Bethany Blankley | Washington Examiner
March 16, 2024
"The United States is... being targeted by foreign adversaries through 'weaponized migration,' Kelly Greenhill, a senior research scholar at MIT Center for International Studies, director of Seminar XXI, and author of 'Weapons of Mass Migration,' wrote in an analysis."
-Blankley in Washington Examiner
(The Center Square) – Unless Congress and policymakers understand how weaponized migration is being used against the U.S., they won’t be able to solve the problem, foreign policy analysts warn.
More than 11 million foreign nationals, including gotaways, illegally entering the U.S. from all over the world is not an accident, military and foreign policy experts have warned. It’s called migrant warfare, The Center Square first reported. The European Commission, United Nations, NATO, and foreign policy institutes have identified hybrid warfare being used in Europe, including migrant warfare, to shape national and international policies.
The United States is also being targeted by foreign adversaries through “weaponized migration,” Kelly Greenhill, a senior research scholar at MIT Center for International Studies and author of “Weapons of Mass Migration,” wrote in an analysis.
“The United States has been an especially frequent target, with the tactic used against nearly every U.S. administration from Dwight Eisenhower’s in the 1950s through George W Bush’s in the first decade of this century,” she wrote. Western governments do not appear to understand how migrant warfare is used to exploit “political divisions that exist within the targeted states.” Engineering the movement of people across international borders “has long been a distressingly effective policy instrument, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon,” she said. “Unless policymakers begin to confront the forces that enable weaponized migration, the favored policy responses seem destined to increase, rather than curtail.”
She highlighted examples of how weaponized migration has been used to achieve desired outcomes in multiple countries, noting that Cuba and Haiti have used the tactic against the U.S. for decades.
“When weaponized migration is used, it is often successful,” she wrote. Of the 81 cases she identified worldwide since 1951, the tactic achieved the anticipated objective. Targets are disproportionately liberal democracies, she noted, and the effectiveness of weaponized migration “as a method of coercive statecraft depends on the attitude and politics of the targeted country.”
From Washington Examiner