Refugees Head West to Bypass Fortress — Refugees Deeply

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  • Africans Face Dead End After Death-Defying Odyssey to U.S.

    The number of Africans crossing the Americas to seek refuge in the U.S. grew tenfold last year. Now survivors of that long, expensive and dangerous journey face shrinking prospects of reaching the U.S. and more hardships in Mexico amid Trump’s immigration crackdown.

    In the Mexican border town of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, a 27-year-old Somali man made inquiries at a grotty inn called the Imperial Hotel. He had arrived in Mexico a day earlier.

    Nadir C. fled Somalia several years ago after falling in love with a woman from a rival tribe. Pursued by her family, he escaped to Kenya, before traveling on to Uganda and South Sudan.


    https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/03/02/africans-face-dead-end-after-death-defying-odyssey-to-u-s
    #parcours_migratoires #migrants_africains #asile #migrations #réfugiés #itinéraires_migratoires #Mexique #USA #Etats-Unis #migrerrance
    cc @reka

    • The New Coyote Trail : Refugees Head West to Bypass Fortress Europe

      Europe’s closing borders and the death toll in the Mediterranean are forcing asylum seekers to look further afield. An investigation into the migration routes out of Latin America into the U.S. and Canada finds Africans, Afghans and Iraqis enduring great risks.

      https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/12/19/the-new-coyote-trail-refugees-head-west-to-bypass-fortress-europe
      #réfugiés_afghans #réfugiés_irakiens #Canada #Equateur

    • More Migrants From Far-Flung Lands Crossing US-Mexico Border

      The young man traversed Andean mountains, plains and cities in buses, took a harrowing boat ride in which five fellow migrants drowned, walked through thick jungle for days, and finally reached the U.S.-Mexico border.

      Then Abdoulaye Camara, from the poor West African country of Mauritania, asked U.S. officials for asylum.

      Camara’s arduous journey highlights how immigration to the United States through its southern border is evolving. Instead of being almost exclusively people from Latin America, the stream of migrants crossing the Mexican border these days includes many who come from the other side of the world.

      Almost 3,000 citizens of India were apprehended entering the U.S. from Mexico last year. In 2007, only 76 were. The number of Nepalese rose from just four in 2007 to 647 last year. More people from Africa are also seeking to get into the United States, with hundreds having reached Mexican towns across the border from Texas in recent weeks, according to local news reports from both sides of the border.

      Camara’s journey began more than a year ago in the small town of Toulel, in southern Mauritania. He left Mauritania, where slavery is illegal but still practiced, “because it’s a country that doesn’t know human rights,” he said.

      Camara was one of 124 migrants who ended up in a federal prison in Oregon after being detained in the U.S. near the border with Mexico in May, the result of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy.

      He was released October 3, after he had passed his “credible fear” exam, the first step on obtaining asylum, and members of the community near the prison donated money for his bond. He was assisted by lawyers working pro bono.

      “My heart is so gracious, and I am so happy. I really thank my lawyers who got me out of that detention,” Camara said in French as he rode in a car away from the prison.

      Camara’s journey was epic, yet more people are making similar treks to reach the United States. It took him from his village on the edge of the Sahara desert to Morocco by plane and then a flight to Brazil. He stayed there 15 months, picking apples in orchards and saving his earnings as best he could. Finally he felt he had enough to make it to the United States.

      All that lay between him and the U.S. border was 6,000 miles (9,700 kilometers).

      “It was very, very difficult,” said Camara, 30. “I climbed mountains, I crossed rivers. I crossed many rivers, the sea.”

      Camara learned Portuguese in Brazil and could understand a lot of Spanish, which is similar, but not speak it very well. He rode buses through Brazil, Peru and Colombia. Then he and others on the migrant trail faced the most serious obstacle: the Darien Gap, a 60-mile (97-kilometer) stretch of roadless jungle straddling the border of Colombia and Panama.

      But first, he and other travelers who gathered in the town of Turbo, Colombia, had to cross the Gulf of Uraba, a long and wide inlet from the Caribbean Sea. Turbo, on its southeast shore, has become a major point on the migrant trail, where travelers can resupply and where human smugglers offer boat rides.

