This chapter is part of a report written in collaboration between the Center for American Progress and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS).
The strategic context surrounding migration in the Americas is shifting, and the United States’ response—particularly under U.S. President Donald Trump—has reshaped the region’s migration landscape. This chapter contrasts these developments with European approaches, highlighting both differences in baseline challenges and shared consequences of policy failure. Ultimately, this chapter argues that while enforcement is necessary, it cannot substitute for a well-ordered migration system rooted in national interest, economic pragmatism, and international cooperation.
Strategic context
In the period immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, the Americas have been home to historic levels of human displacement. Latin America and the Caribbean, while comprising 8 percent of the world’s population, account for 15 to 20 percent of the world’s displaced population as of 2023. Although more than 80 percent of displaced individuals have been absorbed elsewhere in the Americas, the United States has experienced significant migration management challenges. From 2021 to 2025, the United States saw 10.58 million encounters of irregular migrants at its border with Mexico, and in 2024, the U.S. foreign-born population reached a historic high of 15.6 percent. Against this backdrop, the American people have adopted increasingly restrictionist attitudes toward immigration and have rewarded politicians who promise immigration crackdowns—particularly President Trump.
Policy continuity and change
President Trump has made immigration enforcement a centerpiece of his agenda, prioritizing efforts to reduce the country’s foreign-born population. He has promised to deport millions of unauthorized migrants during his second term. To that end, he has moved to consolidate and enhance limitations on asylum imposed by his predecessor while ending recently created alternative legal pathways for migrants fleeing the region’s most unstable and repressive countries. The Trump administration has also engaged in unprecedented enforcement actions, including the use of military aircraft for deportation flights and the use of detention facilities at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Station for migrants awaiting deportation; deputization of a wide range of federal law enforcement officials to engage in immigration enforcement; invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target members of a Venezuelan transnational criminal organization; defiance of a court order seeking to prevent the expulsion of migrants to an infamous “super prison” in El Salvador; and high-profile targeting of the immigration status of student protestors. In addition, the Trump administration has eliminated scaled humanitarian parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans and has taken steps to roll back Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. President Trump has also repeatedly used a purported lack of migration cooperation from Mexico and Canada as a reason for threatening those countries with 25 percent tariffs and has induced Panama and Costa Rica to accept deportees who originated from a third country.
Although the Trump administration’s immigration control efforts have started with a focus on eliminating irregular migration, they are unlikely to end there. During his first term, Trump sought to reduce legal migration, and the governing guide for his second administration—Project 2025—calls for severe limits on legal migration to the United States.
Efforts to reduce the foreign-born population will have adverse effects on the U.S. economy, spurring inflation, reducing growth, and aging the population. These efforts will also fuel transnational organized crime as cartels are deeply enmeshed in human smuggling and trafficking, both in the Americas and beyond. Since the underlying reasons for human mobility are unlikely to abate as limited lawful migration pathways are eliminated, people will continue to try to migrate, even if they must do so in a dangerous manner.
Diverging interests and approaches between the United States and the EU
U.S. and EU migration management depart from different baselines. The foreign-born population currently comprises 15.6 percent of the U.S. population and 9.9 percent of the EU population, albeit with notable variance among member states. Among the foreign-born population, irregular migration is less common than is frequently perceived. In the European Union, for example, less than 10 percent of migrants arrived via irregular channels in 2023. In the United States, the unauthorized population is still less than one-quarter of the foreign-born population, despite recent increases in the unauthorized population. The paths followed by irregular migrants to the United States and the European Union are also different, as are their respective response frameworks.
While increasing forced displacement is a global phenomenon, most human mobility occurs in regional or hemispheric migratory systems. As a result, migration to the EU today is primarily from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, while migration to the United States originates primarily—but not exclusively—from the countries of the Americas; both the United States and the EU are seeing significant migration, irregular and otherwise, from India and China. While the European Union has mechanisms, albeit flawed ones, designed to share the burden of reception among member states, no such mechanism exists in the Americas, nor within the United States.
Nevertheless, the consequences of irregular migration to the United States and the EU are similar: It undermines confidence in government, provides significant fuel to nativist politicians, and creates an economically negative backlash against legal migration. The United States and the European Union thus have a shared interest in crafting and deploying policy solutions that promote well-ordered migration and meet their respective interests.
Advancing shared agendas
Any approach to managing migration must be firmly rooted, both in reality and in rhetoric, in the national interest, not only or even primarily in the interest of migrants. A well-ordered migration system with clear rules and accountability for all—from those responsible for the conditions leading to displacement, to those on the move, to those crafting and implementing policy—should be nonnegotiable. So too should be an unwavering commitment to target criminal organizations and their collaborators who undermine ordered migration and prey on the vulnerable.
A well-ordered migration system would have significant economic benefits. The recent influx of migrants to the United States, for example, is projected to generate a net benefit of more than $900 billion to the U.S. budget in the coming decade. A system that includes a regularization mechanism that provides legal pathways for undocumented people to regularize their immigration status would expand that positive effect at a time when the United States faces mounting fiscal challenges. Temporary regularization systems would help adjust a critical equation at times of significant influx, rapidly converting new arrivals from fiscal burdens to economic contributors, as they have in places such as Colombia. As a result, highlighting the positive economic effects of ordered migration is essential in laying out a progressive vision for migration management.
Coordinated enforcement efforts among countries of origin, transit, and destination are indispensable, as is all countries doing their share to present solutions to displacement as close to home as possible. In the Americas, this means supporting regularization and integration efforts that have succeeded in keeping more than 80 percent of displaced people in region during a tumultuous decade. Migrant stabilization efforts must be understood as the public international goods they are, and development finance—both multilateral and bilateral—must be leveraged to support such solutions at scale.
Enforcement without legal migration alternatives is a recipe for empowering organized crime, making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable, and sowing the chaos that undermines confidence in governments. Legal migration pathways must be reformed and crafted to meet key national needs. Collapsed U.S. and EU asylum systems must be reformed to restore functionality and conformity with moral and long-standing international obligations, even as those require modernization to meet today’s dynamics and not those of the 1940s and 1950s. Credible lines must be established and facilitated for those seeking family reunification; temporary work, commensurate with the labor needs of the countries of destination; or educational and professional opportunities.
A well-ordered migration system is also protective of migrants’ rights. Functioning asylum systems on both sides of the Atlantic, which do not exist today, would provide safe refuge for those in the gravest danger. Robust legal migration pathways would help unburden overwhelmed asylum systems and keep individuals away from the severe peril and uncertainty that defines irregular migration. Well-ordered migration systems also would deprive political actors who aim to restrict rights of vital oxygen—protecting rights for all, not just for migrants.
As the groundwork is laid for a progressive governing vision on migration, it is essential to confront today’s excesses. The denial of the basic dignity of migrants, regardless of legal status, is not just a harbinger of the erosion of rights for others but also a fundamental betrayal of core values and democratic principles. In the United States, immigration is an area of significant executive authority, but that authority is not a blank check for authoritarian disregard for the rule of law, including suspension of due process rights and rendition to third countries.