NEW YORK, May 5 (Xinhua) -- The recent rise in unauthorized border crossings into the United States isn't limited to any one area, with the number of migrants apprehended and expelled across the entire southern U.S. border skyrocketing: more than 200,000 in November last year alone, reported National Public Radio (NPR) earlier this week.
"Numbers that high were seen during the last major wave of immigration, over 20 years ago," said the report.
"One major factor for the increase has been the pandemic and it's aftermath," said Raquel Aldana, professor with the UC Davis School of Law.
The complexities of immigration, combined with politics, has kept any long-term solutions in limbo, noted the report. "The Biden administration has enacted a number of policies designed to discourage people from going to the border. They've elicited criticism from both immigration advocates and from Republicans. The bottleneck continues."
Title 42 -- a pandemic-era policy that allowed border authorities to detain and expel migrants without the traditional legal proceeding -- is set to end in a few weeks. Some Texas cities along the border have declared states of emergency, anticipating more crossings, according to the report.
"We just focus on the short term, the wall, the tinkering with asylum policy, and it doesn't really work. There's instability abroad and people are fleeing their countries. And that's not going to stop with a wall," Professor David Hernandez of Mount Holyoke College was quoted as saying.
