Most migrants do not qualify for legal asylum in the U.S. This is an unsurprising info item in a short documentary which contains a few surprising info items and many unsettling ones. I mean the Federalist dot com documentary (which I viewed on YouTube), Cartel Country: The Untold Story of America’s Black Market on the Border (2022) , a sad film about border crossers and the cartels.

Migrants flee poverty, organized crime, and gang violence. Curiously, we hear Haitians tell an interviewer that they emigrated to such places as Chile and Brazil but eventually moved out (because of no prospects?) to try to enter the United States. We see migrants in Mexico near the U.S. border naturally filling the shelters until there is no more room and people are sleeping in the streets. Many of such migrants do not know how to enter the country once they’re close to it. Often they wish to hire lawyers.

Lawyers or not, masses of them are here. Illegal immigration is much in the news right now, but I don’t much care what the major networks are saying about it. I would decidedly rather see this 36-minute doc. Calmly it presents quite a lot.