#route_arctique

  • Three asylum seekers walked the wilderness out of Russia

    This is the second time this summer illegal crossings happen in the terrain from Russia to Norway.

    “The persons were detained by the border guards and handed over to the police. All three have asked for asylum and we can’t give further details,” says Chief of Staff with the Police in Finnmark, Tarjei Sirma Tellefsen, to the Barents Observer.

    It was Sør-Varanger Avis that first reported about this week’s illegal border crossings.

    The three foreigners were detained at #Korpfjell. The exact circumstances are still to be determined, and the police is formally still investigating it as “a possible illegal crossing,” Tellefsen says.

    In late June, a person came walking in the same northern sector of the 198 km border. Also he applied for asylum in Norway.

    It is strictly illegal to cross the border in the terrain, and such incidents happen rarely. Only a few times over the last three decades. Norway’s border with Russia is likely the least troubled among all external Schengen-borders in Europe.

    “Threat assessment in regards to illegal border crossings is low, and the fact that we have seen two incidents this summer doesn’t change the overall picture,” Tarjei Sirma Tellefsen says.

    Norway has military border guards patrolling the land border with Russia, but it is the police that formally is in charge of law enforcement.

    On the Russian side, a barbed wired fence stretches the entire area of a highly secured and surveilled border zone.

    There are several military camps in the Pechenga region, with the nearest only a 10-12 km from the border to Norway.

    Both the 200th Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 61. Naval Infantry Brigade are located in Pechenga. Soldiers from these brigades are currently fighting Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine.

    https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2022/08/18/three-asylum-seekers-walked-the-wilderness-out-of-russia
    #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #route_arctique #Norvège #Russie

    Sur la “route arctique”, voir (2018):
    https://seenthis.net/messages/714902

    ping @reka

  • Halfway round the world by plane: Africa’s new migration route

    Migrants using traditional routes from Africa to Europe often fail to reach their destinations. Smugglers now offer new options, such as taking migrants to faraway countries by plane.
    In early July, Mexico’s authorities reported that the number of African migrants in the country had tripled. According to government figures, around 1,900 migrants, most of them from crisis-ridden countries like Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are now in Mexico. Their destination? The United States of America.
    The journey by plane of some of these migrants began halfway across the world in Uganda. In a garden bar in the Ugandan capital #Kampala sits a 23-year-old Eritrean man who could soon be one of them. For security reasons, he does not want to give his name. He fled the brutal military service in Eritrea last September. According to human rights organizations, military service in Eritrea can mean years of forced labor. “I do not believe that anything will change in Eritrea soon; on the contrary,” he said. Many young Eritreans see their futures overseas.


    https://www.dw.com/en/halfway-round-the-world-by-plane-africas-new-migration-route/a-49868809
    #Afrique #détour #détours #asile #migrations #réfugiés #routes_migratoires #itinéraires_migratoires #USA #Mexique #Etats-Unis #fermeture_des_frontières #Erythrée #Corne_de_l'Afrique #Ouganda #route_pacifique
    via @isskein
    ping @reka

    • Africa: At U.S.-Mexico Border, Africans Join Diversifying Migrant Community

      It took Julia and her two daughters five years to get from Kassai, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to a cot on the floor of a migrant shelter in Laredo, Texas, on a Sunday night in August 2019.

      First, it was four years in Angola. She saved money, she says, by working as a hairdresser.

      They flew to Ecuador. Took a bus and boat to Colombia. They spent 14 days crossing through Panama’s Darien Gap, lost part of the time in the dense jungle. Three weeks in Panama, then three more in Costa Rica while Julia recuperated from an illness. Then Nicaragua. Honduras. Guatemala.

      Finally, after a month of waiting in Acuña, on the U.S.-Mexico border, they stuck their feet in the sandy dirt along the southern bank of the Rio Grande. They were alone, and didn’t know how to swim.

      “We prayed first, then we got into the water,” Julia recalled. “My daughter was crying.”

      “‘Mom, I can’t…’” Julia remembers her pleading in chest-high water.

      Halfway across, she says, U.S. soldiers — possibly border agents — shouted to them: “‘Come, give us your hands.’“

      “I did,” Julia recalls, “and they took us out.”

      More families from afar

      Historically, the majority of people caught crossing into the southwest U.S. without authorization were single Mexican adults. In fiscal 2009, Mexicans accounted for 91.63% of border apprehensions, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.

