Migrants travel in groups through Mexico for safety reasons. But Mexico is still one of the world’s most dangerous countries. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

But group travel couldn’t save everyone.

Earlier this month, two trucks from the caravan disappeared in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. One person who escaped told officials that about “65 children and seven women were sold” by the driver to a group of armed men.

Mexican authorities are searching for the migrants, but history shows that people missing for more than 24 hours are rarely found in Mexico – alive or at all.
 

Mexico’s ambiguous welcome

An average of 12 people disappear each day in Mexico. Most are victims of a raging three-way war among the Mexican armed forces, organized crime and drug cartels.

The military crackdown on criminal activity has actually escalated violence in Mexico since operations began in 2006, my research and other security studies show.

Nearly 22,000 people were murdered in Mexico in the first eight months of this year, a dismal record in one of the world’s deadliest places.

Central Americans fleeing similarly rampant violence back home confront those risks and others on their journey to the United States. Doctors Without Borders found that over two-thirds of migrants surveyed in Mexico in 2014 experienced violence en route. One-third of women had been sexually abused.

Mexico’s security crisis may explain why so few caravan members want to stay there.

In response to President Donald Trump’s demands that Mexico “stop this onslaught,” Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that migrants who applied for asylum at Mexico’s southern border would be given shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs.

About 1,700 of the estimated 5,000 caravan members took him up on the offer.

Meanwhile, everyday Mexicans are greeting the migrants as they pass through their towns, donating food, clothing, lodging and transport.

A recent poll shows that 51 percent of Mexicans support the caravan. Thirty-three percent of respondents, many of them affluent members of Mexico’s urban middle class, want the migrants to go back to Central America.

Two trucks carrying an estimated 80 migrants went missing in Mexico in early November. AP Photo/Marco Ugarte
 

Asylum overload

Mexican law, which allows eligible asylum seekers to both request and be granted asylum, exceeds international standards on the rights of migrants.

But reality in Mexico often falls short of the law.

The Mexican Refugee Assistance Commission is supposed to process asylum applications in 45 days. But its offices in Mexico City were damaged by last year’s earthquake, forcing the already overstretched and underfunded agency to suspend processing of open asylum claims for months.

Meanwhile, new applications for asylum in Mexico continued to pour in – a record 14,596 were filed last year. The processing backlog is now two years.

During that period of legal limbo, asylum seekers cannot work, attend school or fully access Mexico’s public health system. President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, says he will offer Central American migrants temporary working visas while their claims are processed.

Anti-caravan posts on social media accuse migrants of taking Mexican jobs and violating Mexico’s sovereignty, using nativist language similar to that seen in the United States.

Mexico City, which in 2017 declared itself to be a sanctuary city, nonetheless put thousands of caravan members up in a stadium staffed by medical teams and humanitarian groups.
 

Militarizing the US-Mexico border

The first Central Americans from the caravan are now arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they face a far less warm reception.

Calling the caravan an “invasion,” President Trump has ordered the deployment of over 5,000 troops to the border.

U.S. law prohibits the use of the armed forces to enforce domestic laws without specific congressional authorization. That means the troops can only support border agents in deterring migrants.

But Trump’s decision still has symbolic power. This is the first time in over a century that military troops have been summoned to defend the U.S.-Mexico border.

The last deployment occurred during the Mexican Revolution.

On March 9, 1916, a small band of revolutionaries led by Francisco “Pancho” Villa invaded Columbus, New Mexico.

After Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the border – and into Mexican territory. United States Air Force

Officially, the group assaulted the border city in retaliation for then-President Woodrow Wilson’s support of Venustiano Carranza, Villa’s political rival. Villa also had a personal vendetta against Sam Ravel, a local man who had swindled money from him.

President Wilson responded by summoning General John J. Pershing, who assembled a force of 6,000 U.S. troops to chase Villa deep inside Mexico’s northern territory. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” returned in early 1917 after failing to capture the revolutionary leader.
 

No relief at the border

Central Americans who reach the militarized United States border can still apply for asylum there, despite President Trump’s recent executive order limiting where they may do so. But they face stiff odds.

The Central American caravan includes many women asylum seekers hoping to give their children a safer life in the United States. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

After an evaluation process that can take months or years, the majority of Central American asylum claims filed in the United States – 75 percent – are denied. Caravan members rejected will be sent back to the same perilous place they fled last month.

With 60 percent of its population living in poverty, Honduras is the poorest country in Latin America. It also has the world’s second-highest homicide rate – 43.6 murders per 100,000 people – trailing only El Salvador.

The U.S. contributed to the instability that created these hardships.

Honduras has been in turmoil since 2009, when the military overthrew leftist President Manuel Zelaya. Rather than join the United Nations and European Union in demanding Zelaya’s reinstatement, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for new elections, effectively endorsing a coup.

The country entered a prolonged political crisis. Honduras’s November 2017 presidential election was contested, with the U.S.-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández accused of rigging the vote. Seventeen opposition protesters were killed in the unrest that followed.
The Central American caravan that started in Honduras seeks in the U.S. a life free of such violence. Its steady progress toward the border shows that even kidnappings, Trump’s threats and soldiers cannot deter them.

