Global Migration Coursing Through Mexico

By Michael Flynn

President Bush’s “comprehensive strategy” on border security aimed at preventing “people from coming here in the first place,” announced last month, does nothing to address the growing phenomenon of global migration. What’s more, it leaves Mexico to clean up a mess it didn’t make.

According to the UN’s Global Commission on International Migration, the number of people worldwide living outside their country of birth has doubled in the past 25 years, rising to more than 200 million people—or about one in every 30 people on the planet. Most of these are “irregular migrants,” people who migrate without proper documents or visas. According to the commission, these numbers will inexorably grow because of the impact of globalization and growing disparities in development between rich and poor countries.

One aspect of this exodus is “transmigration.” People who leave their own poor countries typically don’t do so just to end up far from home in another poor country that has even less to offer them. In the Western Hemisphere, Mexico is the most prominent gateway country.

Caught between wealthy countries to the north and poor countries to the south, gateway countries shoulder a burden not of their making. Images of Mexicans trying illegally to migrate into the United States tend to obscure the transmigration burden confronting our southern neighbor.

Transmigration often has ugly consequences, as the world recently witnessed in Morocco, which serves as a gateway for desperate sub-Saharan Africans hoping to make it to Europe. Finding itself with thousands of unwanted migrants who had hoped to cross into the Spanish colonies of Ceuta and Melilla, Morocco unceremoniously dumped large groups of these unsuccessful transmigrants in the desert outside its border. The situation confronting Mexico is not dissimilar.

In one case in 2002, Mexican authorities deported a large group of Indian migrants, who had languished in the Mexico City detention center for months, to Guatemala, where they spent another six months cooped up in a detention center funded by the U.S. government. After one of the Indian migrants committed suicide, a Guatemalan judge ordered the others released. All of them eventually transmigrated successfully through Mexico into the United States.

This case highlights a particularly vexing problem posed by transmigration—what happens to migrants when no one recognizes their citizenship? Before deporting the Indians to Guatemala, Mexico had unsuccessfully tried to establish their citizenship through the Indian Embassy. But an official at the Indian Embassy said that India “never recognizes” the citizenship of its undocumented migrants. Unable to return the migrants to India, authorities sent them “back” to Guatemala, arguing that the migrants had illegally entered Mexico through Central America.

Mexico has ceased this particular deportation practice, but the situation of many undocumented migrants in Mexico remains precarious. Corruption in the ranks of the National Migration Institute (INM), terrible conditions in many detention centers, bribes paid to police by migrants, and the terrifying experiences of migrants who turn to unscrupulous “coyotes” or migrant smugglers to avoid military roadblocks in the south and U.S. border patrols in the north characterize the migratory phenomenon in Mexico.

Making matters worse, many migrants crossing the southern Mexican border hop on freight trains heading north to avoid detection. According to Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH), as of October 2005, some 1,500 migrants had sustained serious injuries from falling off the trains this year, nearly a hundred of whom have had to have limbs amputated. In some cases, migrants have claimed that police threw people off moving trains, purposely injuring them to prevent flight.

Commenting on some of these problems in an interview last December, CNDH’s director Jose Luis Soberanes remarked that “morally we cannot demand of the United States that they recognize the dignity and rights of our people if we are not willing to offer the same to migrants passing though our territory.”

To its credit, Mexico has undertaken a number of steps recently to improve the treatment of undocumented migrants, firing dozens of officials accused of corruption or of mistreating migrants. In April 2005, Mexico became the second country in Latin America to ratify a protocol to the UN Torture Treaty that obliges member states to set up national monitoring mechanisms in places of detention.

The INM, which manages 52 migrant detention centers scattered across Mexico, has closed several facilities considered deficient. To relieve overcrowding in detention centers in the south, Mexico is constructing in the Chiapas border town of Tapachula what it touts as the largest migrant detention center in the Americas.

Also, because of the complications posed by extra-regional migrants, Mexico invited the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, a member-based inter-governmental group devoted to managing global migration crises, to open an office in Mexico City this year. Among its activities, the IOM assists the “voluntary return” of extra-regionals and trains migration officials on how to deal with migrant trafficking cases, focusing primarily on assisting the victims of human smuggling.

