The Center for Immigration Studies reported yesterday something our readers already knew: more and more, migrants are showing up on our southern border who come from countries far removed from the traditional source countries of Mexico and the Northern Triangle.
CIS staffer Andrew R. Arthur says that in July more than a quarter (57,094) of the 200,000 migrants encountered were not from those traditional sources.
- 17,239 were from Ecuador, up from 2,196 in October, a 10-month increase of 779 percent.
- 13,308 were from Nicaragua, an increase of 5,160 percent in those 10 months
- Colombia added 704, an increase of 2,960 percent and 44 times as many as the same month a year before.
- Otherwise in the Western hemisphere, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti are all sending tens of thousands.
- Of the “extra-continentals”–migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere–34,000 Filipinos have illegally crossed the border in the past year.
- Since October, Romania has sent 3,700—most of them gypsies, or Roma.
- So far this year, 33,000 migrants have been counted passing through Panama on their way to the U.S, most of them coming from not only Haiti and Cuba, but also Senegal, Ghana, Somalia, Guinea, Congo, and Burkina Faso.
All told, in July, 29 percent of all illegal crossings were by migrants from outside Mexico and Central America. When migrant families are considered, the percentage shoots up to 40 percent.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, says all this means a new migration route has formed: “We are seeing a permanent change in migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. And now it’s expanding.”
To exacerbate the problem of sheer numbers, the increasingly far-flung migrants are bringing in more and more exotic strains of Covid: for example, the Lambda variant from Peru, the Beta from South Africa, Gamma from Brazil, and the Kappa from India. Most of the infected are not being returned under CDC guidelines–which means most are here to stay.
For more, see CIS.org and the Wall Street Journal website.