 2018 is now nearly the
same as the number o asylum seekers who arrived in Europe in the
whole o 2015. Observers on both sides o the Atlantic have also stum-
bled on eerily similar scenes. The widely published photograph o the
bodies o Óscar Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, who
drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande in June, resembles
the picture o Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned while trying
to cross the Mediterranean in 2015. Both images have come to symbol-
ize the awful toll o transnational migration in a world o closed borders.
The eects o migration on the European and American political
systems are likewise comparable. The rhetoric o xenophobic right-
wing Ägures in the United States echoes—and, in some cases, draws
on—the pronouncements o their European counterparts. In Europe,
such rhetoric fueled anti-immigrant sentiment and encouraged sup-
port for right-wing parties. It has had similar eects in the United
States, where rising xenophobia has underwritten the Trump admin-
istration’s punitive approach to migrants.
There are more parallels between the two crises when it comes to
their causes, their consequences, and governments’ responses. Both
crises resulted from state collapse. In Europe, the immediate trigger
was the Syrian civil war. State fragility in Afghanistan and Iraq also
contributed to mass displacement, and the chaos in Libya created a
transit option and haven for smugglers facilitating movement from
sub-Saharan Africa across the Mediterranean. In the Americas, El
Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have grown highly unstable in
recent years. Guatemala appears on the “high warning” list o the
Fragile States Index; Honduras is just one grade below. In these states,
governing capacity is low, corruption is high, and organized crime