Re: UN, which USA pays, HAS AN AGENCY FOR INCREASING ILLEGAL MIGRATION
Date: January 09, 2020 07:05PM
Some of the caravans of more than 13,000 migrants are waiting in camps in Tijuana, and others are making their way to the border. A new migrant caravan has already been announced, but the Mexican government is adhering to the United States’ mandates like a servile army as they punish the migrants and treat them as criminals with detentions and deportations.
The National Institute of Migration (INM) of Mexico executes this policy in part through detention centers. 59 Mexican detention centers operate throughout the country, located principally in the states of Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca, where migrants are denied basic rights such as access to communication. Case information is limited and legal defense representation is not offered. There are isolation rooms and “punishment rooms” where migration agents resort to threats.
This disregard for human rights was evident in the first images of the migrant caravan in Mexico. The world watched as the Mexican government brutally repressed the asylum seekers at the Mexican border on October 19. Hundreds of Central American migrants who had entered the country were tear gassed, and some were sent to detention centers to be deported.
Central American migration to Mexico rose dramatically from the mid-1990s through 2005, when between 390,000 and 500,000 migrants reached the country. According to Mexico’s Migration Statistics, provided by the Ministry of the Interior, from 2006 to 2009, there was a pronounced drop of about 70 percent. By 2012, there was a rebound in the flow of migrants by at least 40 percent.
From 2009 to 2014, the population from the Northern Triangle region, which includes Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, constituted 91 percent to 93 percent of all the people detained by Mexico’s migration authorities. In 2014 the Mexican government stepped up deportations after the increased arrival of “unaccompanied minors” and families coming from Central America. These migrants, primarily on their way to the U.S., were detained and deported in Mexico at the behest of the U.S. government. In 2015, 165,524 Central Americans were detained and deported from Mexico, while 75,342 were reported from the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).
The current Central American exodus is also part of an unprecedented phenomenon, not only in Mexico but in recent history, in which millions of workers are migrating to the principal imperialist countries. According to the 2017 International Report on Migrations from the United Nations, the number of migrants has increased by 49 percent since 2013, reaching 258 million worldwide. In imperialist countries, a renewed xenophobic right has emerged, embodied by Donald Trump in the U.S.
The migrant caravan, which defies the immigration policies of Donald Trump, is an expression of the years of pillage, exploitation and capitalist policy that have been imposed by the White House on Central America through international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
If capitalism sees in the migrant an inexhaustible source of exploitation for its profits, the working people must overcome whatever “difference” is imposed on them by the capitalist class. The imprint of capitalism on migration is clear in the exodus in Mexico; it appears in the economic crisis imposed on the Venezuelan people who flee to Brazil, where Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric is almost manifested in Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to government; it is also the political and social crisis in Nicaragua, which causes thousands to flee to Costa Rica as a result of Daniel Ortega’s repressive policies.
The phrase “no human being is illegal” has to materialize in a powerful social alliance promoting solidarity across sectors of the working class, since those who migrate are workers, poor peasants and their families, small merchants displaced by capitalist voracity and plunder. They are brothers and sisters of the working class, of indigenous communities.
They are women and young people who, as in Mexico, face displacement in rural areas due to drug trafficking crime and mega-development and transnational corporations, due as well to the consequences of the “war on drugs” and militarization. In this alliance, the working class of Mexico and the United States must play a fundamental role, making the demands of the migrants their own and struggling to achieve them, through a perspective of worker and popular unity beyond the walls that the bourgeoisie puts up.
While the Mexican state and parties at the business owners’ service show their class character by denying migrants dignified conditions in their passage through Mexico, international worker solidarity must manifest itself on both sides of the border with active encouragement from social groups, unions and human rights organizations in order to demonstrate active support for Central American migrants and avert any repressive measures on the part of the Mexican state and the racist and xenophobic government of Donald Trump. The demands “full political and social rights for all” and “no human being is illegal” must abound from both sides of the border.