Eliana and Carla, two Venezuelan sisters who came to Chile without legal documents through the border town of Colchane, complained about the lack of clear procedures to regularize their immigration status. The lack of papers causes problems when it comes to accessing healthcare and social security and to bringing children and siblings to Chile for family reunification. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Mar 27 2023 (IPS)

The Chilean government tightened controls on the northern border to curtail the influx of migrants, especially Venezuelans, along a 1,030-km stretch of border with Bolivia and Peru.

Some 600 military personnel joined the police force to reinforce control, initially for a period of three months.

Left-wing President Gabriel Boric, in office for a year, visited Colchane, a small town in the Andean highlands, on Mar. 15 to talk with the 1,800 local residents, most of whom are Aymara indigenous people."It was very hard. I wouldn't want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey.” -- Carla

Undocumented migrants coming to this country enter mainly through that town, triggering social tension and growing expressions of xenophobia, although also drawing shows of solidarity and support from society.

“We have decided to take responsibility for the neglect and lack of equipment and have launched a plan to improve infrastructure and living conditions on the northern border,” said the president.

He said the area was receiving “absolutely uncontrolled migration” that brought the total number of immigrants to 1.4 million, equivalent to seven percent of the current population of this long, narrow Andean country.

The military will have adequate accommodation and will be equipped with thermal cameras and satellite communication systems to double the detection capacity and monitor uncontrolled areas.

The aim, said Boric, is “to contain and reduce irregular migration, but in particular to combat criminal organizations that take advantage of these flows and of people’s needs, to commit crimes such as human, drug and arms trafficking.”

Chile’s border with Peru is 169 kilometers, and with Bolivia 861.

Boric said it was important to “not open the door to hate speech,” just days after a 22-year-old Venezuelan who was proven to be drunk was arrested and charged for allegedly running over and killing a police officer, sparking a wave of xenophobia.

The president also announced that in the next six months he would present a “national migration policy in accordance with the new challenges facing the country,” which in recent decades has become a growing destination for migrants from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and in the last decade for Haitians and especially Venezuelans.

Hundreds of Venezuelans gather early every day in front of the Venezuelan consulate in the municipality of Providencia, in Santiago, to apply for the documents that would allow them to move forward in the regularization of their migration status and that of their family, and make it possible for them to to legally bring in relatives. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), since 2013 more than 7.13 million people have fled Venezuela, the majority to other Latin American countries, in one of the largest international displacement crises in the world.

Minister of the Interior and Public Security Carolina Tohá confirmed that there was a list of more than 20,000 reportedly undocumented migrants to be deported.

“When President Boric took office, there were already 20,000 people facing pending deportation orders,” she said.

Two draft laws are making their way through the legislature aimed at expediting deportations for immigrants convicted of drug crimes.

The National Migration Service informed IPS that “in 2022, 1,070 people were deported, which represented a 19 percent increase from the 913 deportations carried out in 2021.”

It also stated that “of the almost 500,000 pending applications (for regularization of immigration status), in the entire year of 2022 until January 2023, more than 365,000 have received a favorable response.”

“About 265,000 involved Temporary Residence applications, which will gradually become applications for Permanent Residence,” the National Migration Service added.

Erika Vargas and José González are Venezuelan immigrants who came to Chile legally and only have to regularize their children’s citizenship status to complete the process and gain peace of mind. They said they have only suffered sporadic misunderstandings because of the use of different idioms or vocabulary. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Marginal conditions for undocumented migrants

A survey of “campamentos”, the term given to slums in Chile, found 39,567 migrant families living in them, representing 34.7 percent of the total.

The number of migrants coming in through unauthorized border crossings has mushroomed from 2,905 in 2017, to 56,586 in 2021 and to 13,928 in the first quarter alone of 2022 – figures that do not take into account migrants under 18 years of age, according to the Catholic Jesuit Service for Migrants (SJM).

Macarena Rodriguez, chair of the SJM board of directors, told IPS that the influx of migrants through unauthorized border crossings “is not synonymous with people fleeing from justice,” but with people escaping poor life opportunities in other countries.

