Numerous African nations are sending thousands of individuals by air to Central America, from where they proceed by land to Mexico and finally to the southern border.
The young Guinean lads had made the decision to depart from their destitute West African country. However, they chose to travel to the United States, which has recently proven to be a far safer option, rather than trying to start over in Europe, where so many African migrants have landed.
“I came because getting into the United States is certain compared to European countries,” said 30-year-old Sekuba Keita, who was at a San Diego immigration center on a recent afternoon following a journey that saw him travel by plane to Turkey, Colombia, El Salvador, and Nicaragua before arriving by land at the border between Mexico and the United States.
Speaking in French, Mr. Keita was at the center near a smartphone charging station with many other Africans who had done the same calculation. They came from Angola, Mauritania, Senegal, and other countries.
Though they still make up a small portion of those crossing the southern border, the number of migrants from African countries has been rising as smuggling networks in the Americas open up new markets and take advantage of growing anti-immigrant sentiment in some parts of Europe.
In the past, the 54 countries that make up Africa have sent so few migrants to the United States that they were placed under the category of “other,” which has rapidly expanded in recent years due to the continent’s rapidly increasing population, according to officials.
The number of Africans detained at the southern border increased to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022, according to government data that The Times was able to access. In 2023, Mauritania ranked first among African nations with 15,263; Senegal came in second with 13,526; and Angola and Guinea, all with more than 4,000, ranked third.
The trend has persisted, according to border-focused nonprofits, with both the total and percentage of African migrants increasing in recent months as available spots in Europe have become more scarce.
According to Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute Europe, “you have countries that are less and less inviting.” “People will migrate as new routes open up since there aren’t enough economic prospects at home.”
The United Nations reports that a record number of people are escaping economic instability, authoritarian governments, and climate change globally.
As thousands of migrants from Central and South America, China, India, and other countries head north, the number of African migrants has increased, exacerbating the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In the fiscal year 2023, approximately 2.5 million migrants passed through the border, and in December, the U.S. Border Patrol processed the highest number of migrants in a single month, pushing resources to the limit. The majority of these migrants will apply for asylum, allowing them to stay in the country until the resolution of their cases, which may take years to grant.
Republicans in Washington, as well as a few mayors and governors, are putting pressure on President Biden to stop the immigration wave that is entering the nation and displacing residents of cities and towns that are finding it difficult to accommodate the influx.
Reacting to the influx has become more difficult because to Congress’s decades-long inability to come to an agreement on significant reforms to the immigration system.
Now that Congress is back in Washington next week, negotiations on the Biden administration’s demands to expedite deportations and limit asylum in exchange for support for combat aid to Ukraine and Israel are anticipated to continue.
It is possible to observe the migration wave from African countries prior to their arrival in the Americas. On a recent morning, an airport staffer asked for anybody traveling to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, following the arrival of a Senegalese flight in Morocco. She was followed by several dozen Senegalese passengers.
Africans can enter Nicaragua freely under the administration of longtime president Daniel Ortega, and by beginning their journey overland there, migrants avoid the treacherous walk across the Darien Gap, a deep jungle that separates Colombia and Panama.
The African migrants keep traveling through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras until they reach the southern border of the United States. According to the Honduran government, between January and September, about 28,000 Africans traveled through the country—a six-fold rise over the same period in 2022. Just a few dozen migrants from each of the top ten countries of origin for these migrants in 2020 passed through Honduras: Guinea, Senegal, and Mauritania.
Even though the US has increased the number of deportation flights, it has had to continuously release a large number of immigrants into the nation due to the overcrowding in immigration detention facilities and the inability to hold families for long stretches of time. Due to the great distance and lack of cooperation from numerous countries, deporting individuals to nations in Asia and Africa is also quite challenging.
Concerns about immigration have been raised in numerous nations across the Atlantic. A few national elections last year saw the victory of right-wing candidates running on anti-immigration platforms; the most recent of them was in the Netherlands. In order to stop migrants who are passing through Tunisia and Morocco, agreements have been made with France, Germany, and Spain. Additionally, the European Union agreed to restrict immigration into the EU and expedite the expulsion of asylum claimants on December 20.
Smugglers posing as tour guides advertise their services, and migrants traveling to the US exchange advice and success tales on social media. Friends and family members report that after submitting asylum petitions, they are granted permission to work in the US. And due of the enormous backlog in immigration court, even if the migrants have little chance of winning their cases, it usually takes years for a ruling.
According to John Modlin, the chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which has been witnessing a high volume of African migrants entering in isolated locations, “migration across the U.S. border was highly mysterious to people in the past.”
According to Aly Tandian, a professor of migration studies at the University Gaston Berger in Senegal, “the biggest threat at the moment is the global reach of the smuggling organizations,” who are helped along by social media. “I saw people had made it to the United States,” said Ousman Camara, 27, a college student from Mauritania who is currently in the country, in an interview. “Morocco controls the seas, making it harder to reach Europe.”
Mr. Camara declared that he intended to request for asylum in the United States because he no longer felt safe in Mauritania, where human rights organizations have recorded severe atrocities against Black minorities.
In order to finance the trip, he borrowed roughly $8,000 from a friend, which Mr. Camara promised to pay back after he secured a job in the US.
Many migrants from Africa and Asia, in contrast to many from the Americas, had relatives or friends who could assist with the cost of their flying travel to Nicaragua.
Mr. Keita, a Guinean, claimed that in order to pay for the trip, he had liquidated his little laundry detergent factory in Kankan. “I will be able to better myself and provide for us working here,” he stated.
According to 33-year-old Mohammed Aram from Sudan, where a civil war broke out in April, the United States is the ideal place to start over. “It is hard to enter Europe,” Mr. Aram, who was headed to Chicago, remarked.
In interviews for this story, over a dozen migrants claimed they had turned themselves in to American authorities at the border, who then transported them by bus to a processing center. The migrants stayed there for two or three nights as they awaited their turn to give authorities personal information. They were given documentation upon their release that stated they were subject to deportation procedures and needed to appear in court in the city where they claimed to reside on a given date.
After a long wait, the migrants were finally allowed to enter the San Diego center, where they were given food and helped make contact with friends and family who usually paid for their plane tickets to the United States.
After arriving in the US, a lot of people voiced hope for new beginnings in American cities. However, several visitors to the US said that social media posts had failed to warn them about potential dangers they would face while traveling, particularly through Mexico and Central America.
Paulo Kando, 20, and M’bome Joao, 22, residents of Angola, a coastal country rich in oil, reported that at the Guatemala-Mexico border, robbers had taken their telephones and all of their money. In Mexico, they found work loading charcoal into carts in order to make some cash. They had nothing but the clothing on their backs when they arrived in California.
They were stuck in San Diego at this point. They could not afford the bus journey to Portland, Oregon, where an Angolan friend had promised to receive them but was not returning his calls. They claimed to know no one else in the country. They did not regret coming, though.
Speaking in his native Portuguese, Mr. Kando stated that his objective remained unchanged. He declared, “We’re believing in God that a miracle will occur, and we’ll make it to Portland.”