      Camara and about 75 other people boarded a launch for Capurgana, a village next to the Panamanian border on the other end of the gulf.

      While the slow-moving boat was far from shore, the seas got very rough.

      “There was a wave that came and tipped over the canoe,” Camara said. “Five people fell into the water, and they couldn’t swim.”

      They all drowned, he said. The survivors pushed on.

      Finally arriving in Capurgana after spending two nights on the boat, the migrants split into smaller groups to cross the infamous Darien Gap, a wild place that has tested the most seasoned of travelers. The thick jungle hides swamps that can swallow a man. Lost travelers have died, and been devoured, boots and all, by packs of wild boars, or have been found, half out of their minds.

      Camara’s group consisted of 37 people, including women — two of them pregnant, one from Cameroon and one from Congo — and children.

      “We walked seven days and climbed up into the mountains, into the forest,” Camara said. “When it was night, we slept on the ground. We just kept walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping. It was hard.”

      One man, who was around 26 and from the African nation of Guinea, died, perhaps from exhaustion combined with thirst, Camara said.

      By the sixth day, all the drinks the group had brought with them were gone. They drank water from a river. They came across a Panamanian man and his wife, who sold them some bananas for $5, Camara said.

      Once he got out of the jungle, Camara went to Panamanian immigration officials who gave him travel documents enabling him to go on to Costa Rica, which he reached by bus. In Costa Rica, he repeated that process in hopes of going on to Nicaragua. But he heard authorities there were not so accommodating, so he and about 100 other migrants took a boat around Nicaragua, traveling at night along its Pacific coast.

      “All we could see were the lights of Nicaragua,” he said. Then it was over land again, in cars, buses and sometimes on foot, across Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, all the way to the U.S. border at Tijuana. He was just about out of money and spent the night in a migrant shelter.

      On May 20, he crossed into San Ysidro, south of San Diego.

      “I said, `I came, I came. I’m from Africa. I want help,”’ he said.

      He is going to stay with a brother in Philadelphia while he pursues his asylum request.

      https://www.voanews.com/amp/more-migrants-far-flung-lands-crossing-us-mexico-border/4651770.html?__twitter_impression=true
      #parcours_migratoire #nouvelle_Méditerranée

    • For African migrants trying, and dying, to reach north America, the Darién Gap is the “new Mediterranean”

      By the time Basame Lonje made it out of the jungle, he was beyond exhausted. The 35-year-old from Cameroon had gone four days out of seven without food, surviving each day on a single biscuit. He drank from rivers flowing with debris and death, carrying the corpses of an unknown number of people who have perished in the Darién Gap, a remote stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the most dangerous in the world. “I barely survived,” Basame says. “People had sores on the soles of their feet and they had nobody to carry them. They were left there. Do you know what it means to walk for days?”

      As a result of tough migration policies in traditional destination countries in Europe, Basame is one of thousands of so-called‘extracontinental migrants’ taking the desperate decision to try and traverse the American continent in the hope of seeking asylum in the United States or Canada. In previous times this route was used almost exclusively by central American migrants. More recently it has seen a surge in migrants from African countries like Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ghana and Burkina Faso, as well as people from Asian and Middle Eastern countries such as India, Pakistan, Syria and Nepal. Mexico authorities apprehended around 3,000 Africans and some 12,000 extracontinental migrants in total in 2018, according to the Migrant Policy Unit of Mexico’s Interior Ministry. Most are escaping a mix of conflict, political repression and crumbling economies.

      They fly to visa-friendly countries such as Ecuador, Brazil and Guyana, before navigating their way up north to Mexico, sometimes with the help of smugglers, other times with the aid of social media posts of those who have gone before them. They spend thousands of dollars on flights and bus tickets for journeys that can take months.

      Basame was a teacher back in Cameroon but says he fled the bloody conflict that has been raging in parts of his country since 2016 after he was abducted by armed groups fighting for the secession of the English-speaking parts of the country. His crime? Daring to hold classes.

