Archive for the ‘Migrant Crisis’ Category

Staffing crisis in agri-food industry is down to immigration rules, Poots told – Belfast Telegraph

Agri-food representatives have told Agriculture Minster Edwin Poots that the UKs immigration system is the main catalyst for staff shortages facing the industry here.

ne MLA described the situation as a perfect storm of failed regulations, economics and other forces that have severely impacted the sector.

Mr Poots said these shortages are causing difficulties across the food processing sector, and for abattoirs in particular, a situation he described as worrying.

Despite offering competitive wages, the minister said, agri-food firms here have struggled to recruit a fully-staffed workforce from the pool of domestic workers here, so have had to rely on migrant workers to fill the labour gap in the past. Changes to immigration rules made in Westminster, however, now mean migrant labour is limited to skilled jobs that meet certain salary levels and English language requirements.

Mr Poots added: Industry representatives have indicated that the new UK Immigration System is the main catalyst for the current shortages.

Engagement with industry indicates that there continues to be sizeable labour shortages, particular with respect to the number of slaughter plant operatives and butchers in our abattoirs and processing plants.

These labour shortages are causing difficulties across the food processing sector, however, it is the pig sector that is reporting the most serious difficulties with processing capacity, resulting in a rollover of pigs on farms each week.

Other pressures facing the pig sector are an increase in supply alongside a global fall in pig prices. Late last year, the UK Government announced temporary visas for 800 butchers for the pig sector in order to ease staffing pressures. Applications for this scheme have now closed and the DUP minister warned short-term schemes will do nothing to alleviate the agri-food staffing problem in the medium to longer-term.

This is a worrying situation and I continue to take all steps within my power to help mitigate the problem. A significant aspect of this is my continued and extensive engagement with Whitehall given that Immigration Policy is a reserved matter, he said.

Independent unionist MLA Claire Sugden said: Rules made in Westminster not in Stormont mean access to migrant labour is now limited to skilled jobs that meet set salary levels and English lan guage requirements.

As a result, we simply cannot find enough slaughter plant operatives and butchers in our abattoirs and processing plants.

The knock-on effect of this is that animals cannot be slaughtered and processed quickly enough. Farmers and plants have these animals queuing up for longer, which means farmers are not just spending more on feed the price of which has also soared in recent months but actually having to pay price penalties for overweight animals in the case of pigs.

It truly is a perfect storm of failed regulations, economics and other forces that together are conspiring to make meat farming and processing across Northern Ireland increasingly unsustainable.

SDLP agriculture spokesperson Patsy McGlone said the main reason for the issues is Brexit.

Minister Poots also acknowledges that there is no obvious solution to these problems. Perhaps if his party stopped threatening to collapse our institutions and supported an agreement between the EU and British Government to resolve the small number of outstanding issues around the Protocol, we could then turn our attentions to coming up with a plan to support businesses like these and help them attract the staff they need, he said.

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Staffing crisis in agri-food industry is down to immigration rules, Poots told - Belfast Telegraph

Migrant encounters increased again at the southern border in December: court docs – Fox News

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Migrant encounters at the southern border increased again in December from the prior month, according to data provided to a federal court by the Biden administration -- the latest sign that the crisis at the border is likely to continue into 2022.

According to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data provided in the Jan 14 filing, there were 178,840 migrant encounters in December, up from 173,620 in November. That in turn was an increase from the 164,753 apprehensions in October.

BIDEN ADMIN FORMALLY TERMINATED KEY TRUMP-ERA MIGRATION AGREEMENTS AT HEIGHT OF BORDER CRISIS

Those numbers are drastically higher than the previous year, when there were 72,113 encounters in November and 73,994 in December.

CBP has not yet officially released its monthly operational update, and told Fox that it does not provide preliminary data or comment before the update posts. A spokesperson said that the official data should be published in the coming days.

Of the 178,840 apprehensions, 78,589 were expelled via Title 42 -- the Trump era public health order that has been kept in a limited capacity and can be used to expel migrants quickly at the southern border.

The documents also show that 55,626 migrants were released into the U.S. Of those, 36,652 were released on an order of recognizance with a Notice to Appear at an eventual court hearing. Meanwhile, nearly 19,000 were given humanitarian parole -- which is used on a "case by case basis" for an urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reason.

The Biden administration has been struggling to deal with the ongoing crisis at the southern border, which saw a massive increase in apprehensions after President Biden was inaugurated. The number spiked to more than 213,000 encounters in July, and has dropped slightly since then but has remained stubbornly above the 150,000 mark.

