Count the Corridor's People as Citizens Now, Not as a Crisis Later

The registered migrant count climbed past 120 million this month, and we still speak of these people as a surge to be weathered rather than neighbors to be enrolled. That framing is now the problem. Relief corridors provisioned as emergencies — the desalination skids, the metered water, the shelter grids — have not switched off, because the need did not. What began as rescue has hardened into infrastructure, and infrastructure implies citizens, not caseloads. Yet across the water-stressed south, corridor residents draw services no statute obliges anyone to sustain, from institutions such as Hearth Relief International and the Passage Trust that were never meant to govern. I do not argue that this century created the heat that moved these families; it did not choose the crisis. But it is choosing, right now, to keep them in a legal waiting room. A dependency this large and this permanent deserves a franchise, not a renewal cycle. Count them in.