      New migration regulations have rolled out swiftly and unpredictably since Trump took office in January 2017. Military troops were deployed to the border in October 2018, when some 7,000 people from central America fleeing gang violence and poverty approached on foot. In January 2019, the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), known as ‘Remain in Mexico’ went into effect: as a result, asylees that arrive in the US via Mexico are now sent back to wait while their cases are processed, instead of being released on parole in the US as prescribed by US law. Rights organisations point out that sending asylum seekers back to Mexico, where they often face deportation, is a violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

      This February, Trump declared a state of emergency and accessed emergency funds to begin construction of a physical wall between the US and Mexico. He has also pursued agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras under which all migrants who pass through these countries must first seek refuge and be rejected in them before placing claims in the US. The agreement disregards the fact that not only do these countries lack the capacity to process large-scale asylum claims but that many people are fleeing violence and poverty from these same countries.

      Cumulatively, these policies have seen thousands of people waiting in shelters in US-Mexico border towns like Tijuana and Matamoros where conditions are deteriorating. A ‘metering’ system sees US customs officials attend to about three people daily. Mexico’s northern towns are also notorious for violence, and migrants are vulnerable to exploitation by drug cartels and human traffickers.
      Externalising borders

      In July 2019, Mexico signed an agreement with the US after President Trump threatened to impose trade sanctions if migration flows were not brought to a minimum. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed to deploy 6,000 troops from the newly-formed National Guard to police its borders, adopting the US border militarisation strategy and sealing Mexico’s fate as President Trump’s outer wall.

      Since then, Mexican immigration officials have stopped issuing exit permits to extracontinental migrants arriving at the southern border, trapping many like Basame in a country they have no desire to stay in. With fewer people able to reach the US, Mexico – a transit country – is becoming an unintentional final destination. Although Mexico has refused to sign a third safe country agreement with the US, it has been forced to field over 60,000 asylum claims – double the number received last year. It has been estimated that 60 per cent of these applications are made in Tapachula.

      With no work permit, and even if he had one, with few opportunities available to him as an African migrant and a non-Spanish speaker, Basame is clear about his options: “Mexico can’t give me that.”

      But Mexico’s immigration agency has denied his application for a visitor’s visa that would help him move north. Officials are only issuing permanent residency cards, a document that he fears will affect his asylum claim in the US.

      By 09.00, hundreds of men and women from over two dozen countries were waiting in the blistering sun. Their voices were a cacophony of languages – Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Tigrinya and Haitian Creole – clashing with the wails of hot, hungry children hanging from their parents. Migrants of Asian origin are mostly absent from these daily crowds: since Mexico deported 310 Indian migrants in an “unprecedented” move this October, they have been keeping a low profile for fear of suffering a similar fate.

      An immigration officer appeared behind the gate, looked at the crowd and shook his head in frustration. A fight broke out when the gates opened as people rushed to get in. Despite his punctuality, Basame was not seen that day.
      “My friends died there”

      Narrating his long, treacherous journey from Cameroon to Mexico, Basame tells Equal Times that after fleeing the captivity of armed rebels this March, he headed to Nigeria before deciding to try to reach the safety of the US. He wanted better opportunities than Nigeria could offer and feared the rebels could easily reach him there. First, he took a flight to Ecuador, then by bus he moved through Colombia. In the north-western town of Capurgana on the Colombian-Panamanian border, he met fellow Cameroonian migrants, as well as Haitians and Cubans. As they prepared to enter the Darién, villagers living at the mouth of the jungle warned them: “If you start this journey, you must finish it, otherwise it is bad news,” alluding to the dangers of the wild animals, poisonous insects and armed kidnappers marauding inside the impenetrable rainforest that breaks up the Pan-American Highway.