Luis Gómez Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong
 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Roughly 5,000 people, mostly from Central America’s violent and unstable “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are reportedly making their way through Mexico with the intention of claiming asylum at the U.S. border. The so-called “migrant caravan” is attracting intense social and political attention, with U.S. President Donald Trump declaring it a “national emergency.” He has also claimed, erroneously, that the migrants “have to” claim asylum in Mexico first.
 

Naira and her daughter, who are traveling with thousands of other immigrants from Central America, rest in Huixtla, Mexico, on Oct. 22, 2018. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Migrants aren’t obligated to claim asylum in any country, but have a right to seek asylum in a country of their choosing, the right to a fair process in that country, and crucially, a right not to be sent back to a country where they will face persecution – or even death.

I’ve been working with asylum-seekers in Europe and the U.S. since 2008. Over the last decade I have witnessed firsthand the increasing pressure on the asylum system to manage complex situations at borders. The reality is that even if the migrants currently traveling through Mexico are able to claim asylum at the U.S. border – a big if, considering they are still more than 1,000 miles away – the legal path to safety is challenging.

© OpenStreetMap contributors

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND

What has always been a difficult process has been made more difficult by growing governmental and public concern that asylum-seekers are gaming the system or that asylum itself has become a backdoor route for economic migrants.

Pressures like these lead to ever-narrowing legal protections for asylum-seekers.

The asylum system is flawed, and ensuring fair access to genuine protection requires making significant improvements to the broader legal, administrative and social contexts.
 

The legal framework

The international legal framework for asylum is the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which was developed at the end of WWII by the United Nations.

The convention established five categories on which asylum claims can be based: race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

From the beginning, however, these protection categories were political. Much like recent efforts to limit protections for those fleeing domestic or gang violence, these categories have always protected some, but not all persecuted people. For example, the 1951 convention excluded Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and those forced to flee partition of India and Pakistan.

Many of the people displaced or persecuted today also struggle to fit their experiences into the boxes created by the law. For example, despite broad global support for the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, no specific categories exist for gender or sexuality.

The 1951 Convention is not useless – far from it. However, it contributes to a legal environment in which successful asylum-seekers must have rather narrowly defined experiences in order to be protected.
 

The administrative process

Sandra Gutierrez, who fled from gang violence in Honduras with her family and was granted asylum by the United States in 2016, at home in Oakland. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

When a person seeks asylum – not just in the U.S., but in any country that is a party to the refugee convention – they have to prove they have been persecuted because of their race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. What’s more, they have to prove that they cannot live safely in their country of origin. Their proof depends in large part on being able to demonstrate credibility. In other words, they have to share their experiences in such a way that their claim is believed to be true and their fear of persecution is found to be genuine.

This process is made more challenging by suspicions that asylum-seekers are abusing the system. For example, in January 2018, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages the administrative process, changed their policy regarding interviews so that those who have claimed asylum more recently are interviewed first.

The assumption by USCIS is that newer applications are more likely to be fraudulent and quicker interviews will deter people from “using asylum backlogs solely to obtain employment authorization by filing frivolous, fraudulent or otherwise non-meritorious asylum applications.”

In the meantime, those who have been waiting years to be interviewed will wait even longer. In January 2018 more than 300,000 people were waiting. USCIS used to publish a bulletin of wait times, but discontinued it when the interviewing policy changed in January. The last published bulletin showed that, for example, people in Miami were waiting nearly four and a half years to be interviewed.

In addition to confronting suspicion that they are abusing the system, asylum-seekers face a lack of legal support for making claims, and the reality that decision-makers have a great deal of discretion in deciding their fate.

No legal representation is automatically provided for asylum-seekers. Many manage the entire process, including going before an immigration judge, entirely on their own. Unsurprisingly, those who do have an attorney are five times more likely to be granted asylum.

Research also regularly shows that the chances of being granted asylum vary considerably depending on the applicant’s nationality and the location within the U.S. where they seek asylum. In 2017, almost 90 percent of claims from Mexicans were denied, compared to only 20 percent of Chinese cases. All three Northern Triangle countries – El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – are in the top five most frequently denied, with more than 75 percent of claims being refused. Similarly, a case is more likely to be granted in New York or San Francisco than in those courts closer to the border in Texas or Arizona.
 

The social context

Lastly, asylum has in many ways become an outlet for broader social anxieties about borders, security, terrorism, economic inequality and multiculturalism. Research shows us that migrants and refugees are in fact not more likely to commit crime than citizens. Nor are they likely to be terrorists. In fact, they contribute to local economies in positive ways. But until these social attitudes and assumptions change, the prospect of there being sufficient political will to create workable legal solutions will likely remain low.

The legal and administrative frameworks can only really be addressed once adequate social and political will exists to make the kinds of changes that would support a just and humane asylum system.

Abigail Stepnitz, PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley
 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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