Republican critics have blamed the surge on the dramatic rollback of Trump-era border protections and policies. The Biden administration has ended border wall construction, terminated asylum cooperative agreements and limited the ability of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION REACHES DEAL WITH MEXICO TO REIMPLEMENT TRUMP-ERA REMAIN IN MEXICO POLICY

The administration also ended the Migrant Protection Protocols -- a key policy of the Trump administration which saw migrants returned to Mexico as their hearings progressed. It was seen as central in ending the practice of "catch and release."

However, the Supreme Court upheld a federal court ruling that the Biden administration ended the program unlawfully, and ordered it restored. The filing came as part of that ongoing litigation.

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While the administration has complied with the order, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has issued a memo indicating that the agency will end the policy -- which critics have decried as cruel -- in a manner that complies with the court ruling.

Fox News' Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.

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Migrant encounters increased again at the southern border in December: court docs - Fox News

Del Rio and the Call for Migrant Justice – The New Yorker

The violent removal of Haitian asylum seekers from their encampments in Del Rio, Texas, in September, opened a critical window for reckoning with the centrality of racismand anti-Black racism in particularto the conduct and character of U.S. border policing. Photographs taken at the scene showed uniformed white agents in chaps and full riding gear as they drove Haitians away from U.S. territory. In one shot, captured by the photojournalist Paul Ratje, an agent lunges forward to grab a young mans shirt; the man, who has since been identified as Mirard Joseph, is carrying nothing more threatening than food for his wife and daughter.

The spectacle of heavily armed border guards abusing vulnerable migrants reminds us that the U.S.-Mexico border is not a neutral entity. Since it was established, following the U.S.-Mexican War, it has been an instrument of power and control. The images of the mounted border agents drew comparisons to slave patrols, which emerged in the early eighteenth century in the U.S. to enforce slave codes, catch escapees, and prevent Black revolt. These groups evolved into militias such as the Texas Rangers, which prosecuted war against the Karankawa, Cherokee, and Comanche tribal nations, pursued fugitive slaves into Mexico, and established control over ethnic Mexican communities. By 1835, when they were formally constituted as a law-enforcement agency, the Rangers had created a culture of policing in the service of white supremacy. (Working with the descendants of affected communities, Monica Muoz Martinez and others have recovered the record of Ranger atrocities, including the 1918 Porvenir Massacre, in which Rangers and local ranchers executed fifteen unarmed Tejanos.) Founded in 1924, the Border Patrol recruited directly from the Texas Rangers and incorporated the habits of using border security to enforce white racial primacy. During this early period, many agents were active in borderland chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Del Rio images recalled photographs taken more than a century ago, of Texas Rangers posed triumphantly on horseback over the bodies of slain Mexicans. (Those images circulated widely, too, serving as sensational propaganda for white power.) They also called further back, to images of slave patrols. On Twitter, the N.A.A.C.P. paired Ratjes photograph with a nineteenth-century engraving of a mounted slave patrol. The symmetry between the two images is chilling. In the engraving, a white man in a riding costume leans forward with his whip raised. He is about to strike a Black fugitive, whose back is turned to him at much the same angle as the Haitian youth in the other photograph. The whips, the ropes, the horsesall of them have been marshalled for the sake of inflicting pain and fear. In both instances, the law of the land gives white men on horseback plenary power over Black people in flight for survival.

By calling up painful racial memory, the Del Rio photographs provoked an important dialogue about the rights and protections owed to migrant members of the Black diaspora. On September 21st, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, of Texass Eighteenth District, in Houston, exercised her authority as an executive board member of the Congressional Black Caucus to call for an official inquiry into the events. On September 22nd, she and eight other C.B.C. members met with White House officials to express their concern that the Border Patrols actions were discriminatory and unlawful, and to remind them of their commitments to Haitian asylum seekers and members of the Haitian diaspora. These included the May, 2021, announcement of a new Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, made months before the assassination of President Jovenel Mose and a major earthquake further destabilized the country. The Department of Homeland Securitys inspector general declined to conduct an investigation. Instead, it referred the matter to Customs and Border Protections office of professional responsibility; the outcome of that investigation remains pending.

