WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden commended Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for his country’s collaboration with the United States and Canada to establish migration hubs in Latin America where asylum seekers fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries can apply for protection.
The two leaders sat down at the White House on Friday for wide-ranging talks on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, climate change and other issues. But efforts by the U.S. and Spain to cooperate on asylum processing loomed large over the discussion as the Biden administration rolls out new immigration measures now that COVID-19 immigration restrictions have ended.
The new efforts are designed to crack down on illegal border crossings while opening legal pathways to give migrants incentives to apply for asylum online where they are, instead of making the dangerous journey to the border.
Migrants caught illegally crossing the southern U.S. border cannot return for five years, and they face criminal prosecution if they do. And migrants will be barred from seeking asylum at the border if they do not first ask for protection in a country they traveled through or apply online.
A major piece of the expanded legal pathway is the creation of processing centers in Colombia and Guatemala and up to 100 others in the Western Hemisphere where migrants can go to apply to enter the U.S., Spain or Canada.
“We’re both facing the challenges of migration in the Western Hemisphere,” Biden told Sanchez at the start of the Oval Office meeting.
It was a huge step for the White House to get Spain and Canada to agree to take in asylum seekers from Latin America. And it helps reinforce the Biden administration’s argument that the current migration quandary facing the Americas is a global problem that needs a global solution — much like the refugee crises that have impacted Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine in recent years.
The State Department on Thursday announced a website where asylum seekers can now find information on the process and will eventually be able to request appointments.
The U.S. has increasingly seen migrants arrive at its southern border who are from China, Ukraine, Haiti, Russia and other nations far from Latin America and who are increasingly family groups and children traveling alone. Thirty years ago, by contrast, illegal crossings were almost always single adults from Mexico who were easily returned over the border.
Spain, though it has high overall unemployment,…