TikTok makes border journey look too easy
Alfredo, 33, used to love living in Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border. But that was before the cartel turf battle that’s raging there. The violence has scared away the tourists he used to guide through the jungle.
When I spoke with him a few weeks ago, he told me he felt ready to leave it all if it meant a better future for his young family. And the United States, all of a sudden, looked tempting.
Like many, Alfredo is convinced that asylum is the easiest and cheapest option for him and his family to reach and remain in the United States.
That’s what he heard from his wife, who told him that her family members had made the crossing and gotten asylum within a few days.
Except, it’d be a migration marvel if that were true.
Out of the many dozens of nationalities represented in U.S. asylum cases, Mexico has one of the lowest grant rates, second only to the Philippines.
It’s far more likely that Alfredo didn’t get all the details of his wife’s family’s story. Most likely, they didn’t actually get asylum; they only applied for it and were allowed to stay in the U.S. while they await a ruling.
If that’s what’s happening, they can expect a long wait. The U.S. immigration court backlog has topped 3 million, while the number of immigration judges actually decreased between 2023 and 2024 to a measly 725. With almost 4,000 cases on each judge’s docket, the wait time for asylum-seekers is at least four to six years.
Once 180 days have passed, asylum-seekers become eligible to apply for a permit to work in the United States. So it’s easy to see how, when passed through word of mouth, people back home could get the wrong idea.
In truth, actually getting asylum here is anything but easy and cheap.
But there doesn’t seem to be any other realistic legal pathway. As American Immigration Council policy director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick put it, legal immigration to the U.S. is now all but impossible for most people. According to the Cato Institute, fewer than 1% of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally.
For that, we can blame an immigration system that hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 1996 — a few years after the world’s first website went online.
That difficulty is especially true for someone like Alfredo. Under a cap set in 1990, no country can receive more than 7% of the available green cards for both family-based and employment-based immigrants. If a person from a high-demand place such as Mexico, India and China were to “get in line” for residency today, they might be waiting anywhere from two to eight decades.
Our asylum system is even more outdated. “It’s a Cold War-era relic that envisioned a world that doesn’t exist,” Reichlin-Melnick said. Under U.S. law, anybody fleeing persecution can request asylum, regardless of how they arrived on U.S. soil.
Not surprisingly, that law didn’t anticipate the way social media and technology have made would-be immigrants’ dreams of moving to a new country seem within reach.
In 2016, after a trip to Chiapas when my family hired Alfredo as our guide, I proudly posted photos on Facebook of me, deep in the Lacandon Jungle, triumphant and sweaty after an hourslong odyssey through mud and dense rainforest. So, too, do some migrants.
Like me, some don’t show the feet swollen by ant bites, or the quarreling sparked by hunger and thirst. They probably don’t mention their close call with human traffickers.
Others make an effort to show it all, the good and the bad, providing a blueprint for pitfalls to avoid on the journey north. Whether intentionally or not, many paint a picture of glamor, of bravery and adventure. Of hope.
Through messaging apps like WhatsApp and on platforms such as TikTok, X, Instagram and Facebook, millions of people all over the world watch migrants’ trials and successes as they cross the Darién Gap, the perilous jungle between South and North America.
That audience has catapulted some migrants to influencer status — sometimes earning them more cash than they made at home — and provided smugglers with a bigger platform to reach potential clients.
One migrant from India documented his journey to the U.S. in a multipart YouTube series that has racked up nearly 7 million views. “This looks so much fun,” wrote one commenter. “I want to do this too.”
“Eagerly awaiting part 16 of this video,” wrote another. “Love and blessings from Gujarat.”
Scrolling through TikTok, Alfredo has stumbled upon video after video with step-by-step instructions for reaching the U.S. “They make it look so easy,” he told me this week.
Easter used to be the peak season for Alfredo’s tour guide business. But this past weekend he had zero tours. As his savings dwindle, the options laid out by influencers online are looking more and more attractive.
Don’t pay a smuggler the typical $10,000 to cross from Mexico into the U.S., one TikToker advised.
For half the price, you can legally fly to Canada with a travel visa and illegally cross that U.S. border, which gets less attention, and then request asylum.
How could someone like Alfredo resist?
Next week: What the U.S. can do.
Want to hear more of Alfredo’s story? Check out part 1 of this series from last week.