Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries,
Turns Into a Mass Exodus
By Montes, Dube & Vyas, 9/22/21, Wall St. Journal

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico—The gathering of thousands of Haitians
at the Texas-Mexico border this past week reflects a stark
change in migration patterns to the U.S., driven by Covid-19.

A far broader mix of nationalities is turning up at the
border than in the past. For decades, most crossers were
Mexican men and, in recent years, families from the troubled
Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and
El Salvador, known as the Northern Triangle.

Suddenly Ecuadoreans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans,
Haitians and Cubans are turning up by the hundreds of
thousands, a trend that accelerated sharply in the
past six months.

From Oct 2020 thru Aug, nearly 300,000 migrants from
countries other than Mexico & the Northern Triangle were
encountered at the border, 1/5 of all crossings. For all
of fiscal 2020, when the pandemic slowed the flow of
migrants, the figure was nearly 44,000, or 11% of crossings.
In fiscal 2019, it was 77,000, or 9% of crossings; & the
year before it was only 21,000, or 5%. As recently as
2007 such migrants represented less than 1%.

Among the fastest-growing groups are Haitians. From Oct
of last year thru this Aug, about 28,000 Haitians were
arrested trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. That is
6 times the 4,400 arrested during the entire 2020 fiscal
year that ended last Sept.

The broad wave includes single mothers from Ecuador,
Nicaraguan teens & farm laborers in Chile. Many cite the
same reasons for uprooting their lives & heading north:
economic hits from the pandemic that cost jobs & income,
the allure of a booming U.S. economy & the belief that
Biden’s administration would welcome them.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before,” said
Austin Skero, who retired this summer as chief patrol agent
for the U.S. Border Patrol in the agency’s Del Rio Sector
in South Texas. “All of these folks who are kind of
surging in Del Rio proper, groups of 150, 100. It’s a mix
of Haitians & Cubans, or Venezuelans & Cubans.”

In July & August, migrants from other countries in Latin
America & the Caribbean as a group outpaced those from
either Mexico or individual countries from the Northern
Triangle for the first time.

The influx poses a challenge for the Biden administration.
Encounters of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are near
a 20-year high. Border apprehensions are expected to reach
about 1.7 million this year, twice the number from 2019.
It's unknown how many cross undetected.

The admin this week sent hundreds of Customs and Border
Protection agents to stabilize the border & try to keep
more migrants from entering. It began deporting Haitians
at the border in flights back to their home country.

Many of those apprehended are currently being sent back
across the border under a public health authority known as
Title 42 that both the Trump & Biden admins have argued
allows the U.S., during a public health emergency, to deny
migrants’ rights to request asylum. Some, usually with
small children, are allowed to enter and ask for asylum,
adding to an already-overwhelmed asylum system.

More than 9 in 10 of the migrants from other countries
come from just 6 Latin American nations: Ecuador, Brazil,
Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua & Venezuela.

Struggling to put food on the table after the pandemic
closed her small coffee business, Mayra Aguilar sold her
car & left her home in Ecuador’s southern Andes last month,
hoping for a better life in the United States.

Aguilar & her 4-yr-old son crossed the Rio Grande & turned
themselves over to the U.S. Border Patrol, believing they
would be welcomed after her smuggler said the border was
open for migrants. Instead, they were apprehended & sent
back to Mexico, leaving the single mom broke & depressed,
living in a shelter in this violent border city filled
with other migrants.

“I was cheated. I thought I'd be able to stay in the U.S.,
but it was a total lie,” said Aguilar.

The number of Ecuadorean migrants encountered by U.S.
border officials since last Oct hit 88,342 thru Aug,
compared with 13,000 in the 2019 fiscal year and just
1,495 in 2018.

Latin America & the Caribbean as a whole suffered the
world’s steepest economic contraction last year, & the
region’s biggest decline since the Great Depression, acc.
to the IMF. The pandemic cost some 26 million jobs.

“After the pandemic, what we're now seeing is like a
pressure cooker in which the valve has exploded,” said
Enrique Vidal, coordinator of Fray Matías de Córdoba
Human Rights Center, a pro-migrant nonprofit in Mexico.
“It’s a humanitarian drama.”

