The Biden administration has rolled out new steps to tackle migrant arrivals at the US-Mexico border, which come as a COVID-era border restriction, known as Title 42, expires next week. The measures include the creation of migrant processing centers in Latin America to screen those seeking entry to find out whether they have a legal pathway.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that the centers would "improve qualified individuals' access" to refugee resettlement, family reunification and lawful settlement in the US or other countries. He added that these hubs “will take a hugely important step to prevent people from making the dangerous journey to the border by providing a much safer, legal option to migrate that they can pursue in and from their own countries.”
“I hate to be cynical, […] but I have to think that that there is a political component in this,” McAdams commented, saying that he “doesn’t now” whether the aforementioned migrant processing centers will add to containing refugee flows.
He recalled that Washington’s announcement about the centers came shortly after Biden officially declared his re-election bid, suggesting that the White House’s push for the centers “is red meat for a lot of Republican voters.”
According to McAdams, “there's a real problem” over the fact that the due-to-be-created hubs “are going to be joined by international organizations.”
“That seems weird. What does that mean? I mean, we're going to have NGOs somehow out there in Guatemala dealing with our immigration policy. Who's behind them, who's running them?” the director said.
Touching upon “a complicated issue” of migration in the US as such, McAdams argued that “first of all, you have American foreign policy that creates refugees.”
“You have a system in the US that rewards people who come illegally, you know, against the rules. You have a welfare state and a warfare state combined. It's a very complex problem that doesn't provide easy answers and bumper sticker solutions,” he concluded.