2023: the year of the migrant crisis

Immigration policy has been a hot-button issue for generations, in the United States and around the world. But waves of people fled their homes by land or by sea in 2023, triggering migrant crisis after migrant crisis in multiple regions. Battles over migration policy stoked domestic political feuds and diplomatic clashes.

International Organization for Migration officials told delegates at the United Nations' COP28 climate conference that more than half of forced "internal displacements," which totaled 32.6 million people last year, were driven by climate-related events, according to Forbes. Wars, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, drove more people to seek a better life in a new country, and increased tensions once they got there.

Here are some of the migration routes where the crisis was intense in 2023:

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The U.S.-Mexico border

A "growing wave of migration" exploded at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported recently. It hit especially hard in the small border city of Eagle Pass, Texas, where Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. declared a state of emergency as the number of migrants entering from Mexico hit 3,000 per day. "We are on pace for this to be the worst of the border crisis yet, and we've seen some doozies," said Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas), whose district includes Eagle Pass. The migrants included people fleeing turmoil in Venezuela, drug cartel violence in Ecuador and other once-safe countries, gang violence in Haiti, and a broad economic downturn across Latin America blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the impact wasn't just felt at the U.S.-Mexico border. New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency as thousands of migrants — more than 146,000 between spring 2022 and November 2023 — arrived from the southern border. Many were sent north by Texas' Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to cities run by Democrats in a campaign to pressure President Joe Biden to crack down at the border. Adams warned the city was facing a humanitarian crisis that would cost $12 billion over three years, The New York Times reported. City officials said in November their homeless shelters had no room for any more asylum-seekers. 

The EU and UK

European nations have faced a huge influx of migrants in recent years. The EU is on track to receive more than one million asylum seekers in 2023, the most since a wave of people in 2015 and 2016, most of them fleeing Syria's civil war. In Germany — already home to three million refugees, the most since waves of ethnic Germans returned from Eastern Europe after World War II — Chancellor Olaf Scholz is under pressure from overwhelmed states to do something about a more than 70 percent rise in asylum applications in 2023. "I don't want to use big words," Scholz told reporters in November, according to Politico, "but I think this is a historic moment."

Italy and the United Kingdom joined forces in October to lead a European effort to fight "illegal migration." Italy's right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power last year after vowing "to clamp down on unauthorized arrivals from North Africa with harsher immigration laws, restrictions on sea rescue charities, and plans to build migrant reception camps in Albania," Reuters reported. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's conservative government wants to pay Rwanda to process asylum applications for people arriving illegally in the U.K., which Sunak said would help "break the cycle of tragedy" of people-smuggling using small boats, the BBC reported. The UK also is taking steps to curb legal migration, including a higher minimum salary. 

South to South

Migrant waves to Western countries get most of the headlines, but most migration occurs between countries in the same region. "That has put a significant burden on states that border conflict zones, like Uganda, which sits alongside both South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo," according to the World Politics Review. Fighting between Sudan's army and paramilitaries has internally displaced three million people, and sent 926,841 people seeking refuge in Egypt, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and other neighboring countries, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.

These crises threaten to only get worse as rising global temperatures fuel mass climate migrations, according to Fortune. Global carbon emissions are rising, and climate scientists say the greenhouse gasses already accumulated in our atmosphere all but guarantee that Earth's average temperature rise will exceed the tipping point of two degrees Celsius, which it did briefly in November 2023. This, according to Fortune, could make countries like Bolivia or Yemen "vacant states," as their people leave seeking "fertile" ground, with their leaders unable to give them reason to stay. As Fortune put it: "Solar panels for an Eritrean village won't keep its boys from fleeing the country's hopeless economy and austere politics."