The border crisis isn’t only about the West. This OZY original series captures how migration is reshaping other societies too.

The border crisis is once again grabbing America’s attention, with Democratic lawmakers visiting detention centers where immigration officials are holding thousands of migrants seeking asylum. Some have compared these centers to “concentration camps,” in turn drawing criticism from both supporters of the Trump administration and those who believe the comparison minimizes the suffering of Jews and other ethnic minorities who were forced by the Nazis to accept forced labor and death.

But the heart-wrenching images of children and families in subhuman conditions at the centers along America’s southern border are only the tip of an iceberg that extends thousands of miles, to the distant corners of South America, Asia and the Middle East. That the crisis facing the Trump administration isn’t withering away through tougher immigration rules alone serves as a reminder that in a globalized world, finding a solution often requires first identifying the full magnitude of the problem — wherever it may lie.

Some countries are struggling to host Venezuelan refugees. But for Chile’s Patagonia, they’re lifesavers. 

The first time Luis Vieras Delnardo gazed across Last Hope Sound and saw the icy blue waters ringed by snow-covered mountains, he felt like he was watching a scene unfold from a movie. The then-33-year-old anesthesiologist from Caracas, Venezuela, had applied online for a position at the public hospital in Puerto Natales, a town in Chile’s southernmost region — Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic. He had never heard of the town’s name before, so on a frigid winter day last July, Vieras stepped off a bus to see if he could envision building a life in a blustery coastal town in the Chilean Patagonia.

While international aid has long been thought to reduce migration, the numbers don’t add up.

In March, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it would stop all foreign aid — including hundreds of millions of dollars already promised — to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala until those countries reduced the numbers of migrants fleeing to the United States. He faced flak over the decision: Lawmakers warned that he was just encouraging more migration by making the situation for people in those countries even more desperate.

Trump’s action went against conventional wisdom that foreign aid helps stop migration from poorer countries to richer ones. In June 2015, then U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon explained that the U.K. needed to spend more money on foreign aid “to discourage mass migration so we don’t have to fish people out of the Mediterranean later on.”