Don't Be Fooled by Biden's Plan for Migration Centers | Opinion

I interviewed more than 160 Venezuelan migrants in South America over the last four years. I met one couple in their early 30s who worked as teachers in Venezuela but could not afford food and other essential goods. Hyperinflation dissipated their salaries and savings. During our interview, they explained that they sold their family's home for $500 to migrate with their 3-year-old daughter to Bogotá, Colombia.

They left Venezuela without passports because they could not afford the fees, to pay for living expenses while waiting months to receive them, or to bribe a Venezuelan official to expedite procedures. Without passports, they entered and lived in Colombia without authorization.

Families like these are among the 7.2 million internationally displaced Venezuelans who migrated to escape widespread human rights violations, social disorder, economic crises, and essential goods shortages in Venezuela.

With the end of Title 42, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created new programs to address humanitarian migration flows. The DHS will open regional migration processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala where Venezuelan, Haitian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan migrants can apply to enter the United States legally. If accepted, beneficiaries will have two years to secure U.S. lawful residency. Immigrant advocates welcomed the policies, claiming that the centers help migrants avoid dangerous migrant routes.

However, my research showed that most Venezuelans do not meet these programs' requirements. The regional migration processing centers and temporary legal entry programs disqualify most humanitarian migrants like the hundreds of families I met who had to flee without documentation. Venezuelans will need a passport that has not expired in the last five years to qualify for legal entry into the United States. According to President Joe Biden's administration, migrants from these four countries will need a U.S.-based sponsor who earns more than 100 percent to 125 percent of the U.S. federal poverty level.

In one study, I found that half of the 2.5 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia are undocumented because they migrated without passports. Most Venezuelan migrants, like the families I interviewed, do not know people in the United States who could sponsor them.

Moreover, most migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border won't benefit from these programs. The DHS disqualifies immigrants who entered Panama and Mexico without authorization (after Oct. 19, 2022, for Venezuelans and Jan. 9, 2023, for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans).

President Biden's centers and legal entry program are more likely to deter asylum seekers than expand legal immigration channels. According to sociologists David FitzGerald and Rawan Arar, wealthy governments use various legal strategies to deter asylum seekers because international refugee norms challenge their authority to determine who can enter and reside in their territories.

Under United Nations (U.N.) Refugee Convention (1951), 1967 Protocol, and Convention Against Torture (1984), governments cannot send asylum seekers back to their persecutors or torturers—under the principle of non-refoulement. Moreover, states cannot penalize asylum seekers for unlawfully entering or residing in the country. These rights go into force after refugees are resettled or when asylum seekers set foot in their desired destination country.

To avoid these international humanitarian obligations, governments in rich countries do not allow people to apply for refugee status at their embassies and incentivize lower-income countries (with aid and other benefits) to contain and prevent asylum seekers from reaching wealthy nations' territories. Consequently, over 80 percent of asylees and refugees reside in lower-income countries. Between 1994 and 2018, only 1 percent of refugee applicants were resettled in a wealthy country.

The migration processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala are another case of a longstanding U.S. asylee deterrence pattern in Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, President Biden's administration has struggled to expel and deport Venezuelans because Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has not allowed international planes carrying deportees to land. In the past, United States officials convinced the Dominican Republic and Trinidad to accept deported Venezuelans. In 2022, U.S. authorities convinced their Mexican counterparts to extend the Title 42 and Stay in Mexico programs to take Venezuelans along with Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran migrants.

Undoubtedly some will worry that taking in more humanitarian migrants is too costly. But we can afford it. After all, President Biden's administration allocated $1 billion to outsourcing our migration governance to Latin American countries such as Colombia. The DHS asked Congress for billions more to hike up border surveillance—even when sociologist Douglas Massey and colleagues have long shown that increasing border enforcement does not prevent undesired immigration flows.

The U.S. regional migration processing centers in Latin America and legal entry are a new tactic to keep asylum seekers in lower-income countries and as far as legally possible from the United States.

Instead of outsourcing U.S. immigration governance, we should let humanitarian immigrants enter and quickly access legal residency by removing unnecessary and arbitrary requirements, such as U.S.-sponsors. After all, the U.S. government—not U.S. citizens—should burden the responsibility of facilitating legal immigration.

Deisy Del Real (PhD) is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, a PD Soros Fellow, and Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. Her award-winning international migration research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.