Florida Keys – unlocking America

Across miles of postcard-perfect coastline, the Keys are packed with luxury beach resorts where tourists lounge and the wealthy retreat to their second homes.

Since the summer, the peace of this chain of low-lying islands has been disturbed by the whirring sounds of border patrol boats rushing to intercept the newest surge of migrants arriving from the Caribbean. In 2023, America’s southernmost border has found itself at the newest fault lines between the two warring and factitious parties.

Over the New Year’s weekend 500 migrants arrived by boat. On Thursday alone, 177 Cuban migrants were intercepted before they could reach land, just as 24 Haitian migrants swam ashore elsewhere. They are the latest to make the treacherous journey across hundreds of miles of open ocean in flimsy, wooden boats in search of America.

The influx has been driven by worsening conditions across the Caribbean. Cubans face food shortages, power outages and persecution under the nation’s communist government, whilst Haitians flee gang violence, spiralling poverty and near-total state collapse.

Emmanuel, a Haitian community worker, who did not give his real name due to security reasons, says that: “It is a very desperate situation, it’s got to breaking point”. There is a mass exodus, he explains, because “people have already been broken by what’s happening”.

Migrants interdicted at sea by U.S. authorities are returned home, but for those that make it, the Keys mark a gateway to America under the Biden administrations’ new migration strategy.

In an attempt to provide more pathways for asylum, Biden is allowing 30,000 citizens of Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua a month with American sponsors to go to the U.S and work legally temporarily.

The new policy, intended to diffuse the build up at the U.S.-Mexico border, has instead created Biden’s newest political headache as Republican leaders ramp up their protest that a “federal failure” is taking place on Florida’s coastline.

“The migrants say that they are taking advantage to make the dangerous journey now,” says Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies. “This area of migration has become a focal point because of the dramatic increase in arrivals and the lack of a federal response.”

On a national scale, Vaughan says, Republicans see it as an “illustration of the lack of border control as a result of the Biden administration policies.”

Politics aside, the tangible consequences of the migrant surge are being felt locally. Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay called it a “humanitarian crisis” fed by federal agencies failing to “deal with a mass migration issue that was foreseeable”.

On January 6, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has his eyes fixed on the Republican presidential nomination, activated the Florida National Guard to aid local authorities, whilst criticising Biden’s migration policies as “lawless”.

And yet, Biden remains fixed on what he sees as a long-term approach to legal migration. Fresh off a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border at El Paso, Biden returned fire stating: “I’ll sit down with anyone who, in good faith, wants to fix our broken immigration system.”