Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Chicago
US President Joe Biden on Sunday visited the southern border to get a first-hand account of the snowballing refugee crisis. It comes after he expanded a controversial Trump-era policy that allowed for more deportations of asylum-seekers. Ramin Mazaheri reports from Chicago.
United States President Joe Biden has visited the Mexican border for just the first time in his presidency. An estimated 8,000 asylum-seekers cross the Texas border every day, with last year breaking records.
Official data showed that the number of undocumented immigrant crossings at the southwest border reached 2.8 million people, breaking the previous annual record by more than 1 million people.
In yet another major expansion of a policy of Donald Trump which the Democratic Party criticized for years, Biden announced the US will immediately deport even more new arrivals. Biden has also drastically increased the number of deportations from the Trump era.
The United States accepts fewer refugees per capita than almost any other Western nation, and the world’s wealthiest country refuses to provide adequate resettlement and border services.
Rarely discussed in the mainstream media is that US foreign policy has played a major role in the Western Hemisphere’s long-running refugee crisis. Instead, both the media and Biden’s immigration policy give special priority to asylum-seekers leaving socialist-inspired nations Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
2022 saw seemingly the entire West accused of racism due to their privileging of refugees from Ukraine over non-White asylum-seekers.