That is the case of two Venezuelan sisters, Eliana, 36, and Carla, 33, who have traumatic memories of their entry through Colchane, on separate trips, coming by land from Venezuela.

“I came with a ‘travel advisor’ (smuggler or coyote). In Bolivia it was complicated because of many groups that operate there. They kidnapped us in a border area. We were locked up for six or seven days waiting for that person to pay to get us released,” said Eliana.

She came to Chile in September 2021 after living in Peru for almost three years.

“We paid that person to take us to Santiago on a trip without complications. The normal journey is three to four days from Peru, but it took me 15,” she told IPS.

Carla traveled with her eight-year-old son Eduardo and arrived in Chile 15 months ago.

“It was very hard. I wouldn’t want to go through that ever again. The border is very dangerous, there is tremendous insecurity. You experience hunger, cold, thirst and many other things on the journey,” she said.

Immigrants of various nationalities go daily to the offices of the National Migration Service, on San Antonio street in Santiago, where they are attended if they have made an online appointment. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

The sisters both work in Santiago and live in a small rented room in the municipality of Quinta Normal, on the west side of the Chilean capital, for which they pay 312 dollars a month.

“It was difficult to find a school. I thought it was like in Venezuela where you just register your child with his birth certificate. But here they ask for an identity document and educational records,” said Carla, who, like her sister, only wanted to be identified by her first name.

They have both adapted, but they complain about the lack of a protocol to regularize their situation.

“I would like to stay. I am in the process of bringing my daughter, who stayed in Venezuela, but it has become very difficult because I don’t have papers,” Carla said.

“I miss my family and the beaches. I am from the East, where it’s all coastline. There are beaches and islands there, it’s spectacular,” she added.

Eliana said “Chile is a country that opens its doors. There is a lot of work. We have never experienced hunger here, or gone without a place to sleep.”

She wants to bring another sister and her three children to Chile.

“I would like to make a life here, but it is difficult without papers,” she said. “With papers it would be easier to get health coverage, for example. I tried to legalize my status, but there are many hurdles. There is no set procedure with clear steps to follow.”

Another Venezuelan Erika Vargas, 42, originally from the western Andean state of Táchira in that country, lives with her husband and four children in Rancagua, 90 kilometers south of Santiago. She came to Chile five years ago.

“My husband came a year earlier and sent me a permit to travel with the children,” she told IPS.

“We’re doing fine…the children have documents and now we are in the process of getting permanent residency,” she explained while lining up at the Venezuelan consulate in the capital.

Her husband José González, 40, came from the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzoátegui thanks to a “democracy visa” created by former President Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022).

“I’m a civil engineer and I have a degree in public accounting, and I work in logistics in a mining company,” he said. “My wife came a year ago, she works in education. We all came legally.”

González lamented that he could not practice his profession because “to get my degrees recognized I would have to pay about six million pesos (7,500 dollars).”

What the experts say

The SJM’s Macarena Rodríguez said the presence of the military in the north “is aimed at preventing or reducing the influx of people with criminal records and the entry of weapons.”

“It’s a temporary measure that will be in place as long as the military is there, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem, which is providing care for these people,” she told IPS.

According to Rodríguez, the movement of troops is designed to attack the security crisis rather than forming part of a public policy regarding mobility.

“If you came in by means of an unauthorized crossing, which is the case with the majority, you have no way to regularize your situation… it doesn’t matter if you have a work contract or ties to Chile,” she said.

Located in front of the Venezuelan consulate, in the Santiago municipality of Providencia, Rincón Venezolano offers a popular menu of typical products from that country. Venezuelan food businesses and restaurants are making their way into the landscape of the capital and other Chilean cities. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS

Germán Campos-Herrera, an academic at the Diego Portales University, said the deployment of military troops forms part of “an institutional framework that guarantees that the use of firearms is restricted to cases where people’s lives are endangered.”
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He believes, however, that elements such as “a much stricter control of those who enter and leave and knowing who are the migrants who commit crimes and are in an irregular situation” are missing.

Rodríguez said “We had not experienced these levels of exodus in the region. None of the countries of the Southern Cone (of South America) have experienced this before.”