      But demographics of migrants and asylum-seekers crossing into the U.S. from Mexico are shifting in two significant ways: In the last decade, nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras began migrating in greater numbers. In the same period, the number of Mexicans dropped.

      Then, in the last year, families became the top source of Southwest border migration. The Border Patrol apprehended 432,838 adults and children traveling in family units from October 2018 through July 2019, a 456% increase over the same period the previous fiscal year.

      To the surprise of longtime border agents, while the overwhelming majority of these families continue to be from Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America, a small but growing proportion are from countries outside the Americas, nearly twice as much as two years ago.

      By the end of July this year, CBP data shows the agency had apprehended 63,470 people from countries other than those four, making up 8.35% of total apprehensions. In fiscal 2017, they were 4.3% of the total apprehended population.

      CBP does not release the breakdown of where detained migrants come from until after the end of the fiscal year in September. But anecdotes and preliminary data show an increasingly diverse group of migrants and asylum-seekers, including more than 1,600 African nationals from 36 countries, apprehended in one border sector alone.

      They are unprecedented numbers.

      Allen Vowell, an acting deputy patrol agent in charge with the U.S. Border Patrol in Eagle Pass, Texas, said the recent demographic changes are unlike any he has seen in two decades of working on the border.

      “I would say until this year, Africans — personally I’ve probably only seen a handful in over 20 years,” Vowell said.

      From Oct. 1, 2018, to Aug. 22, 2019, Del Rio sector agents apprehended 51,394 people, including 1,681 nationals of African countries. They are largely, like Julia, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola or Cameroon, according to sector officials.

      The arrival of sub-Saharan nationals — often Congolese, according to Del Rio Sector officials — posed new challenges. A lot of border agents are bilingual in English and Spanish. But when apprehending a group that primarily spoke French and Portuguese, the agents had to scramble for interpreters.

      While many migrants from the Northern Triangle have relatives in the U.S. as a point of contact or a destination, those from Africa are less likely to have those relationships.

      That means they are more likely to stay in migrant shelters in the U.S. or in Mexico for longer, waiting to figure out their next steps until their immigration court hearing.

      There is the political tumult in Venezuela, leading to the exodus of millions of people scattered throughout the region.

      The end of the “wet foot dry foot” policy with Cuba that allowed migrants who reached the shores of Florida to remain, Cubans who want to leave the island for the U.S. to take a more circuitous route.

      And then, to the surprise of Border Patrol agents, there arrived the large groups of sub-Saharan Africans, crossing through the Del Rio sector in Texas.

      The migrant trail goes beyond Africa.

      Ten years ago, CBP detained 99 Indians on the Southwest border. In 2018, it was 8,997.

      Similarly, Bangladeshi migrants didn’t figure into the top 20 countries among those apprehended at the border a decade ago. In 2019, there were 1,198.

      This week, a Bangladeshi man living in Mexico pleaded guilty to human smuggling charges.

      There are also the regional conflicts and tensions in Latin America and the Caribbean that are leading to a bigger number of migrants within the hemisphere arriving at the U.S-Mexico border, like Venezuela and Nicaragua. Haitians and Cubans continue to take the more circuitous route through Central America and up to the U.S., rather than travel by boat to Florida, where they risk being stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard before setting foot on land.

      Son’s death sends family on a dangerous journey

      Julia says she got tunnel vision after her teenage son was killed in DRC, en route to school one day in 2014 for reasons she still does not know or understand.

      She only knows that she received a call from the morgue. A truck dropped his body off there.

      He was 17. His name was George.

      She can’t go back to DRC, she says. It’s just not safe.

      “There, while you sleep, the thieves will come through the roof. They demand money, and if you don’t have money, they’ll rape your daughter,” she said.

      “When he died in 2014, I made up my mind that I would not stay.”

      They want to get to Buffalo, New York. They don’t have family in the U.S., Julia says, but some people they met on the road were headed there. Word was, there was work, at least.

      She had an immigration court hearing scheduled for the first week of August. She was still at the San Antonio shelter, two days before.

      They didn’t now how far from Texas it was, or how cold New York gets in winter. They weren’t worried about those things now. They just needed the bus fare to get there, and they had nothing left. No money. No phone.

      Ketsia, now 15, speaks Spanish, English and Italian with ease. Jemima, 9, is the best French speaker in the family. They didn’t fight while they’ve been on the road for the last five months, from Ecuador to San Antonio. Not much, at least, they giggle.

