Forced migration is a global phenomenon with a regional scope and whose intensity, although it varies from time to time, has accelerated at unprecedented rates in the last two decades. In fact, data from the European Union shows that this year, the two most terrible quarters were recorded for people using the so-called “Mediterranean Route”.
Elsewhere, the war caused the displacement of tens of thousands of people, in the most visible case, in Ukraine due to Russian aggression, but also in other countries, such as the case of Ethiopia, where it is estimated that 600,000 people died and more than one million were displaced as a result of the civil war.
In the case of Latin American migration to the United States, the crisis has been going on for years. And in the last five years, cases of extortion, kidnapping, and abuse committed against migrants, mainly Central Americans and others from Haiti and Venezuela, have increased to reach unimaginable levels. at the beginning of this century.
This fact does not necessarily lead to the concealment or invisibility of Mexican migration itself, since arrests of people who migrate irregularly to the United States have also increased significantly in recent months.
Migration in an irregular situation, in a world marked by illicit trafficking, exposes people to many risks: sexual assault, human trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping are some of the most terrible, but also forced recruitment to work for criminal cartels, and in the worst cases, torture, murder, and exhumation of victims in secret graves, as documented by Marcela Turati in her recent text San Fernando, last stop.
Faced with this reality, the institutional response is not only inadequate but, above all, misleading. That is why the position of the Federal Executive is strange, who, in a clear question, answered once again that there is no need to review the country’s immigration policy because, in its view of reality, everything is progressing correctly.
There is nothing worse than that. Transit municipalities, many of which are already destinations for thousands of migrants, are overwhelmed by their capacities. There are no resources to provide them with dignified care: shelter, even if it is temporary, food, access to minimum hygiene and decent rest services, and, above all, appropriate care for children, who, regardless of their immigration status, and their partners, must be protected under the mandates, standards, and protocols derived from the Convention on the Rights of Girls and Boys and from the Mexican Constitution and laws.
On the other hand, migration accelerates and deepens phenomena such as the abandonment and disappearance of entire communities, the abandonment of houses in marginalized urban areas, and the waste, aging, and deterioration of social infrastructure, which spends millions of pesos in the treasury and is not used or completely abandoned. It remains a paradox because, in any case, the resources available and the mechanisms that exist for their distribution and application at the local level are distributed, and there is no national process of leadership that guides social investment towards a new logic of guaranteeing rights and promoting virtuous processes of economic growth and social development.
The historical poverty experienced in Central America and many Latin American countries, but also registered in many regions of our country, is now creating a crisis with a wide wave of violence and an institutional and democratic deterioration in our countries that provokes further reactions committed to the criminalization of immigration processes and whose harmful consequences we see every day.
