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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 22, 2024.
Sunak says the UK is ready to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda
On Monday, Britain's parliament voted to put asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that the UK would be ready to begin deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda within the next few months.
Sunak has vowed to put a stop to the some 30,000 refugees who entered the UK by crossing the English Channel last year. The idea to send migrants to Rwanda was first introduced by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022. Under the plan, regardless of a refugee’s country of origin, they will be shipped to Rwanda and forced to submit their asylum applications there instead of in the UK.
The legislation is a response to a UK Supreme Court ruling that deemed such deportations a violation of international law because of Rwanda’s poor human rights record and because refugees would be at risk of being returned from Rwanda to their home countries, where they could face harm.
The plan is being criticized as a highly expensive gimmick for Sunak, who is facing significant political pressure as his party risks defeat in the upcoming general elections. The UK has already transferred $178 million to Rwanda although no refugees have been sent so far. He remains committed to the plan, asserting that preparations, including chartered jets and an airfield on standby, are complete for the flights expected to start in 10 to 12 weeks. However, UN rights experts have cautioned that airlines participating could face legal repercussions for complicity in violating international law.
An American flag flies atop Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.
HARD NUMBERS: Americans on the same page, Africans in rural Quebec, Chickens on death row, Honeybees on the rise
90: There are plenty of things that divide Americans these days, but what unites them? More than you’d think. A new poll shows that 90% of people in the US say that “equal protection under the law,” the “right to vote,” and “free speech” are fundamental to US identity. The “right to privacy,” “freedom of religion,” and “freedom of assembly” all come in above 80%. But polarization is never far away: The number drops to just 54% for “the right to bear arms.”
4,500: The once-declining northern Quebec town of Rouyn-Noranda, located some 400 miles northwest of Montreal, has been economically and culturally revitalized in recent years by an influx of immigrants from Africa. Of the 4,500 temporary foreign laborers in the city, the vast majority are from French-speaking African countries like Cameroon or the Democratic Republic of Congo. The city’s most famous poutine restaurant is now owned by a couple from Benin.
2 million: The largest egg producer in the US, Cal-Maine foods, has destroyed nearly 2 million chickens after detecting a case of avian flu at a farm in Texas. The news came just a day after a farmer was infected with the disease after coming into contact with cows that had it. Health officials said there was minimal broader health risk for now, but with egg prices already creeping back up to their highest levels since April 2023, consumers are likely to feel the outbreak at the checkout aisle before long.
3.8 million: From the birds to the bees … The latest US Department of Agriculture Census shows that the honeybee population has soared to 3.8 million colonies, the highest figure on record. After years of concern about the plight of the bumblebee, the sudden turnaround raised some antennae. It seems that a buzzing boom in smaller beekeepers, driven in part by fresh tax incentives, accounts for the change of fortunes. And now, listen to Rimsky-Korsakov.
A man walks his dog on the Mexican side of a section of the U.S.-Mexican Border wall on Wednesday morning, September 7th, 2022, as seen from Cameron County, Texas
Can Texas write its own border laws?
Federal courts played a game of injunction ping-pong this week with Texas’ controversial new immigration law known as SB4, which would dramatically expand the Lone Star State’s power at the border. The law would allow Texas police to detain people suspected of entering the US illegally and enable Texas judges to deport them – powers that have traditionally fallen under federal jurisdiction.
The law briefly came into effect Tuesday after the US Supreme Court declined an emergency application from the Biden administration arguing it violated federal authority. Within hours, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated an injunction on enforcement, and on Wednesday that court heard arguments on the constitutionality of the law – one step in a process that could take the case back to SCOTUS.
The key question is whether states may write their own immigration laws even if they conflict with existing federal law, according to Eurasia Group analyst Noah Daponte-Smith.
“If the court ruled the entire law constitutional, that may open the door to conflictual federal and state immigration policies and would raise big questions about enforcement,” he says.
And Texas is finding it takes two to tango in foreign relations. Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear it does not recognize Texas’ own border policy and will not accept any attempted repatriations from state authorities.