      “She’s strong. Very strong,” Ketsia says of her mother, in Spanish. “I saw a lot of women who left their kids behind in the jungle. She’s courageous. This path we’re on, isn’t for everyone. If you’re not strong, it’s very difficult.”

      “My dream is to arrive there, to New York. To get a job. To put the girls in school,” Julia responds.

      “I suffered a lot already,” she says, something she repeats without going into more detail. She has a tendency to stare off, lose herself in thought when the conversation nears the darker parts of their family history.

      “I don’t want my children to go through the same,” she says. “We suffered a lot. I don’t want that anymore for my children.”

      The shelter where they stayed does not track migrants after they’ve left, and for privacy and safety reasons, shelters do not share whether individuals are staying with them.

      Attempts by VOA to locate Julia, Ketsia and Jemima in the weeks following the interview were unsuccessful.

      https://allafrica.com/stories/201909020140.html

    • El naufragio de un grupo de africanos en Chiapas revela una nueva ruta migratoria por el Pacífico

      El accidente de una lancha en Tonalá deja un muerto y varios desaparecidos. Ante la presión policial en el sur de México, grupos de cameruneses optan por usar vías marítimas para llegar a EE UU.

      Tirado en la playa, entre el pasto y la orilla. La foto del cuerpo de Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, camerunés de 39 años, fallecido este viernes tras el naufragio de su embarcación en Ignacio Allende, municipio de Tonalá, ha vuelto a revivir las peores imágenes de la crisis migratoria que se vive en el sur de México. La nueva política migratoria puesta en marcha por Andrés Manuel López Obrador tras el chantaje de Estados Unidos, ha obligado a los nuevos grupos de migrantes atrapados en Tapachula, Chiapas, a buscar nuevas y peligrosas rutas en su intento de llegar a la frontera norte.

      A las 7.00 de la mañana, según pescadores de la zona, una embarcación con personas procedentes de Camerún comenzó a tambalearse hasta que todos cayeron al agua, de acuerdo a la investigación judicial. El portal AlertaChiapas y activistas en la zona consultados por este medio, afirmaron que el bote salió desde la costa de Guatemala o desde el sur del Estado de Chiapas, ya en México, con destino Oaxaca. Cuando llegaron los Grupos de Rescate consiguieron socorrer a 8 personas, 7 hombres y una mujer, que fueron trasladados al Hospital General de Tonalá. El cuerpo de Cheo Ngu fue encontrado tirado cerca de la orilla. Hasta el momento hay varias personas desaparecidas.

      La ruta por vía marítima que une la frontera de Guatemala con el istmo de Tehuantepec, en Oaxaca, es una opción cada vez más frecuente ante el aumento de detenciones y deportaciones por parte de la recién creada Guardia Nacional. Tradicionalmente los migrantes han utilizado las rutas terrestres, pero los traficantes de personas cada vez recurren más a esta ruta poco vigilada, más barata y con menos riesgos a ser detenido. Por una cantidad que oscila entre los 400 y 800 dólares —para los cubanos puede ser el doble— esta ruta permite a los centroamericanos avanzar desde Guatemala a Salina Cruz o Huatulco, en Oaxaca.

      Aunque la mayoría de los migrantes en México son de origen centroamericano, el flujo de personas procedentes de Camerún, República Democrática del Congo o Eritrea, ha ido en aumento. Los africanos se encuentran en un ‘limbo legal’ ya que no pueden ser repatriados y actualmente tienen la negativa del gobierno federal para recibir los trámites de salida para continuar su trayecto hacia Estados Unidos. En los últimos dos meses cientos de ellos permanecen varados en Tapachula (Chiapas). Algunos en la Estación Migratoria Siglo XXI, y otros en la calle, donde han mantenido protestas y enfrentamientos contra la policía y la Guardia Nacional por la situación que viven y la falta de respuestas.

      Luis García Villagran es activista por los derechos humanos en Tapachula. En llamada telefónica y aparentemente afectado, confirma que su versión dista mucho de la de las autoridades. “Hay una embarcación que sí ha llegado a su destino (Oaxaca) y que ni se ha nombrado, pero en la accidentada iban más personas de las que dice el informe oficial. Sé con seguridad que hay más personas desaparecidas. No solo hemos perdido a nuestro hermano Emmanuel”, zanja Villagran.

      https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/10/12/actualidad/1570833110_016901.html

  • Russian border guards detain more migrants seeking Arctic route

    Pressure on the northern Schengen-border intensifies as several groups of migrants are detained in Russian Arctic borderlands.

