Illegal immigration is accelerating

 Todd Bensman:

Austin, Texas — Following months of Biden administration shuttle diplomacy, multi-national U.S.-bound immigrants from more than 150 countries are now finding international routes to the southern border faster, easier, and less obstructed than ever before.

Panama has dramatically shortened the notorious Darien Gap route from South America for the first time. Mexico has amended a years-old policy of using a national guard road blockade to slow U.S.-bound immigrants on its Guatemala border for one that now immediately hands out fast-pass visas straight to the American border.

Taken altogether, the new relative ease, safety, and swiftness of global journeys to the U.S. southern border should induce even greater numbers of foreign nationals to try the journey, especially those border-crossing nationalities the administration is currently allowing to remain. The number of foreign nationals not from Mexico or Central America is at the highest level in American history, amid illegal migration already at record-breaking levels overall.

Such nationals range from 40 to 50 percent of all who reach the southern border since the Biden administration carved exemptions in the pandemic-related Title 42 instant expulsion policy. The Biden exceptions have allowed large numbers of such trespassing foreign citizens to stay inside the United States. Homeland security officials regard this population as posing heightened national security, public safety, and health risks.

The Biden government has not taken specific credit for these two consequential changes. But the enticing changes do come after months of American diplomacy with Panama and Mexico and fall in line with the administration’s overarching policy idea for border management that illegal immigration not be stopped so much as rendered “safe, humane, and orderly.”

The administration has certainly lodged no objections to the creation of what amounts to a free-flow corridor from Panama through Mexico. That has included nary a discouraging word on Mexico’s apparent order that its national guard deployment, which Biden’s administration once insisted be maintained, stand down.

Starting late last year, a series of investigative stories by major American news outlets drew attention to the largest human flows ever recorded through the exceedingly dangerous Darien Gap. That gap is a lawless 60-mile jungle wilderness that must be crossed from Colombia to reach Panama.

Usually no more than 10,000 mostly single, young, adult male immigrants a year undertook the seven- to 10-day trek to Panama over mountains and across flash-flood-prone rivers. Yet more than 130,000 crossed in the first year after Biden won office to take advantage of exemptions the new president allowed in Title 42 for families with young children, unaccompanied minors, and pregnant women. Much of the recent popular press coverage focused on their deaths, criminal victimizations, and misery.

American diplomacy with Panama followed these stories, culminating in the April signing of a Bilateral Arrangement on Migration and Protection agreement to “improve migration management” by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The agreement is short on specifics, but during the preliminary shuttle diplomacy in February, Panama suddenly established a new sea route.

That route allows smuggling vessels from Colombia full of U.S.-bound foreign nationals to land much further northwest up the Caribbean coast on Panamanian territory. Panamanian coast guard vessels had previously blocked such smugglers. Immigrants landing make their way to the community of Canaan Membrillo. Another route opened up on the Pacific side of Panama to the community of Jaque.

The route to civilization in Panama from the new landings is only a two- or three-day trip over easier terrain through Kuna tribal territory, compared to the old 10-day trek through Embera tribal lands. Francisco Agapi, mayor of 29 villages where the old trail emptied out for years, told me recently that vastly reduced numbers now come through because the immigrants naturally prefer the short route the Panamanian government made possible by allowing the migrant boats to land further north.

The new route, which will almost surely draw higher numbers of migrants from around the world, coincided with a Panamanian border and immigration police operation it called wana humaradá, which means “let’s go with everything” in the Embera language. Its purpose was described as an effort to create a “more controlled migration” and to reduce the loss of life among foreign nationals, Spanish-language media reported.

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There is more.

 This is good intelligence on how the Biden policy has not just opened the southern border but facilitated access to it from around the world.  It is not like the US needs this rush of humanity, But it does appear that the Democrats think their party needs it to import future voters.