Reps. Ilhan Omar And Yvette D. Clarke Sound The Alarm On Injustice Faced By Black Immigrants

By Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Yvette D. Clark, Huffpost

“We can’t deport our way out of the problem like Donald Trump wants us to believe.”

More than one 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.

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