      Basame spent seven days in the dense thickness of the Darién, battling the rain and cold, moving from morning until nightfall with nothing but a bag of clothes and some snacks. “You do not stop in the Darién. You keep moving,” he says. He walked with a group of other migrants. Many didn’t make it out of the jungle due to exhaustion. Others were swept away in the fast-moving rivers. “My friends died there,” Basame remembers soberly. One of his worst memories is of walking past the corpse of a dead baby left in a backpack.

      Basame is one of the lucky ones. After reaching Panama, exhausted and starving, he regained his strength before moving up through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. After crossing the Suchiate River into Mexico by raft, he arrived in Tapachula in July. He spent a week at an immigration detention centre there before he was given an exit permit to leave the country.

      It wasn’t until he got pulled from a bus to Tijuana by the National Guard that he realised that he could not legally leave Tapachula unless he was heading south, back to Guatemala. The US-Mexico deal took effect on 10 July and he was amongst the first people stranded by Mexico’s new regulations. Basame’s permit would force him back through the jungle of death he had barely survived.
      Death and disease in Mexico

      Judeline Romelus sits with her friends in Tapachula’s main square watching as they braid the hair of her 10-year-old daughter, Mariska. Nearby, Ghanaian and Guinean flags announce African food at restaurants, alongside Mexican and Honduran colours. Haitians and Africans give locals a trim in makeshift barbershops.

      But the general atmosphere of warmth masks the apprehension many locals feel. Despite being in one of the country’s poorest regions, Tapachula has tried to bear the weight of its new migrant population but some people are concerned that government agencies and NGOs are focusing their attention on these new arrivals when the needs of the locals are also many.

      Like Basame, Judeline and Mariska are stranded. Judeline applied for a humanitarian visa so that she can travel north with her daughter, but she must wait for her appointment in February 2020. The 28-year-old mother packed her bags and left Haiti three months ago. Economic stagnation and recent political unrest have caused many to flee the small Caribbean nation. “There are no opportunities in Haiti and I cannot work,” she says, even with a diploma. Judeline says she is looking for a better life in the US where friends are waiting for them in Florida. She relies on their monthly remittances of US$50 to pay for the small room the mother and daughter share.

      The unsanitary living conditions in overcrowded shelters such as these have caused a spike in health problems. “Women are presenting diseases related to sexual and reproductive health,” says Claudia León, regional head at Jesuits Refugee Service, a humanitarian non-profit providing legal and psychosocial assistance to refugees. Many were assaulted in the Darién. “The situation is critical. They have no clean water to wash with and those who are pregnant are at risk.”

      Migrants of all nationalities are suffering from invisible illnesses too. A spokesperson for the medical humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it is dealing with many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and trauma. Poor living conditions coupled with the memories of the treacherous journey to Mexico and the general uncertainty is causing some to self-harm. “We are in an emergency,” says León. “I have seen people outside the immigration centre hurting themselves because they are in such extreme conditions.”

      The desperation to get to the US has led to the exploration of dangerous alternative routes. A boat smuggling Cameroonian migrants capsized off the coast of Mexico in October, killing one man. “We knew him,” one migrant tells Equal Times at the restaurant where the deceased once frequented. But even as they recall his tragic passing, another man says that he is also considering taking the same route to the US.
      “The new Mediterranean”

      All across the world, tough policies on migration are forcing the most vulnerable migrants and refugees to go underground and seek the services of smuggling gangs and human traffickers. Like the US, Europe has enforced stringent measures to stem migration flows. An increase in anti-immigrant sentiments from far-right, populist governments in the US and Europe in particular sees leaders like Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban routinely employ rhetoric that fuels racist anxieties and emphasises the building of walls to prevent a ‘migrant invasion’.

      In 2016, Turkey signed an agreement with the European Union and a bilateral agreement with Greece to keep some three million refugees fleeing the Syrian war from crossing the Aegean Sea into Greece. The agreement saw the European Union send back anyone who crossed without documents after 20 March 2016.