The New York migrant crisis up close
Since 2022, New York City has absorbed more than 170,000 migrants, mostly sent on buses by Texas officials from the US-Mexico border. Many of them are asylum-seekers who hail from South American countries facing political and economic upheaval, like Venezuela and El Salvador. But increasingly, people from Asia, western Africa, and the Caribbean have been making the difficult journey to the US via the southern border as well.
Unlike other so-called “sanctuary cities,” New York has a legal mandate, known as a consent decree, that requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it. But the already under-funded, under-resourced system is struggling to deal with the influx of so many people. Adding to the chaos, in October, the city changed its policy to require everyone in the shelter system to reapply for a bed every 30-60 days. For asylum seekers already trying to navigate byzantine legal and healthcare systems, the instability can have devastating consequences.
That’s why grassroots organizers like Power Malu of Artists Athletes Activists, Adama Bah of Afrikana, and Ilze Thielmann of TeamTLC have been stepping up to fill a major gap in the city’s immigration system: greeting arrivals, pointing them towards resources, providing food and clothing. Most crucially, they're help people understand their rights and apply for asylum, so they can get work permits and find permanent housing.
Speaking from the front lines of this crisis, the organizers say the city isn't fully meeting the needs of the migrants coming here, despite spending $1.45 billion on migrant costs alone in 2023. "The illusion is that they're in these beautiful hotels and they're getting all of these services and it's not true," Malu says, "That's why you have organizations like ours that have stepped up and had to change from welcoming to now doing case management, social services, helping them with mental health therapy."
GZERO’s Alex Kliment spent time on the ground with newly-arrived asylum-seekers and the volunteers to better understand the reality on the ground, how this current crisis getting so much national attention is functioning day to day, and if the city could be doing more to help.
GZERO has reached out to City Hall for comment and will update with any response.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Catch this full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on public television beginning this Friday, March 15. Check local listings.
“Everything is political” is personal: the NYC migrant crisis
“Do you know,”
Jhon asked me, shivering slightly in the lengthening afternoon shadows of New York’s Penn Station, “do you know if we can stay here – in America?”
Jhon is a wiry 42-year-old construction worker who fled Ecuador a month ago with his wife and four children. The recent surge of narco-violence there had gotten so bad, he said, that the local school switched to virtual classes for the safety of the students and their parents.
Now, after a trying journey by foot, boat, bus, and train, he was standing in the middle of New York City, bewildered but hopeful.
“I just want to work,” he told me. “I don’t want anyone to take care of me or to rely on anyone else. I just want to be able to work.”
But in those early moments, Jhon and his family did need help – to find their way to New York’s intake center for migrants seeking shelter, to learn to navigate the city’s byzantine health and legal systems, to stay on track with their asylum applications.
In that way, he is like many of the more than 170,000 undocumented migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past two years, most of them on buses from Texas.
The city government says it’s struggling to deal with the influx. Mayor Eric Adams has warned that providing services to the migrants will “destroy this city” and cost more than $12 billion. But a small group of grassroots non-profits has stepped up to welcome, orient, and support the new arrivals.
I met Jhon while shadowing Power Malu, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist from New York’s Lower East Side, whose Artists Athletes Activists organization is one of the subjects of a new report I’ve been working on for our TV show “GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.”
Nearly every day and night for almost two years, Power’s been at Gotham’s various bus and train stations, welcoming migrants like Jhon, giving a guiding hand to people who arrive in a city of millions after a journey of months and simply don’t know whom to trust or where to go.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent many hours with Power and other activists in New York – like Adama Bah, a formerly undocumented migrant from Guinea who has built the largest Black-oriented migrant services network in the city (a big deal given that migrants from Haiti or West Africa are chronically underserved by systems geared mainly towards Latinos), and Ilze Thielmann, who started a free “store” that gives clothing, strollers, and toiletries to recent migrants.
Along the way, we met people like Igor, a refugee from violence in Burundi who left behind a cushy job as an IT manager and traveled through Mexico on foot with his pregnant wife to get to the US. He finally got asylum several weeks ago.
Or Brandon, from Venezuela, who braved the treacherous Darién Gap and the constant gauntlets of extortion, kidnapping, and violence in Mexico on his journey to New York, and who now works with Power to welcome others who followed the same route.
