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Huddled Masses
Ever since Donald Trump's election, America's southern neighbor has become
a growing destination for migrants—and the country is already buckling
under the strain.
The debate isn’t merely semantic. A change in Mexico’s status would, for
instance, permit the United States to turn away many of the hundreds of
thousands of people who submitted asylum applications in the United States
last year, requiring those who arrived at the southern border to first submit
applications in Mexico instead. It’s a proposal that some U.S. policymakers
say makes sense because, over the past five years, a growing number of
migrants have started to apply for refugee status in Mexico.
What has received less attention, however, is whether Mexico, despite its
emerging status as a destination for other migrants, is truly capable of
receiving them. Once a country of transit, Mexico is already buckling under
the demands of its new reality. Although its government had once styled itself
as a progressive defender of refugees, some immigrants are discovering that
the country isn’t nearly as welcoming to its neighbors in need as its rhetoric
suggests.
“It’s not that Mexico has decided to take more people,” said Irazú Gomez, a
coordinator with the migrant defense organization Sin Fronteras. “People are
arriving regardless, even if there is no political will.” The problem, she said, is
that last year, “the system collapsed.”
It was not until mass migration during the Guatemalan Civil War that the
uglier side of Mexican immigration policy began to publicly emerge. During
the 1980s, an estimated 50,000 migrants settled in camps in the state of
Chiapas. At first, they returned to Guatemala in daylight and then retreated
to Mexico at night, at times having to fend off invasions from the Guatemalan
military. But Mexico was at times two-faced, known to have handed over
alleged guerillas to the Guatemalan authorities.
It was in the face of this wave that Mexico created the Mexican Commission
for Refugee Assistance, abbreviated in Spanish as COMAR, which eventually
helped the government send many of the Guatemalans to live in isolated
border territories in the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. But according
to María Cristina García, the author of Seeking Refuge, the office was soon
hindered. It was placed under the Interior Department “theoretically to better
coordinate assistance to the refugees, but also to control any dissident voices
that challenged official government policy.”
Mexico thus failed to establish a refugee system that could respond to future
crises, such as the civil war that displaced Salvadorans in the 1980s or the
natural disaster that pushed out Hondurans in the 1990s. Its response to these
problems was ultimately ad hoc: It harbored more than half a million
Salvadorans but forced the majority to remain undocumented. For years,
COMAR denied the Guatemalans visas that would allow them to establish
themselves beyond the encampments and then encouraged their return to
their original homes after the war.
When it came to migration policy, Mexico was instead focused on the rate at
which its own people were bleeding out of the country. In the 1990s, the
population of Mexican immigrants living in the United States grew by 5
million. “Mexico’s concern was how to attend to the Mexican immigrant
population in the United States,” said Axel García Carballar, a former
COMAR official. Aiding refugees, on the other hand, “has never been a
national priority.”
In the early part of this century, after Mexico belatedly signed the 1951
Refugee Convention, which is the basis for international refugee protections,
the United Nations turned over official responsibility for adjudicating refugee
cases to the country. García Carballar said that the office came into its new
role in the uproar immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, and it would struggle to
fulfill its responsibilities in the years that followed.
Last year, more than 14,000 people applied for asylum in Mexico. That
represents a drop in the broader ocean of migrants in Mexico, many of whom
are looking to head farther north. But it’s a major increase from only five
years ago, when just over a thousand people applied—the result, perhaps in
part, of Mexican officials’ increased security measures and the Trump
administration’s fiery rhetoric. Both have made some migrants living in
Mexico illegally reconsider continuing north.
The people who end up staying are often those with fewer established family
ties in the United States or those who have a network of earlier immigrants in
Mexico to support them, according to Carlos Cotera, the coordinator in
Tapachula for the Jesuit Refugee Service. Those from nearby countries stand
in immigration lines next to Venezuelans running from economic collapse,
Cubans who faced the end of the United States’ “wet foot, dry foot” policy,
Haitians who had previously settled in Brazil, and
Cameroonians fleeing conflict between their country’s army and rebel groups.
They are all obliged to have patience with a bureaucratic system that has
developed at a snail’s pace. García Carballar remembered being one of only
three interviewers in the office when the COMAR started processing
applications. For years afterward, refugee applications were “treated like an
administrative proceeding, the same as for tourists,” he said. It took another
10 years, until 2011, to develop a national law that granted immigrant rights
such as medical care and education, though the Mexican government never
fully followed through on all its promises.
(In the interim, those who voluntarily applied before being detained by
Mexican authorities are supposed to eventually be given a temporary
humanitarian permit that allows them to legally work.)
“We had cases that had not been resolved in five months, so the earthquake
was just a pretext,” said Alejandra Macías Delgadillo, the director-general of
Asylum Access Mexico. “If we suppose that the COMAR has 30 people, and
you divide 7,000 cases between those 30 people, do you really think you can do
an in-depth study of each case?”
“It’s a test to try to make you not stay in Mexico,” he said, explaining how his
passport had been confiscated and he was held until it was established he had
an open case. “For 18 days, I was in the migration station, and it was a
deplorable situation. It was literally a jail.”
The legal aid organizations that work with Mexico’s asylum-seekers have
often found themselves baffled by the disarray that COMAR is in. Cotera, of
the Jesuit Refugee Service, had a case of a 32-year-old Somali man who, when
he was denied asylum, was told by Mexican authorities he should have
resettled in another part of El Salvador; it was a case of erroneously copying
and pasting the answer that had been given to another person.
Among would-be refugees in Mexico, the denial rate last year was 37 percent,
by far better than the 62 percent in the United States. But those who leave the
country before receiving a decision may nevertheless be making a strategic
decision, according to Leonila Romero González, a coordinator for the
Scalabrinian Mission for Migrants and Refugees shelter in Mexico City. “It’s
expensive for them to stay here, so they think about crossing and then sending
money back [to family members],” she said.
López Obrador has indicated that, after he takes office in December, he would
like to close the gap between Mexico’s generous legal provisions for migrants
and the strained reality. He has already proposed Alejandro Solalinde, a
celebrated priest who created one of the most prominent migrant shelters in
Oaxaca, as the head of the National Human Rights Commission. In a letter he
sent to Trump on July 12, he also suggested that the United States, Mexico,
and Central America all invest in a regional plan to reduce migration: 75
percent of the money would be to increase employment and diminish poverty,
and the remainder would be for border security.
“Every government, from Panama to the Rio Grande, will work to make the
migration of its citizens economically unnecessary and will care for its borders
to avoid the illegal transit of goods, arms, and drugs, which we see as the most
humane and effective way to guarantee peace, tranquility, and security for
our people and nations,” he wrote.
“When I started the process, they told me it would only be three months,” said
Anderson Hernández Miranda, 18, a migrant from Honduras who dealt with
COMAR’s stalled bureaucracy over the course of his first year in the country,
while sleeping in a church-run shelter. “I almost left, but the priest stopped
me and told me I should think about whether my life is important to me.” It
was an acknowledgment that the Mexican government’s provisions for
migrants aren’t good enough—but they are often still, sadly, better than any
alternative.