Krish O’Mara Vignarajah:
Look, these types of decisions have a devastating impact. For people who have built their lives here, many have fled unimaginable hardship, political violence, food shortages, a collapsed economy.
And it’s not just the 600,000 Venezuelans, for example, who are impacted. These are families, workers, parents of U.S. children who now face the terrifying prospect of being forced to return. And I think that’s where it’s such an important emphasis in explaining that, though there’s been so much focus on the response to undocumented immigrants, unauthorized migration, the brunt of these executive orders really seeks to dismantle existing legal immigration systems.
And what that means, when you throw wrenches into gears that had started working in creating functional and order legal pathways to the U.S., it means that a deterrence-only approach is going to lead people who, in some cases, are so incredibly desperate because they are fleeing for their lives, for the lives of their children.
What happens is they, out of fear, will do whatever it takes to reach safety. And what that means is that many will pay their life savings to cartel smugglers. That’s how U.S. immigration policy can end up pushing people towards exploitation and ultimately line the pockets of the very transnational crime organizations we’re trying to fight.