President Bidens response to demands for accountability was to join in the outrage. Calling the Del Rio photographs horrible, he announced a suspension of the use of horse patrols in migrant management in Del Rio. Even this effort at restraint proved illusory. On October 7th, the Facebook page of the Border Patrols Del Rio sector featured a photo of agents on horseback encircling a group of captured migrants. The accompanying text boasted about having made over 1,000 apprehensions across sector yesterday. Months after their dispersal, the U.S. has not accounted for the fate of the many thousands of Haitian and other migrants who populated the Del Rio encampment. As D.H.S. escalated its program of deportation flights, an estimated eight thousand entered Mexico to avoid the catastrophic consequences of forced return. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas had the temerity to call these voluntary departures.

Even as Biden introduced his Collaborative Migration Management Strategy, in July, which promises safe, orderly, and humane migration, his Administration has continued to defend Title 42, the Trump Administration order that enlists the governments of Central America and Mexico in a program tantamount to mass expulsion. This has had devastating consequences for Black migrants and other vulnerable populations. In late August, video recordings of National Guard and immigration police in Tapachula, Chiapas, captured images of Mexican agents throwing Haitian, Cuban, Central American, and South American women and children to the ground and delivering beatings to break up a migrant caravan. Last fall, Mexican immigration officials were deporting some three hundred migrants a day at the southern border with Guatemala, Haitians among them, as part of a partnership with the U.S. In early December, representatives of the several thousand Haitians encamped outside of a sports arena in Tapachula protested their subjection to hunger, assaults, and unsanitary conditions while awaiting processing by migration authorities. The reinstatement of the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (Remain in Mexico) in Texas on December 2nd (in modified form) will only increase the displacement of Haitian and other vulnerable migrants to similar sites of confinement in Mexico.

To charges of human-rights abuses and failure, the Biden Administration, like others before it, answered weakly that they must follow the rule of law. But no law requires that people fleeing political violence and natural disaster should be met by the militarized cordon sanitaire in South Texas. We have so normalized the excessive use of force at the border that few questioned Governor Greg Abbotts September 22nd decision to briefly deploy hundreds of Border Patrol cars in a kilometres-long wall of steel against Haitians and other migrants huddled under border bridges and in makeshift camps near the Rio Grande. It was a costly stunt that will prolong state failure and human catastrophe.

The Del Rio photographs are shadowed by other violence that goes unseen and unrecorded by cameras. Immigration-law enforcement works by imposing privation and social isolation on those deemed alien and illegal: familial separation, physical and sexual abuse, and prolonged captivity. Migrants invoke international and civil-rights law to defend themselvesMirard Joseph, who appears in Ratjes Del Rio photograph, has filed a lawsuit against the federal governmentbut they most often confront these conditions alone and beyond any effective oversight. The Del Rio photographs should also make us look differently at the images we do seethe pictures of lawful violence that circulate in media coverage of the so-called migrant crisis. Scenes of migrants in chains, boarding buses on their way to deportation flights, have yet to cause the same anguish. Until someone you love is in chains or wearing an ankle monitor, it is possible to imagine that these are not dehumanizing or scarring.

Black civil-rights leaders and migrant organizations responded to the Del Rio photos with a broad campaign for racial justice. The UndocuBlack Network issued a statement that called for an end to the war on Black migrants. On September 22nd, the leaders of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Urban League, and other groups wrote to President Biden to denounce his Administrations mistreatment of Haitian refugees, stating, of the Del Rio photographs, We are hard-pressed in the year 2021 to find more horrific, traumatizing and blatantly racist images. The images are distressing not only because they depict racial cruelty. They also cause harm by making Black migrants appear helpless, passive, and defeatedthe inverse mirror of the prevailing image of migrants as a criminal threat. This is an insidious message, because it is false and because it perpetuates misapprehension about the relationship between migrants and the nations they seek to enter. As the Haitian Bridge Alliance reminds us, these Haitian refugees are not strangers. They are kin to long-standing Haitian communities in the U.S. Black migrant-led campaigns to end deportations stand out from the cacophony of the border debates for their refusal to depict Haitian migrants as foreign; their call, Immigration Is a Black Issue, integrates them into a broader campaign for racial justice based in principles of equity and abolition.

The U.S. government has largely excluded migrant-led organizations from the process of policy reform. And yet migrant communities have been crucial protagonists in the most vital struggles of our difficult moment. One finds migrant-led organizations working to raise wages and worker-safety standards, fight racial and sexual discrimination, support vulnerable people during the pandemic, and address the harms of climate change. In Vermont, migrant dairy workers created the Milk with Dignity program, a platform of farmworkers rights that yielded landmark gains in health-care coverage, worker safety, and wage-theft prevention. In New York, migrants held a rolling hunger strike, the Fast for the Forgotten, to obtain a historic $2.1-billion pandemic-relief fund for undocumented workers. Food couriers in Manhattan secured protective legislation for those performing the dangerous tasks of fulfilling mobile-app orders. In my city of New Haven, Connecticut, the migrant-led Semilla Collective formed a food garage and community garden that fed hundreds of low-income and shut-in people during the pandemic.