      A similar agreement between Italy and Libya in 2017 was extended this November. Italy is training and funding the Libyan Coast Guard to stop African and Middle Eastern migrants on the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, a country at war.
      Interception numbers have dropped from 181,000 in 2016 to only 8,000 this year, according to UNHCR. Thousands are held in detention centres run by armed factions battling for control since the Arab uprisings of 2011. African migrants have been enslaved, tortured and sold. They have also been caught in the crossfire of the battle for Tripoli. In July, a bomb fell on one detention centre, killing 44 people.

      The number of asylum claims in Mexico keeps rising and is expected reach 80,000 by the end of the year. Although most Africans initially refused to seek asylum in Mexico, more people are applying, particularly from Cameroon. The number of asylum claims from Africa is currently around 500.

      The influx of migrants and refugees has split Mexico politically, with many accusing President Obrador of yielding to President Trump and rescinding on human rights promises he made when he campaigned last year.

      Human rights organisations condemn the US and Mexico’s strategies. “Those seeking safety want the same thing any of us would want if we were in their shoes,” says Isa Sanusi, of Amnesty International in Nigeria. “Mexico and the US must ensure that these migrants from Africa and other parts of the world are not denied the rights guaranteed to them by international law.”

      For now, Basame is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Even if he had the money, it would be too dangerous for him to go home, and yet he currently has no way out of Mexico. As he struggles to stay afloat, his hopes are fading fast. “I’m running out of cash and I’m running out of patience. I’m sick and I don’t have anywhere to live,” he says. “How will I survive?”

      https://www.equaltimes.org/for-migrants-trying-and-dying-to?lang=en

    • Es cosa suya: entanglements of border externalization and African transit migration in northern #Costa_Rica

      Starting from the idea that border externalization – understood as the spatial and institutional stretching of borders – is enmeshed with the highly contextual humanitarian and securitarian dynamics of migrant trajectories, this article addresses the reach of border externalization tentacles in Costa Rica. Although Costa Rica does not formally engage in border externalization agreements, it is located in a region characterized by transit migration and transnational securitization pressures. Moreover, externalization efforts across the Atlantic have contributed to a relatively new presence of so-called extra-continental migrants. Given these circumstances, we aim to interrogate the ways in which border externalization plays a role in Costa Rica’s discourses, policies and practices of migration management. We do so by analysing a migrant reception centre in the northern Costa Rica border region, and by focusing on African transit migration. Our analysis is based on exploratory field research at the centre as well as on long-term migration research in Central America. Building on these empirical explorations and the theoretical notions of mobility regimes, transit and arterial borders, the article finds that Costa Rica’s identity as a ‘humanitarian transit country’ – as enacted in the migrant reception centre – both reproduces and challenges border externalization. While moving towards increased securitization of migration and an internalization of its border, Costa Rica also distinguishes itself from neighbouring countries by emphasizing the care it extends to African migrants, in practice enabling these migrants to move further north. Based on these findings, the article argues for a deeper appreciation of the role of local-regional histories, perceptions, rivalries, linkages and strategies of migration management. This allows for a better grip of the scope and shape of border externalization across a diversity of migration landscapes.

      https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-019-0131-9

    • New contested borderlands: Senegalese migrants en route to Argentina

      This article sheds novel, light on how Senegalese men and women adapt to European border governance by finding new ways to ‘look for life’ (chercher la vie) in Latin America, as an alternative to the perilous clandestine routes to Europe. The article follows how Senegalese migrants’ mobility to Argentina has evolved over the last two decades. It particularly focuses on the migrants’ journey to Argentina and explores the migrants’ accounts of their experiences en route and compares them to how different intersecting state-driven national and supranational migration policies become entangled in their mobility. By analytically focusing on the changing migration infrastructure and the different forms of friction the migrants encounter and respond to while moving, the article shows how the risk and uncertainty along the journey increasingly mirror the struggles which African migrants face at EU–African borderlands, and thus how similar features of global mobility regimes seem to be reproduced along this new route from West Africa to Latin America. In this way the politics and hierarchies of mobility are brought to the fore. Yet the article also points to how migrants find new openings and ways to contest the hindrances that aims to stop them as they move through these newly traversed borderlands.

      https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-018-0109-z
      #migrants_sénégalais #Argentine #Sénégal