The prevailing narrative is that there’s a new crisis taking place at our borders. But the recent arrival of children seeking safety at our borders is neither new nor unexpected. The arrival of migrants, and our inability to quickly welcome and process them, traces back decades, to immigration laws and policies rooted in criminalization rather than welcoming, and to foreign policy that has failed to address root causes of migration in many of the countries from which people flee. Children, families, and adults arriving at the border today are also directly connected to the policies of the last four years, during which thousands of families were separated and then deported, hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers were forced into homelessness along the Mexico side of the U.S. border, and roughly fifty thousand children who sought protection at our border were turned away without a question asked. The crisis is not the act of migration—it’s how we respond.