Even when the pandemic recedes, the new migration patterns
will likely persist. Immigrants to the U.S. often create
a network of pathways that spur new migrants to head north,
as those who succeed provide advice to family & friends,
causing word to spread, immigration experts say.

Sidmar Pereira, a 34-year-old Brazilian, hopes to reach
Massachusetts & join his cousin, who settled there with
his entire family. Last month, Pereira flew with his wife
& 3 kids from Sao Paulo to Mexico City & then traveled to
Ciudad Juarez. He’s now waiting with his family in a shelter
for the U.S. to resume processing asylum requests at the
international bridge, which was suspended during the pandemic.

He says he'd like to work in one project tied to Biden’s
proposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan. “They don’t have
enough workers,” he said of U.S. companies, “& we're doing
nothing here in Mexico.”

Other migrants are fleeing political repression as
crackdowns intensify in Cuba, Venezuela & Nicaragua, Latin
America’s 3 authoritarian regimes. Some 37,000 Venezuelans
were arrested at the border up to August, compared with
2,200 in all of 2019 and just 62 in 2018. Apprehensions of
Cubans jumped to 33,000, compared with 11,600 in 2019.

About 42,500 Nicaraguans, who traditionally migrated to
neighboring Costa Rica, were apprehended, more than
tripling arrests for the whole of 2019 and surpassing
migration from Salvadorans for the first time in July.

“In Nicaragua, our fate is prison or death,” said Cristhian
Espinosa, a 19-year-old Nicaraguan who hoped to get asylum
in the U.S. after saying he received death threats from a
pro-government paramilitary group. “We need help.”

At the start of pandemic, experts expected more migration
from poor countries hit by rising poverty & hunger. The
outflow was initially stemmed because of closed borders &
strict lockdowns. The downturn in the U.S. economy also
curtailed interest in traveling north.

But with borders opening back up & lockdowns lifted,
migrants are on the move, attracted to an improving U.S.
economy. Desperate for a better life, they are being
encouraged by coyotes—or human smugglers—who are operating
in more countries around the region, said Blanca Navarrete,
the director of a pro-migrant nonprofit in Ciudad Juárez.

“They often mislead vulnerable people, telling them that
the U.S. border is open, when it is not,” she said.

At a Methodist migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, across
the border from El Paso, Father Juan Fierro, says he’s
seeing growing numbers of migrants from much further
south than ever before.

“This shelter is increasingly looking like a tower of
Babel,” said Fierro, a folksy, mustached man. “You have
people coming from more countries than in the past, people
with different cultures and different languages.”

While thousands of Haitian & other migrants have already
turned up at the U.S. border, there are tens of thousands
still on their way, overwhelming border crossings in
Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.

In Panama, Haitian migration drove a record 70,000
undocumented migrants from Jan thru Aug, more than the
previous 3 years combined, acc. to govt figures.

“We can’t answer why a citizen of Haiti living in these
countries would decide to sell all his belongings & start
such a dangerous trek north with no documents, but this
is what’s happening,” said Samira Gozaine, the chief of
Panama’s migration agency.

Some of the Haitian migrants who turned up in the U.S.
recently fled the country after President Moïse ’s assass-
ination in July, which has put the country on the brink
of anarchy. Earlier this month, the U.S. Coast Guard
intercepted a boat with over 100 Haitian migrants on board
some 18 miles off the coast of Miami’s Biscayne Bay.

But the overwhelming majority in Del Rio had left Haiti
in the years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that
killed some 200,000 people, moving to South American
countries like Chile & Brazil that had lenient immigration
rules. At the time, economists described it as a new wave
of immigration from one developing country to another.

Many of those migrants had been living near the bottom
rung of the economy, selling food or footwear at street
markets. That has made them particularly vulnerable to
the economic shock caused by the pandemic.

Chile, one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations, also
tightened immigration requirements after receiving hundreds
of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans in
recent years.