With no path to formal political rights, migrants have also crafted powerful, affirmative responses to the failures of immigration and economic policies. In transit through Mexico, migrants have made their journeys into protest marches against the cacera de migrantesmigrant-huntingstaged in the face of the extraordinary forces marshalled against them. During the worst years of the Trump era, migrant-led organizations, including the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, drafted the Migrant Justice Platform, conceived as an open-source unity blueprint for reconceptualizing migration governance. It departs from legislative strategies for comprehensive immigration reform, by linking migration policy to the defense of labor rights and the repair of civic institutions. Like the abolitionists before them, theirs is a political project based in solidarity and an abiding appreciation for liberty. Like our most radical futurists, they are calling forth horizontal social relations made for the global age. Freedom from the kind of violence and misery on exhibit in Del Rio is unthinkable right now only because we have made it so.

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Del Rio and the Call for Migrant Justice - The New Yorker

A review of President Biden’s first year on border policy | TheHill – The Hill

In January of 2021, as President BidenJoe BidenPredictions of disaster for Democrats aren't guarantees of midterm failure A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Vilsack accuses China of breaking commitments in Trump-era trade deal MORE and his team transitioned from the campaign to the White House, addressing U.S. border policy was top priority. A year later, the lasting impact of those initial decisions is undeniable the Biden administrations policies and actions on the border created a crisis, and his continued inaction allowed it to devastate our immigration system.

In the opening days of President Bidens first year, the main goal of his administration centered around reversing the policies of former President TrumpDonald TrumpPredictions of disaster for Democrats aren't guarantees of midterm failure A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Hannity after Jan. 6 texted McEnany 'no more stolen election talk' in five-point plan for Trump MORE. Instead of reviewing policies based on their effectiveness, the Biden administration blindly canceled President Trumps policies without first analyzing the impact the removal of those policies would have on our border communities.

On the very first day, the Biden administration effectively terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the Remain in Mexico policy. The policy allowed for asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until the time came for them to appear at an immigration hearing. This program reduced the number of border apprehensions by 64% over a four-month span in 2019 and was a major component of the Trump administrations efforts to combat illegal immigration. Earlier this year, I sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro MayorkasAlejandro MayorkasDemocrats calls on Biden administration to ease entry to US for at-risk Afghans A review of President Biden's first year on border policy Rift grows between Biden and immigration advocates MORE questioning the administrations rationale for suspending the MPP. While a court order required the Biden administration to reinstate the program, the administration continues to fight the use of this effective strategy through legal challenges.

President Biden also issued other executive orders (EOs) that reinstated catch-and-release measures, a controversial practice terminated under the Trump administration that allows undocumented migrants to enter the United States without a visa. President Bidens policies gave undocumented immigrants traveling with children an ability to remain indefinitely in the United States, and many warned that this policy would incentivize human trafficking of children across the border. These warnings proved true as Border Patrol agents encountered almost 19,000 unaccompanied children two months later in March, five times the number encountered in the same month of 2020.

Another policy targeted by President Biden was border wall system construction. After the federal government had already paid for much of the wall system, the president canceled the project, which not only wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, but also left our border vulnerable.

The administrations actions quickly led to a surge of migrants on the border. Within weeks of President Bidens inauguration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters with family units at the southwest border increased 400 percent compared to months prior to election day, prompting leaders from across the political spectrum to warn the White House of an impending border crisis.

We are writing to express our deep concern that your recent sweeping border security and immigration enforcement policy rollbacks are causing a new crisis at our southwest border, undercutting the rule of law, and damaging the integrity of our territorial borders, my colleagues on the Committee on Homeland Security and I wrote to the president in early February, 2021.

Despite the warnings, however, President Biden chose to ignore the crisis he and his administration had created as details of the humanitarian crisis became publicly known. Border Patrol agents reported that the Biden administration had become the biggest facilitator of human smuggling across the border. Drug smuggling exploded as Border Patrol agents seized more fentanyl by April 2021 than in all of 2020 combined. Suspected or known terrorists were reported to have been apprehended while attempting to sneak into the United States during the crisis.

