“If there is a perception of more-humane policies, you are likely to see an increase of arrivals at the border,” T. Alexander Aleinikoff, the director of the New York-based Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, told the NYT for a December 13 report titled, “As Biden Prepares to Take Office, a New Rush at the Border.”
The NYT‘s report showed how several deported migrants explained their rational decision to undergo arduous and risky treks through the dangerous deserts, amid U.S. surveillance and sweeps:
Alfonso Mena, his jeans ripped at the knee, shivered with his companion on a bench less than 300 yards from Arizona and sobbed uncontrollably. “What wouldn’t you do to help your children get ahead?” he said. A landscaping job in Houston awaited him, he said, and his family was counting on him. “We are not bad people. We come to work.”
Mena and other migrants, according to the NYT, are:
likely the leading edge of a much more substantial surge toward the border, immigration analysts say, as a worsening economy in Central America, the disaster wrought by Hurricanes Eta and Iota and expectations of a more lenient U.S. border policy drive ever-larger numbers toward the United States.
