As immigration policy evolves around the world, consequences resound.
Years of debate on immigration have come to a head. A mass crossing at the border of Spain in Ceuta sparked widespread panic and confusion. In South Africa, a crackdown on undocumented migration and anti-migrant protests triggered an exodus of people from the country. Candidates around the world were elected to office on platforms that are harsh on immigration. And while the United States has long engaged in policies aimed at slowing or stopping unauthorized immigration, the Trump administration’s policies have represented a significant departure from the stances of previous administrations
“For many years the U.S. government would use what we academics called externalization policies to try to keep migrants from getting anywhere near the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Katrina Burgess, professor of political economy and director of the Henry J. Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security.
Under these policies, the government recruited other countries, such as Mexico, to deter migrants from going northward.
“It didn't work all that well,” said Burgess. “It made their journeys more expensive and more dangerous, but people kept coming north.”
More recently, the federal government has ramped up interior enforcement in the form of widespread arrests, detention, and deportation of immigrants. “Interior enforcement is actually serving as a much more effective deterrent but with unacceptably high costs,” said Burgess.
Even interior enforcement has an externalizing component. Since January 2025, the U.S. government has made deals with at least 29 countries to accept more than 25,000 foreign nationals deported to countries other than their nations of origin. In some cases, asylum seekers have ended up back home where they face persecution. “The U.S. is washing its hands with this back door policy of refoulement,” said Burgess, “returning people to dangerous situations.”
A few days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling allowing the Trump administration to temporarily continue these third-country deportations despite a lower-court ruling that doing so without due process is unlawful.
Attitudes toward immigration are shifting across the world too. Germany’s far right Alternative for Germany party won consecutive state elections. Colombia, once seen as a country hospitable to immigrants, swerved right with the election of Abelardo de la Espriella, who has followed President Trump’s suit with policies of interior enforcement. Confusion about immigration in Ceuta, a Spanish outpost off the northern coast of Africa, stirred a news cycle into a frenzy. Burgess argues that making immigration into a wedge issue has been proven to be an effective political strategy.
“If you make immigration really salient and make people afraid, then you can win a bunch of votes,” she said.
Simultaneously, immigration remains a key economic driver. According to EconoFact, “immigration has historically been an important driver of U.S. population growth and immigrants are a significant share of the nation’s workers. About 45 million foreign-born people lived in the United States in 2022, making up about 14 percent of the U.S. population and around 17 percent of the labor force.”
Assessing the state of affairs, Burgess sees another key problem undergirding the debate.
“We don't have so much a migration crisis as we have a governance crisis,” said Burgess, pointing to conditions that make people feel hopeless in their home countries. “In terms of how we respond to people moving, the system is not working. Regardless of what political side of the aisle you're on, it's dysfunctional, which further fuels this anti-immigrant response.”
The European Migration Crisis of 2015
Considering the drop in arrivals and rise in deaths along migration routes, the situation in the European Union remains of great importance, said Fletcher doctoral student Marina Lažetić.
In her research comparing civil society responses to migration at the U.S.-Mexico and the E.U.(Hungary)-Serbia borders, Lažetić has found that migration policies aimed at deterring migration do not stop, but rather displace migration and humanitarian need to more dangerous and invisible contexts, shifting responsibilities for the survival of migrants to civil society organizations, churches, and local communities.
“This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between emergency powers and the rule of law,” said Lažetić. “Governments do have a responsibility to manage their borders, particularly when asylum systems come under significant pressure. But the concern is what happens when measures introduced as temporary responses become embedded in ordinary migration policy.”
“The E.U. and the U.S. seem to have used the ‘migration crisis’ and then the COVID-19 ‘health crisis’ and many other ‘artificial’ crisis moments to introduce policies and practices that have long-lasting effects and lead to normalization of border violence and human rights violations,” she added. “What governments frame as a temporary migration ‘crisis’ often becomes the justification for expanding border enforcement and introducing measures that outlast the immediate emergency.”
Lažetić pointed both to Hungary in 2015 and contemporary dynamics along the U.S.-Mexico border as examples of the phenomenon.
“What concerns me about proposals to suspend asylum applications during periods of mass arrivals is precisely this normalization of exceptional measures,” Lažetić said. “The question becomes not only how governments respond to an emergency, but how those responses permanently reshape access to protection. Ultimately, the debate should not focus solely on whether governments can respond to sudden increases in arrivals, but also on the long-term legal and institutional consequences of the measures they adopt.”
Lažetić pointed to the E.U.’s response to the mass displacement of Ukrainians following Russia’s 2022 invasion as an example of how governments can accommodate sudden arrivals while expanding access to protection.
“The way that the E.U. handled displacement of people from Ukraine shows that exceptional arrivals can be met with a coordinated expansion of protection and administrative capacity. In this situation, the E.U. activated temporary protection measures that allowed millions of Ukrainians to access residency, employment and essential services,” Lažetić said.
A Loss of Livelihoods, A Loss of a Future
Anti-migrant policies and xenophobia in the U.S. are mirrored overseas too, according to Karen Jacobsen, Henry J. Leir Professor in Global Migration.
“What's happening in the U.S. is also happening in many other countries, including in Europe,” Jacobsen said. In South Africa there are often violent anti-migrant protests and xenophobia, including killing of migrants. In Pakistan, the government has on three separate occasions sought to forcibly repatriate longstanding refugees back to Afghanistan. “Many of these Afghan refugees have been in Pakistan for decades, and have made a life for themselves there,” Jacobsen said.
However, Jacobsen said, “A country can manifest both intense opposition to migration by governments and civil society but at the same time there are many who support migrants and resist violence by governments and civilians against migrants.”
Some host countries set good examples of how to treat their refugees. “In recent years, Kenya has begun trying to turn some of its long-standing refugee camps into towns where refugees are able to work and become more integrated with the host population,” she said. “It's still early days, and we have yet to see how things turn out in Kenya, but it’s always good to focus on countries and cities that set good examples, and try to figure out why countries like South Africa and Pakistan are setting such bad examples.”
Through her work with the Refugees in Towns project, Jacobsen has spent years learning more about how these communities evolve over time. “Especially with refugees, hosts are initially willing to welcome and support them,” she said. “But over time, it's a well established pattern that as more refugees and migrants come, the host population tends to become more negative because they see them as taking their jobs, school classrooms, and services.”
“As this frustration with migrants and refugees builds, politicians take political advantage,” she added. “and start blaming refugees and migrants for the country's problems. Another well established and widespread problem is how politicians drum up support by blaming migrants.”
Underlying these problems, said Jacobsen, there is indeed a “migration crisis” arising from a “perfect storm” of increased conflict, environmental exploitation stemming from greed and corruption, and climate change - all of which lead to loss of livelihoods and increased migration. For example, a recent New York Times article showed how in Senegal, fishermen who once made their livelihoods fishing off the country’s coast have been displaced by Chinese and European factory ships that have devastated Senegal’s fishing grounds. No longer able to fish, fishermen use their boats to migrate north.
Read more at the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security.