That is why Boric wants to talk with Bolivia and Venezuela and raised the issue at the 28th Ibero-American Summit, held in Santo Domingo on Mar. 24.

“There have been positive signals, from both Bolivian and Venezuelan authorities. They are willing to talk and it is an opportunity that we have to take advantage of,” said Foreign Minister Alberto van Klaveren.

“It was not a central theme of the Summit, but it was an opportunity to have contact with the authorities of both countries, express concern and make progress in a forum, towards contact and dialogue,” he added.

Thousands of undocumented immigrants await a solution to their lack of papers, and they praise positive examples, such as the Temporary Work Residence granted by Colombia.

“We could regularize ours status and contribute to the State,” commented Eliana, one of the Venezuelan sisters.

The National Migration Service told IPS that it is developing a project to connect visa applications with the National Employment Service.

“Every year there are unfilled vacancies available in agriculture, transportation or construction. With this project we not only seek to make the flow of migration more orderly but to regulate it and make our migration policy more economically rational,” the National Migration Service said.

Venezuelan migrants stranded in Guatemala after their journey to Mexico was cut short by new restrictions issued by the United States. Most of them, unable to afford to return to their home country, await possible humanitarian return flights. CREDIT: IMG

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 28 2022 (IPS)

Thousands of Venezuelans who have crossed the treacherous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama, or who have made the perilous journey through Central America and Mexico to reach the United States, have found themselves stranded in countries that do not want them, unable to continue their journey or to afford to return to their country.

Unexpectedly, on Oct. 12, the U.S. government announced that it would no longer accept undocumented Venezuelans who crossed its southern border, would deport them to Mexico and, in exchange, would offer up to 24,000 annual quotas, for two years, for Venezuelan immigrants to enter the country by air and under a new set of requirements.

“We were already in the United States when President Joe Biden gave the order, but they put us in a van and sent us back to Mexico. It’s not fair, on the 12th we had already crossed into the country,” a young man who identified himself as Antonio, among the first to be sent back to the border city of Tijuana, told reporters in tears.

He was one of approximately 150,000 Venezuelans who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border this year to join the 545,000 already in the U.S. by the end of 2021, according to U.S. authorities.

Raul was in a group that took a week to cross the jungle and rivers in the Darien Gap, bushwhacking in the rain and through the mud, suffering from hunger, thirst, and the threat of vermin and assailants. When he arrived at the indigenous village of Lajas Blancas in eastern Panama, he heard about the new U.S. regulation that rendered his dangerous journey useless.

There he told Venezuelan opposition politician Tomás Guanipa, who visited the village in October, that “the journey is too hard, I saw people die, someone I could not save because a river swept him away, and it was not worth it. Now what I have to do is return, alive, to my country.”

In Panama, as in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala and of course Mexico, there are now thousands of Venezuelans stranded, some still trying to reach and cross the U.S. border, others trying to get the funds they need to return home.

They fill the shelters that are already overburdened and with few resources to care for them. Sometimes they sleep on the streets, or are seen walking and begging for food or a little money, abruptly cut off from the dream of going to live and work legally in the United States.

That aim was fueled by the fact that the United States made the possibility of granting asylum to Venezuelans more flexible, as part of its opposition to the government of President Nicolás Maduro, which U.S. authorities consider illegitimate.

In addition, it established a protection status that temporarily allowed Venezuelans who reached the U.S. to stay and work.

Venezuela has been in the grip of an economic and political crisis over the last decade which, together with the impoverishment of the population, has produced the largest exodus in the history of the hemisphere: according to United Nations agencies, 7.1 million people have left the country – a quarter of the population.

Venezuelan migrants walk in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez between the Rio Grande and the wall that separates them from the United States, a border that they will no longer be able to cross on foot but only by air and with express permission from Washington. CREDIT: Rey R. Jáuregui/Pie de Página

Caught up in the elections

The flood of Venezuelan immigrants pouring across the southern border coincided with the tough campaign for the mid-term elections for the U.S. Congress in November, which could result in the control of both chambers by the Republican Party, strongly opposed to Democratic President Biden.