    Two citizens of Nigeria have been detained as they illegally tried to cross the border to Norway, Severpost reports. According to the Russian Border Guard Service, the individuals face charges of “attempted illegal crossing of the state border of the Russian Federation”. That could mean up to six years in jail.

    It is not clear where exactly the two Nigerians were detained.

    The arrests come shortly after the Russian border guards detained a group of people from Senegal. These people were also aiming for Norway, Severpost informs.

    The number of reports about cases of illegal border crossing has increased over the last weeks. In the first days of August, two Indian nationals were caught. Prior to that, two groups of Nigerians were detained, B-port reports. At least one of the groups was halted in Pechenga, the Russian border area to Norway. There were reportedly people under adult age in the group.
    Rivers, mountains, sensors and barbed wire

    The border between Russia and Norway is 196 km long and runs mostly through rivers and mountain terrain. On the Russian side, there is a double barbed wire fence with sensors. Both countries have over the last years made major investments in border monitoring and surveillance.

    In March this year, the Russian border guards detained two Syrians after they had made it through the doubled barbed wire fence. However, there are no known successful illegal border crossings between the countries over the last years.

    Norwegian border commissioner Roger Jakobsen confirms to the Barents Observer that he has not been informed about the latest cases of attempted border crossing.

    He previously underlined that he is confident that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) keeps a good eye on the border in the interest of both countries.

    “I’m very satisfied with the professional job and dialogue with the Russian Commissioner”, Jakobsen said.

    In autumn 2015, about 5,500 migrants were allowed to leave Russia and enter Norway at the Borisoglebsk-Storskog border checkpoints. The so-called “Arctic Migrant Route” ended in late November 2015.


    http://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2018/08/13/borders-russia-norway-migrants-arctic-police-security-immigration

    #route_arctique #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Russie #frontières #routes_migratoires #itinéraires_migratoires #Norvège #arctique
    cc @reka @isskein

    • Anti-Racism from the Margins: Welcoming Refugees at Schengen’s Northernmost Border

      Through events of solidarity with refugees that unfolded at the Arctic border between Norway and Russia in 2015, we critically address two common analyses of racism and humanitarianism. First, we argue that the often-claimed explanation that racism results from disenfranchised social class fails to identify solidarities across marginalized groups. Furthermore, as anti-Muslim racism has become more mainstream in the Nordic region, solidarity with refugees offers critical positions in relation to political centers. Second, the case demonstrates how humanitarian action and politicized refugee activism are not necessarily separate forms of action but more entangled forms of engagement. The case where a small Arctic community in #Kirkenes responded in solidarity with the refugees who crossed the border from Russia demonstrates how humanitarian assistance entangles with politicized action against the European border regime and against xenophobia, which the locals perceive to be generated by politicians from the political centers of Europe.

      https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-74630-2_8
      #solidarité

  • China sets its sights on the Northwest Passage as a potential trade boon | World news | The Guardian

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/20/china-northwest-passage-trade-route-shipping-guide

    China is looking to exploit the Northwest Passage, the fabled shortcut from the Pacific to the Atlantic, according to state-run media, with the world’s biggest trader in goods publishing a shipping guide to the route.

    The seaway north of Canada, which could offer a quicker journey from China to the US east coast than via the Panama Canal or Cape Horn, was sought by European explorers for centuries, including by the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845.

    #arctique #transport #transport_maritime #route_arctique

  • Tout au nord de la Norvège, entre 150 et 200 « réfugiés cyclistes » arrivent tous les jours. Les capacités d’hébergement sont depuis longtemps complètement dépassées mais la population se montre très solidaire et tout s’organise au jour le jour. Cela dit, malgré les bonnes volontés, le gouvernement norvégien se dit déçus par le manque de coopération des autorités russes et est en train de penser à fermer sa frontière nord sur la base d’une loi qui date de... 1940.

    – Kontorer og korridorer er fylt opp av asylsøkere - Aftenposten
    http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/--Kontorer-og-korridorer-er-fylt-opp-av-asylsokere-8231654.html

    Fungerende stasjonsmester Torstein Pettersen ved Kirkenes politistasjon måtte inndra de ansattes juleferie.

    De ansatte ved grensekontrollen jobber mer enn 12 timers skift for å ta imot syklende asylsøkere som kommer til grensekontrollbygget på Storskog.

    #réfugiés #norvège #russie #kirkenes #cyclistes