ALEXANDER BETTS is Professor of Forced Migration and International Aairs and William
Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, both at the University of Oxford. He
is a co-author (with Paul Collier) of Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System.122 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
Nowhere to Go
How Governments in the Americas Are
Bungling the Migration Crisis
Alexander Betts
I
n 2015, over 1.2 million asylum seekers arrived in the European
Union. They were Áeeing war zones in Afghanistan, South Sudan,
and Syria; economic deprivation in Nigeria and Pakistan; and po-
litical instability in Somalia. The largest group came across the Aegean
Sea; many o them reached European territory in Greece and then
made their way to Germany. Others crossed the Mediterranean on
rickety, overloaded boats or traversed the Bosporus, the Dardanelles,
or the Gibraltar strait. Politicians and journalists labeled the situation
a “crisis” to reÁect its unprecedented scale. But this was not a crisis o
numbers. It was a crisis o politics. European leaders initially resorted
to unilateral, quick-Äx solutions. German Chancellor Angela Merkel
implemented a short-lived open-border policy. Hungarian Prime Min-
ister Viktor Orban built a razor-wire fence. Other countries sought to
accommodate, sequester, or cast out the migrants—mostly to no avail.
The human consequences were devastating: over 10,000 people have
drowned while crossing the Mediterranean since 2015. Those who
made it were greeted not as survivors but as usurpers, free riders, or
covert extremists; they soon became scapegoats for the radical right.
The political consequences changed Europe forever.
The Western Hemisphere now faces a migration crisis on a similar
scale, with consequences that will likely be just as far-reaching. So far,
this crisis has received a piecemeal treatment. Central American mi-
grants arriving at the U.S.-Mexican border, Venezuelans crossing dry
plains into Colombia, Bolivians seeking work in Argentina and
Chile—these are treated as separate phenomena but are in fact part o