Migrants in New York Are Grateful for Help. But They Want to Work.
The United States government has been a lifeline to families trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy. And while the United States does that now, Europe’s migrant crisis is more than a few hundred migrants.
A new report from UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of association, Shashank Bengali, finds that migrants’ rights and protections are still being violated as they try to get to the United States.
In fact, a migrant in Germany has been able to ask the authorities to help him. He only had a few days to make it to the U.S. border and had no passport and no money. The man arrived at the U.S. border on Monday with little to no identification. He told them he was just a refugee and that he needed to buy a train ticket. After three days, he made it there.
An estimated 44,000 people crossed the Mediterranean Sea this year, almost all to reach Europe, the vast majority of them fleeing from conflict in Central and South America, according to U.N. officials.
“This situation is not a temporary or transit situation,” Bengali said in a statement Monday. He added that even the people fleeing “genocide,” like the violence in Sudan or Syria, and political persecution, like political persecution in Eritrea, are entitled to the rights and protections that all EU citizens have.
The U.S. government has been a lifeline for people trying to leave the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the United States has been the largest single contributor of aid to UNHCR, the agency that coordinates with governments on how humanitarian assistance is delivered.
U.S. funding for UNHCR has grown by 654 percent since 2006 when the U.S. Congress approved a budget for three years and an additional $650 million to be spent from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
U.S. funding for UNHCR’s refugee assistance program has grown at an even higher rate. The State Department’s Bureau