Migration: people keep coming. Some facts.

Republicans screaming about an "invasion" at the southern U.S. border encourage me to tune out accounts of what is actually happening. To my way of the thinking, folks have always wanted to come here when life became brutally unbearable in their previous homes. We live pretty well here, sometimes a lot better than pretty well. So sure, folks will try to come. That's how most current citizens' ancestors got here, Black folks with enslaved forbears and Native people excepted.

But we probably should be aware the current migrant flow is different. A lot more people from different countries are turning up trying to get in.

 ... An NBC News analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a fundamental shift. Before the pandemic, roughly 9 in 10 migrants crossing the border illegally (that is, between ports of entry) came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the four countries closest to the border. Those countries no longer hold the majority: As of 2023, for the first time since the U.S. has collected such data, half of all migrants who cross the border now come from elsewhere globally.

The greatest numbers have come from countries farther away in the Americas that have never before sent migrants to the border at this scale. In the 2019 fiscal year, for example, the number of Colombians apprehended illegally crossing the border was 400. In fiscal 2023, it exploded to 154,080 — a nearly four-hundred-fold increase.

But they come, too, from countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and every region in Asia. There have been dramatic increases in the number of migrants from the world’s most populous countries: Between fiscal 2019 and 2023, the number of migrants from China and India grew more than elevenfold and fivefold, respectively. And some countries that previously sent negligible numbers of migrants to the U.S. border have seen staggering increases. In fiscal 2019, the total number of people from the northwest African nation of Mauritania apprehended at the border was 20. Four years later, that number was 15,260. For migrants from Turkey, the number went from 60 to 15,430. The list goes on: More than 50 nationalities saw apprehensions multiplied by a hundred or more.

Most of these people are counted because they turn themselves in and claim asylum as they are entitled to do under U.S. law. Because Republicans refuse to adequately fund the immigration system, it takes years for their asylum claims to be adjudicated. Most will not win asylum, but they work in the interim.

The linked article explores the narco-capitalist smuggling industry that profits from people from all over the world trying to come. I don't know enough to know how true that reporting is, but there's probably some truth.

Republican screaming peddles a bunch of lies about migrants.  Here are some.

Click to enlarge.

Meanwhile, the large number of immigrants legally allowed to work in the United States since the pandemic has helped us recover much faster from the doldrums of 2020 than other parts of the world, especially Europe.

... About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns.

Donald Trump and his merry band of MAGA nativists want strangle the source of our current economic health.