MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s top diplomat for North America is calling on the U.S. to do “a better job” of managing rising immigration by, in part, creating more legal pathways into the U.S. for migrants who otherwise face an increasingly perilous journey at the hands of organized crime.
The number of migrants caught by U.S. Border Patrol hit a high of nearly 1.7 million in the last fiscal year — compared to about 400,000 the previous year when the pandemic started. In January, Border Patrol apprehensions nearly doubled to 147,000 from about 75,000 in the previous year.
Authorities in the U.S. and Mexico are bracing for an even greater influx as the weather gets warmer and the coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt Latin American economies, sending people on the move in search of work and stability. In Mexico, with cartel-related violence sweeping across much of the country, a new wave of migration to the U.S. has quickly been growing.
“We need to do better to understand, not just as governments, but as societies, the realities that human smugglers, human traffickers, put people at greater risk,” said Roberto Velasco, chief officer for the North America Unit at the Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. “So, of course we need to create the legal pathways and the right incentives. We need to reject, prosecute and sanction people who put migrants at peril.”
Velasco was referring to tragic recent incidents such as when more than 50 migrants squeezed into a truck were killed in Chiapas when it flipped over, and the plight of at least 13 Mexican migrants who disappeared last September in the northern state of Chihuahua as they headed for jobs in Texas and beyond. A search for their whereabouts is ongoing, although key U.S. and Mexican sources have told The Dallas Morning News and Marfa Public Radio they believe the migrants were killed by warring cartels.
“Look it’s a sad reality that migrants sometimes end up in very dangerous situations, not just because of human smugglers and traffickers, but also because we face a great challenge with security in Mexico,” Velasco said. “This is something that the security and judicial authorities in Mexico really need to solve and to find what happened with this particular group of people.”
Veteran security and immigration experts are concerned that the violence is partly a result of restrictive U.S. immigration policies that have left tens of thousands of migrants in limbo along the border, where they can easily fall prey to criminal groups.
At the White House, spokesman Vedant Patel said in a statement: “We all agree that our immigration system is outdated and in bad need of reform, but making the necessary changes isn’t going to happen overnight. The administration remains committed to working day in and day out to provide relief to immigrants and bring our immigration system into the 21st century.”
In the first four months of this fiscal year, through January, there have been about 644,000 Border Patrol “encounters,” a term federal officials now prefer.
The pace of migrant crossings in 2022 could exceed record levels of 2021, just as Mexican officials warn. But many of the migrants are repeat crossers. Since March 2020, the U.S. has relied on a pandemic-related public health order known as Title 42 to quickly expel hundreds of thousands of migrants who cross the border. That distorts the numbers because migrants quickly turned away after being caught often try again and again to cross, and every time they are again caught crossing, it counts as an encounter.
Title 42 has been used more than 1.5 million times since its start.
Many immigration advocates criticize Title 42 for depriving people of their rights to due process because those turned away are not allowed access to the immigration courts where many would make cases for asylum.
The U.S. government has no immediate plans to discontinue use of Title 42, even though the borders have been reopened for other traffic as the pandemic’s severity starts to wane.
“The current reassessment examined the present impact of the pandemic throughout the United States and at the U.S. borders, taking special note of the surge in cases and hospitalizations since December due to the highly transmissible omicron variant,” said Nick Spinelli, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The CDC continues to emphasize the need for testing, vaccination, and other mitigation measures at border facilities beyond the use of the order.”
About half of immigrants caught this fiscal year were expelled under Title 42, down from about 63% in 2021, according to federal statistics. While Title 42 distorts the actual number of individual migrants caught crossing into the U.S., overall crossings continue to rise. In January, though, numbers were 25,000 lower than in December, and some immigration experts note that the pandemic disrupted the seasonal patterns of the past.
Migrants have long come north from all parts of Latin America, with, in recent years, heavy influxes of people from Venezuela, Haiti and now Mexico. But a rising number of arrivals at the border also includes migrants from Nicaragua, Ukraine and Russia.