Earlier this year, Yanisleidys Diaz began her trek to the
U.S. after she was told she had to leave Chile in 180 days.
The 39-year-old single mother from Cuba arrived in Chile
in 2019 with her two sons, seeking informal work because
they lacked a work permit. Her oldest boy, 17-year-old
Leodan Riveros, worked construction and as a fruit picker
at a farm, earning less than minimum wage.

They struggled to make ends meet even before the pandemic.
Then Diaz said she was notified by the govt that they
could no longer stay without residency. They sold their
furniture & clothes to pay for 5 bus rides to cross Peru,
Ecuador & Colombia.

Like many other migrants, they tried to exit South America
thru the Darien Gap, one of the thickest tropical rain-
forests on the planet, which straddles the border between
Colombia & Panama. No road passes thru the jungle, which is
rife with venomous snakes and armed gangs.

Once in the Darien Gap, a gang of 8 men attacked them,
holding a knife to Diaz’s 11-year-old son as they rummaged
thru their backpacks for food & money. Now stranded in
Panama, Diaz said she doesn’t know how they'll reach the U.S.
“We’re just humans who are looking for a chance,” she said.

Stevens Saintime’s sister perished in the Darien Gap.
Saintime, a 33-year-old from Haiti, left his impoverished
country 4 years ago & with a brother settled in Santiago,
Chile, working illegally for a scrap metal collector. Their
sister, Jenny, found a job as a cleaner in Brazil’s capital.

Work slowed significantly during the pandemic, making it
difficult for Saintime to pay rent. He said he couldn’t
afford a lawyer to help him obtain residency papers in Chile.

Saintime & his sister decided to embark on a 5,000-mile
journey to the U.S., seeing it as their last hope for a
stable life. The siblings met in Peru in early Aug & took
a bus north thru Ecuador & Colombia before arriving at the
Darien Gap. They crossed the jungle with 15 other Haitians.

Armed men attacked the migrants, stealing the $200 that
Saintime was carrying as well as his clothes, leaving him
only with the shorts & the Chicago Bulls basketball jersey
he was wearing.

Tired & dehydrated, the group of Haitians separated. Saintime
said he walked ahead to see if he could round up food for
his sister, who was getting dizzy & falling behind. Later,
at a migrant camp in Panama, a travel companion told him
that Jenny fainted & stopped breathing. She had to be left
behind, the companion said.

“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my dad that my sister
is dead,” said Saintime, sitting in an indigenous hamlet
in Panama. He planned to continue his journey.

Under pressure from the U.S., Mexico reinstated this month
a visa requirement for Ecuadoreans, who had been able to
fly in as tourists & then head to the U.S. border. In the
first 7 months of this year, 7 out of 10 Ecuadoreans who
arrived as tourists in Mexico didn’t return home, acc. to
Mexico’s govt. Mexico is also considering a visa for
Brazilians, a Mexican official said.

Meanwhile, Ecuador announced in May that Haitians would
need visas for entry. In February, Peruvian authorities
stopped at least 300 Haitians trying to enter the country
by crossing a bridge from neighboring Brazil.

“They arrive here almost every day,” said Quedinei Barreto,
an official in the Brazilian border town of Assis Brasil.

Makendy Timouche, a 27-year-old Haitian who also comes from
Chile, did make it to the city of Tapachula, one of the
last stops in southern Mexico in the long trek towards the
U.S. In recent months, Haitians have often outnumbered
Mexicans in Tapachula’s main plaza.

Timouche is awaiting refugee status in Mexico which, he hopes,
would allow him to get to the U.S. border quickly & safely.
He rents a room with 5 other Haitians in a poor neighborhood.
A couple & their child sleep on a mattress, while Timouche
& two others sleep in sleeping bags.

He spends his days recalling the suffering during the
journey north and thinking of his 7-year-old son, who is
in Haiti. He hasn’t seen the boy in 4 years.

“I dream that we reunite in the U.S.,” Timouche said.
“I dream about a normal life together.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/latin-american-migration-once-limited-to-a-few-countries-turns-into-a-mass-exodus-11632323297

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