Migrants from Mexico have been crossing the southern border in large numbers for decades. More recently migrants from Central America and South America have decided now is the time to make the long, dangerous journey to the US. But it’s a testament to just how completely Joe Biden has bungled the border crisis that word is now being spread even in Africa: The US border is open.

The young men from Guinea had decided it was time to leave their impoverished homeland in West Africa. But instead of seeking a new life in Europe, where so many African migrants have settled, they set out for what has become a far safer bet of late: the United States.

“Getting into the United States is certain compared to European countries, and so I came,” said Sekuba Keita, 30, who was at a migrant center in San Diego on a recent afternoon after an odyssey that took him by plane to Turkey, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, then by land to the Mexico-U.S. border…

Historically, the number of migrants from Africa’s 54 countries has been so low that U.S. authorities classified them as “other,” a category that has grown exponentially, driven recently, officials say, by fast-rising numbers from the continent.

According to government data obtained by The Times, the number of Africans apprehended at the southern border jumped to 58,462 in the fiscal year 2023 from 13,406 in 2022.

Just to put that number in perspective, it was only a few years ago that 58,462 was more migrants than the Border Patrol encountered in most months. Between FY2014 and FY 2018 there were only a handful of individual months where the number of encounters topped 58,000 and even then not by much. For any of those years, 58,000 would have been about 10-12% of our total annual number of border encounters.

Of course things have changed since the arrival of the Biden administration and its determination to undo Trump’s approach to the border. Since Biden took office we haven’t had a single month with fewer than 58,000 migrant encounters. Biden set another new record last month, though the exact number hasn’t been revealed yet.

Not all of the people counted in those totals are allowed to remain in the US but the percentage has been growing simply because there is nowhere for the Border Patrol to detain this many people and because a lot of countries in question won’t allow flights returning them. Instead they get paperwork and are released.

More than a dozen migrants interviewed for this article said that they had surrendered at the border to U.S. agents, who bused them to a processing facility. There, the migrants spent two or three nights waiting their turn to provide personal information to authorities. They were released with documents that indicated they were in deportation proceedings and must go to court on a specific date in the city where they reported they will live.

So Europe has started cracking down on illegal immigration thanks in part to several recent elections voting more conservative parties into office. Word is getting out that the European border is closing. Lucky for these economic migrants the US border remains wide open and so long as Joe Biden is in office it probably will remain that way.

This report is from yesterday.