Why did my producer Molly Rubin and I pick this subject? Migration is now the top political issue in America. A recent poll showed close to three in 10 voters say border policy is their primary concern, topping the list for the first time since 2019, and outstripping other perennial contenders like “the economy,” “inflation,” or the always exciting “crime.”
But when it comes to the crisis at the southern border and its impact on Northern cities, the gigantic numbers can dull your sense of what is actually happening here: A story about “millions” of migrants crossing the border, or the “billions” of dollars it will cost, is still a story about individual human beings, with names, who have lived stories of tremendous suffering, perseverance, and dedication.
“Everything is political,” we often say at GZERO. And that’s true. But everything political is ultimately personal too. If it’s not, why would it matter at all?
This is one story that Molly and I hope will drive that home. You can check it out here, and let us know what you think.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Marc Miller, minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, hands small Canadian flags to 53 new Canadian citizens representing 22 diverse nations, at a special ceremony at Canada Place, on Oct. 12, 2023, in Edmonton, Alberta.
HARD NUMBERS: Small towns get big say in immigration, Canada faces arms export lawsuit, Red Sea attacks push up shipping costs, Hotel California suit gets checked out
18: Over the next 18 months, Canada will expand and make permanent a pilot program that gives small towns a say in where immigrants can settle. The program has already resettled close to 5,000 foreigners in rural villages and small towns struggling with labor shortages.
21 million: The Canadian government is facing a lawsuit alleging that $21 million worth of Ottawa’s arms exports to Israel are illegal. The plaintiffs – the Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and a Ramallah-based non-profit called Al-Haq Law – allege that arms exports to Israel since Oct. 7 violate Canadian laws that prohibit the sale of weapons that could be used in human rights violations. Ottawa says all exports since Israel launched its assault on Gaza have been “non-lethal” equipment.
1,000: The cost of shipping goods from India or the Middle East to North America is about to go up. Global shipping giant Maersk has raised prices along those routes by $1,000 per container, a hike of around 20%. Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea have forced companies like Maersk to take much longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope, which adds at least 15 days to the journey.
3: Well, three lucky guys in New York won’t be “prisoners here of their own device,” or any other device, as it happens. Authorities have dropped charges against a trio of men accused of trying to sell a stolen notepad with handwritten lyrics to the famous Eagles tune “Hotel California.” The pad was swiped from the Eagles’ archives by a biographer in the 1970s and sold to one of three accused men for $50,000 in 2005. Prosecutors said a newly released cache of emails cast doubt on the fairness of the case and asked a judge to drop it.
Graphic Truth: Are migrants crossing the US-Canada border?
Immigration has been a polarizing political topic in the US since, well, forever. This is particularly true during election years. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans are most likely to cite immigration as the most important problem facing the US, which hasn’t been the case since 2019.
But defining the nature of the “problem” largely depends on who you ask. Republican presidential candidates, for example, have recently contended that not enough attention is being paid to the northern border — and some have gone as far to suggest that a wall could be necessary. While encounters at the US-Canada border have increased exponentially in recent years, they are still far below the record-setting numbers recently seen at the US-Mexico border. But it’s a sign that migrants with the means to fly into Canada increasingly see it as a viable route for entering the US. Much like the trek from Latin America to the US, this approach has proven to have deadly consequences at times — people have gotten lost and frozen to death.
Are lawmakers in Washington focusing enough on the US-Canada border when they discuss immigration? And are they approaching the issue in a substantive way, or just exploiting xenophobic sentiments for cheap political points? These questions will continue to loom large over the 2024 election.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks urging Congress to pass the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act in the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., on Feb. 6, 2024.
Biden mulls executive order to curb asylum-seekers
This measure was in the funding bill, but since Republicans are reluctant to give Biden a bipartisan win before the election, he is considering following the same legal roadmap Donald Trump used to limit asylum claims in 2018. Like Trump, Biden’s order would likely face legal challenges.
The order is a sign of Biden’s shift to the right on immigration since he campaigned against Trump’s policies in 2020.
The 2024 calculus: With funding tied up in Congress, an executive order is looking like the only way to reduce illegal migration before November's election. While curbing asylum claims will be controversial on the left, the issue is critical to swing voters, who Biden needs onside to beat Trump. Biden may bet that it is better to look tough on immigration, and that his party’s progressive flank will vote for him regardless.