WASHINGTON: As rich countries struggle to adjust to an era of mass migration, authorities often focus on lethal sea routes out of Africa to Europe and the long-standing flow north from impoverished Latin American countries.
But of the nearly 2.5 million crossings recorded by US Customs and Border Protection in fiscal year 2023, 1.26 million people originated from outside of the usual source-countries Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
That represents a 234 percent increase from 2021, when some 378,000 “other” country nationals crossed the southern border.
For Africans specifically, more than 58,000 crossings were recorded by the Border Patrol in 2023 — a 346 percent jump compared to the year before.
About 15,000 of them were Mauritanians – more than the 13,000 Africans from the entire continent who had crossed the year before.
There isn’t one specific driver for the arrival of tens of thousands of people from as far away as China, India and Russia on the Mexican-US border.
Newspakistan.tv/APP/AFP