However, the administration continued to remain silent as human smuggling and drug trafficking continued to reach record highs until the crisis reached a breaking point in September when thousands of Haitian migrants camped at the border. When those migrants were met by Border Patrol agents, who attempted to gain control of the situation, many attempted to rush across the border and were met by agents on horseback. During the encounter, an agent was photographed using his reins to control the horse he was riding, leading to a photo that media outlets began using to falsely accuse the agents of using whips to strike immigrants.

Instead of supporting the agents who were performing their duties under very difficult circumstances, the Biden administration helped promote this false narrative even after the photographer who took the photos refuted the claims.Instead of taking responsibility for the dozens of actions they took to create the crisis, the administration chose to blame everyone else including the officers who were charged with protecting our border while working overtime to provide care for the influx of unaccompanied children.

One year ago, President Biden implemented a border strategy based on overturning President Trumps actions without regard to the impact on the border. His actions signaled that the border was open with catch-and-release policies and weakened security, and he ignored warnings of the crisis for months.When the crisis reached a pivotal moment, he betrayed the law enforcement agents who were performing their duty to our nation.

President Bidens policies have completely failed the American people, but it is not too late for him to change course.To secure the border President Biden must reimplement the proven policies he scrapped and begin supporting our law enforcement agents on the border. If he chooses not to, his legacy on the border will remain what it is at the end of his first year a complete and total failure.

Michael GuestMichael Patrick GuestDHS considering asylum for migrants whose cases were terminated under Trump I visited the border and the vice president should too The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Senate path uncertain after House approves Jan. 6 panel MORErepresents the 3rd District of Mississippi and is vice ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security.

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A review of President Biden's first year on border policy | TheHill - The Hill

More than 700 migrants have reached Cyprus this year – InfoMigrants

The government of Cyprus says that it has already received more than 700 applications for asylum so far this year. The island nation, which has seen a spike in irregular arrivals in recent years, says it is encountering a "migration crisis", propelled by Turkey.

More than 700 people have filed an application for asylum in Cyprus since the start of the year, according to a report in the Cypriot daily Phileleftheros on Wednesday, January 19.

Last year,the Greek-administered part of the island received close to 13,500asylum applications, according to the Phileleftheros. From all the applications submitted in recent years, the authorities reviewed a record number of 16,549 applications in 2021. Currently, 19,000 applications are reportedly still pending.

The Greek-administered part of the island, which is part of the EU and has a population of 1.2 million, had one of the highest numbers of asylum applications per capita in the entire EU in 2020, according to the bloc's official statistics.

The Cypriot immigration authorities say they are overstretched and struggle to deal with the unabatated flow of migrants to the island.

Also read: Riot police fire warning shots at migrants in Cyprus

The island's two reception centers, one near the capital Nicosia and the other near the port city of Larnaca, are both notoriously overcrowded. Most of the newcomers have been forced to sleep outside the camps, reported the Phileleftheros.

The newspaper says that Interior Minister Nicos Nourisis is planning to ask for EU funding to build another camp on its eastern shores, where the asylum applications could be processed faster.

In November 2021, Cypriot authorities sought to get the European Commissions approval to suspend asylum seekers' applications for all the 'irregular migrants,' claiming that they are facing a 'demographic change' and 'acute socio-economic effects.'

Also Read: Cyprus: Hundreds transferred after coronavirus outbreak at an overcrowded migrant camp

Most migrants arrive on Cyprus by boat from the Turkish mainland. They come ashore in the Turkish-Cypriot north of the island and then pass through a porous 'green line' a buffer zone patrolled by the UN peacekeeping forces that splits the island between the Turkish Cypriot part and the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot southern part.

The Phileleftheros report claimed thatgangs of smugglers charged between 300 to 500 (340 to 567 dollars) for smugglingmigrantsacross the dividing line into the Greek-Cypriot south, where they then can apply for asylum in the EU, reports dpa.

Moreover, Cyprus blames Turkey for allowing irregular migrants to cross from the north.

"Turkeys stance has led to the creation ... of a new migration route in the eastern Mediterranean, which disproportionally burdens Cyprus, and places enormous strain on the national asylum system," said the nation's foreign and interior ministries in a joint statement to the EU Parliament in February 2021. The ministries said they would raise "the extent of the migration crisis faced by Cyprus" in Brussels to ensure the government "receives the assistance required to effectively address it."

Turkey, hosting more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, "could flood the island if wanted," Corina Drousiotou from the Cyprus Refugee Council toldnews agencyAFP in December.

With dpa, AFP

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More than 700 migrants have reached Cyprus this year - InfoMigrants