While the treatment of detained migrants is improving by some accounts, including a new report by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, many rights advocates in Mexico, including CNDH, charge that conditions in detention facilities “openly violated the dignity and the rights of the people detained in them.”

Another concern is that the Mexican government has begun limiting the access of nongovernmental groups like Sin Fronteras, which for years has been allowed to interview detainees held in the Mexico City facility. According to Karina Arias, a director of the group, in 2004 the INM began denying the organization access to the men’s section. And then, in the past few months, Sin Fronteras was told its representatives could no longer visit women or children. “Most of us who work here at Sin Fronteras are women,” said Arias. “And they tell us that they won’t let us enter because there is a risk to our security.”

Pressure from United States

For their part, Mexican officials argue that the United States is failing to do its share. Topping their list of complaints is what they say is the double-talk of the Bush administration. When the number of Central Americans entering the United States by way of Mexico shot up dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. officials began applying pressure on their Mexican counterparts to do something about it, but to little avail. During President George W. Bush’s first term, administration officials promised Mexico a quid pro quo—if the Mexicans would shut down the migrant route through their country, the United States would improve the status of undocumented Mexicans.

This promise remains unfulfilled. And if it has been all but forgotten in Washington, it has turned into a political lightning rod in Mexico. Responding to a law signed by President Bush in May tightening immigration controls, Santiago Creel, a presidential candidate and former interior minister in the administration of President Vicente Fox, said that Mexico had received “absolutely nothing” in return for stemming migration from other countries.

Advocates also argue that many of Mexico’s problems stem from U.S. policies. If the United States didn’t give so much work to “illegal” immigrants, goes the argument, then Mexico wouldn’t be flooded with migrants from across the globe. Says Father Vladimiro Valdez, a Jesuit priest in Mexico City who runs a migrants’ rights program: “The politics of closing borders is a lie. The fact is, the United States needs illegal workers, and it needs them to remain illegal because then they can continue to keep their wages low.”

While the promise of jobs in the United States gives hope to impoverished people across the globe, say critics like Father Valdez, the politics of free trade have done little to improve the situation of the poor. Some critics claim that NAFTA has become a tool used by the United States to drive poor farmers off the land, thereby producing a steady stream of cheap labor for U.S. agribusiness.

Regardless of whether one agrees with this assessment, it seems clear that one of NAFTA’s key selling points—that it would create enough opportunities to stem migration flows—has proven woefully off the mark. Since the agreement went into effect in 1994, undocumented migration from Mexico to the United States has nearly tripled, from an annual average of 277,000 during the 1990-1995 period to a projected 750,000 this year.

Instead of recognizing the root causes of global migration—including, above all, poverty and disillusionment with prospects at home—the Bush administration is pushing two contradictory polices that will likely exacerbate the problem facing Mexico: hardening borders against migrants while pushing free trade agreements throughout the Americas that could contribute to the exodus of people from the south.

Uncomfortable Reality

According to CNDH, Mexico will have detained more than 200,000 undocumented migrants by year’s end, in line with the highest total ever. These numbers could grow, if past experience is any sign. In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch struck Central America, Mexico was inundated with homeless Hondurans who had abandoned their country and headed north. Mexico’s response was criticized at the time as excessively harsh. This year Central America was again hit by a series of destructive hurricanes and tropical storms, leaving thousands without homes. Many of these people will likely head north if their lot doesn’t improve.

Although most of the undocumented migrants detained in Mexico are from Central America, an increasing number are so-called extra-regionals—people who come from as far away as Eritrea, India, China, Brazil, Iraq, and Ecuador. At the overcrowded migrant detention center in Mexico City, there were 60 countries—about a third of the world’s nations—represented among the 630 migrants held there last April.

These numbers also point to an uncomfortable reality for the United States, one that the country is only slowly waking up to—that its southern border is no longer just a border with Mexico; it is a global frontier separating an idealized north from an increasingly impoverished south.

Michael Flynn is a freelance writer based in Geneva, Switzerland, and a contributor to the IRC Americas Program, online atamericas.irc-online.org. Research for this article was made possible in part by a grant from the Washington, DC-based Fund for Investigative Journalism.

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3002