“We need to understand that our fates are tied and act to fix the fundamentally broken systems we have in place. Our systems both in the United States and internationally are not sufficient to meet the scale of the global forced migration crisis.” Getty
Morethanone in ten Black people in the United States are immigrants. There are those fleeing violence and persecution in their homelands, including the Cameroonians, Haitians, Somalis, Sudanese and South Sudanese who are here under Temporary Protected Status, and the Liberians under Deferred Enforced Departure. There are refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Eritrea, Dominicans and people from the West Indies reuniting with their families, and Nigerians and Ghanaians with advanced degrees taking on jobs in the medical field.
The number of African-born people living here has more than tripled in the last 25 years. In the last several years, there has also been a significant surge in Africans taking on dangerous journeys across the Atlantic, through the Darién Gap and to the U.S.-Mexico border. As traditional migrant routes from East and West Africa to the Middle East and Europe begin to close, desperate people are turning to more difficult and expensive measures to find safety. There are more forcibly displaced people in the world now than at any time in history — and organized crime, human smuggling operations and traffickers have risen to meet the demand, operating with vast international scope.
Our destiny, your destiny and the destiny of the people in our communities and around the world are all connected. We need to understand that our fates are tied and act to fix the fundamentally broken systems we have in place. Our systems both in the United States and internationally are not sufficient to meet the scale of the global forced migration crisis. The lack of legitimate, legal pathways for people to safely move around the world allows smugglers and human traffickers to thrive. It makes chaotic border crossings and violence against immigrants inevitable. Policymakers in the United States need to understand this: There are myriad reasons why people might immigrate to the U.S. instead of other destinations, but what we have been experiencing in recent years is not separable from what is truly a global phenomenon.
This means we can’t deport our way out of the problem like Donald Trump wants us to believe.
Throughout our history, the experience of Black immigrants to the United States has been marked by the dualities of hope and pain, of promise and violence, of extraordinary opportunity and extreme isolation. While grappling with our history, we must build a future that embraces this complexity. It means understanding that both versions of the stories of millions of Black people in this country — the stories marked by triumph and success, and those marked by tragedy and agony, are equally true.
This has been the case since the first millions of Black immigrants, enslaved people, were brought to this country against their will, kidnapped, shackled and imported as labor and property. It has been true as subsequent groups of Black people — from the Caribbean, from Latin America, from every country in Africa — have arrived here over centuries.
It is true now for the many Black immigrants who are sitting in private prisons, stranded on the Mexican side of the border with their asylum claims abruptly canceled, held in makeshift detention centers in Panama and Guantánamo, or en route through the world’s most dangerous places to try and make a better life for themselves or their families by coming here.
And it’s true for the millions of Black immigrants already here with legal status, whose richly diverse histories and cultures collide with a legacy of racism in the United States and with the echoes of slavery and Jim Crow.
In the first few weeks of Trump’s second term, we have already added a litany of new shameful episodes to the difficult history of Black migration to the United States. We have already seen Africans among those deported from the United States and held at gunpoint in a hotel in Panama while they awaited the construction of a detention camp in the jungle. We have seen Afro-Venezuelans among those shipped off to Guantánamo, held in a makeshift camp without the ability to speak to their families or their lawyers. We have seen a complete halt to the refugee resettlement program — a critical lifeline for some Black immigrants — with the cruel exception of white South Africans.
This must come as no surprise from a president who ran a campaign built on explicitly racist demagoguery against Black immigrants, and who in his first term wondered aloud why the United States doesn’t accept more immigrants from Norway and fewer from what he calls “shithole countries.” The rhetoric and the policy are the same.
The duality of the Black immigrant experience remains, as we have also seen Black immigrants reaching the highest levels of government, of the courts, of entertainment and sports, of literature and journalism, of business and technology. They have also contributed enormously to the communities in which they have settled, culturally and economically. But even though African immigrants are more likely than the general immigrant population to speak English at home and to be college-educated, they are also more likely to live in poverty. Haitians in 2022 represented 6% of people crossing the border, but 60% of expulsion flights. Cameroonian asylum seekers fleeing brutal government violence at home were first abused in U.S. detention and then suffered unthinkable horrors upon their return.
While the explicit cruelty of the deportation policies led by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller deserves its own particular condemnation, the reality is that our systems have been broken going back generations. Black immigrants to this country, dating back to before its founding, have been among the most loyal and patriotic Americans, among those most committed to our founding ideals. This has occurred despite centuries of violence and discrimination — a testament to the sincerity of the belief that this country can be what it claims to be. It’s time to mourn the Black immigrant lives lost to the reckless inhumanity of Trumpism and redouble our commitment in both policy and practice to the self-evident truth that we are all created equal.
Read the full article here