Moscow has direct nonstop flights from Moscow to Cancun and Cancun to Mexican border cities like Tijuana and even Ciudad Juarez, say Mexican officials. Many of the Russians are members of the persecuted Tatar ethnic group. Velasco confirmed the arrival of Russians and Ukrainian and added that the Mexican government is also seeing migrants from Uzbekistan.
The Rio Grande Valley continues to be the top migratory entry point into the U.S. with more than a quarter of migrants caught there this fiscal year. But Del Rio, about at the midpoint of the Texas-Mexico border, has seen one of the largest increases, with nearly one out of five border encounters along the U.S. border occurring there in recent months.
Del Rio, a border city with a population of 36,000, was the scene this summer of swelling arrivals of Haitians, most of whom previously left Haiti to live in Chile and Brazil before economic distress sent them northward.
Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez said he expects the number of migrants crossing the border to again increase as the weather turns warmer in the coming weeks.
“Once Spring rolls around -- and we better brace for this -- things will pick up again,” he said, expecting more Haitians and Venezuelans fleeing economic distress. “We will soon be reliving last year again.”
He also expects the continued arrival of migrants from countries such as Nicaragua, which is facing political uncertainty, and Mexico, where insecurity caused by organized crime has led thousands more to flee.
Mexico has in recent years offered to allow many more migrants headed to the U.S. to resettle in Mexico, and has used its own federal soldiers to stem the flow of migrants across its own borders as they head north from Central America. The government also co-operated with the U.S. to support a policy requiring migrants to wait in often-dangerous Mexican border cities for their U.S. immigration court dates.
The Mexican government is now signaling that the U.S. has more to do to help. Mexico wants to see the U.S. create more legal paths for people to work in the 50 states, as well as invest more in Central America, to help alleviate the flow of migrants.
The administration of Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has long pressed the Biden administration to take a “holistic” approach to migration by providing more economic development to regions like Central America, or “the main countries of origin where migrants come from,” Velasco explained.
Some of that is already happening: Last December, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that her Call to Action program, which brings together business, public and civic organizations, had raised more than $1.2 billion for new investment in Central America. Mexico applauds the effort, but says more is needed.
Ironically, the current spike in migration comes amid a growing labor shortage in the U.S.: America needs more workers.
Millions of people, including undocumented and legal immigrants and older workers, have recently exited the labor force. There are about two million working-age immigrants gone from the U.S. because of the pandemic restrictions, said Giovanni Peri, a labor economist who directs the Global Migration Project at the University of California, Davis.
Half of those lost immigrants would have been college-educated immigrants, Peri said. That loss will lower U.S. economic growth, he said in a recent report.
Velasco said the labor shortage and lack of “legal pathways for migration” is what drives the rise of migration, particularly as people flee pandemic-ravaged economies to look for opportunities.
“We obviously need to have rules,” Velasco said. “No country can handle a sudden and massive flow of people because obviously that puts a lot of pressure on governments, on society and creates a lot of anxiety. But human mobility will be constant because people will always seek ways to improve their situation.”
Creating more legal paths for temporary workers could alleviate unauthorized crossings at the border.
Velasco said as the Biden administration enters its second year, it needs to grant “even more temporary work visas” for Central Americans and Mexicans to help supply demand for labor in North America. “We need to strengthen and accelerate efforts for development,” he added.
For example, the U.S. provided about 265,000 H2-A visas for agriculture work last calendar year, compared to 217,000 in 2020, for example, according to the Migration Policy Institute. About 95,000 H1-B visas, which often go to those in technology jobs, were granted in 2021, compared to 56,000 in 2020.
But those kinds of numbers don’t put a dent into the almost 11 million unfilled jobs in the U.S., according to the most recent government data.
Velasco noted that Mexico is home to the largest U.S. population outside of the United States.
Mexico’s challenge, he said, is to find the right balance between being a country of “origin to transit and increasingly a destination place.”
“I’m trying to be very careful to not characterize migration as a problem,” he added. “We’re not trying to solve a problem. We’re trying to manage something that is going to happen and that has always happened in a way that works better for everyone.”
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Dallas Morning News staff writers Alfredo Corchado reported from Mexico City and Dianne Solis from Dallas.
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