Republican governors and candidates from the south, strongly opposed to the government’s immigration policy and flexibility towards Venezuelans, decided to send busloads and even a plane full of Venezuelan asylum seekers to northern localities governed by Democratic authorities.

Thus, through misleading promises, hundreds of Venezuelans were bussed or flown and abandoned out in the open in New York, Washington, D.C. or Martha’s Vineyard, an island where millionaires spend their summers in the northeastern state of Massachusetts.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International denounced the use of migrants as political spoils or as a weapon in the election campaign.

Against this backdrop, the Biden administration changed its policy towards Venezuelans, closing the country’s doors to them at the southern border, reactivating Title 42, a pandemic public health order that allows for the immediate expulsion of people for health reasons, and reached an agreement with Mexico to return migrants to that country.

The 24,000 annual quotas provided as a consolation, for migrants who have sponsors responsible for their support in the United States, plus requirements such as not attempting illegal border crossings or not having refugee status in another country, is almost equivalent to the monthly volume of Venezuelans who tried to enter the U.S. this year.

A family of migrants reaches the end of their journey through the dangerous Darien jungle, between Colombia and Panama, on their long journey to reach the border between Mexico and the United States. But a new U.S. immigration measure prohibits access to the U.S. for Venezuelans. CREDIT: Nicola Rosso/UNHCR

What happens now?

In the immediate future, those who were on their way will be left in limbo and will now have to return to their country, where many sold everything – from their clothes to their homes – to pay for their perilous journey.

Hundreds of Venezuelans have begun to arrive in Caracas on flights that they themselves have paid for from Panama, while in Mexico and other countries they await the possibility of free air travel, of a humanitarian nature, because thousands of migrants have been left destitute.

There are entire families who were already living as immigrants in other countries, such as Chile, Ecuador or Peru – where there are one million Venezuelans in Lima for example – but decided to leave due to a hostile environment or the difficulties in keeping jobs or finding decent housing, in a generalized climate of inflation in the region.

This is the case told to journalists by Héctor, who with his wife, mother-in-law and three children invested almost 10,000 dollars in tickets from Chile to the Colombian island of San Andrés, in the Caribbean, from there by boat to Nicaragua, and by land until they were taken by surprise by the U.S. government’s announcement, when they reached Guatemala.

Now, in contact with relatives in the United States, he is considering the possibility of returning to the country he left three years ago for Chile, or trying to continue on, while waiting for another option to enter the U.S.

The United States has reported that crossings or attempts to cross its border by undocumented migrants have decreased significantly since Oct. 12.

Among the justifications for its action at the time, Washington said it sought to combat human trafficking and other crimes associated with irregular migration, and to discourage dangerous border crossings in the Darien Gap.

According to Panamanian government data, between January and Oct. 15 of this year, 184,433 undocumented migrants reached Panama from the Darien jungle, 133,597 of whom were Venezuelans.

After his return to the country on Oct. 25, Guanipa the politician told IPS that at least 70 percent of the migrants who crossed the Darien Gap in the last 12 months were Venezuelans, along with other Latin Americans and people from the Caribbean or African nations.

And, after collecting personal accounts of the death-defying crossing, he urged his fellow Venezuelans to “for no reason risk their lives” on this inhospitable stretch that is the gateway from South America to Central America.

At every Latin American border, migration rules are becoming more restrictive and Venezuelans wait patiently to be allowed access, often to try to reach the farthest destinations in the hemisphere, such as Chile or the United States. CREDIT: Gema Cortés/IOM

The Venezuelan government blames the massive exodus and the dangers faced in the Darien Gap on its political and media confrontation with the United States, while claiming that the numbers of reported migrants are wildly inflated and that, on the contrary, more than 360,000 Venezuelans have returned to the country since 2018.

Heads of United Nations agencies and international humanitarian organizations believe that given the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, the flow of migrants will continue, and they therefore call on host countries to establish rules and mechanisms to facilitate the integration of the migrants into their communities.

While the United States has slammed the door shut on Venezuelan migrants, in countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and some Central American nations, new rules are also being prepared to modify the policy of extending a helping hand to Venezuelans.

For example, Ecuador overhauled the Human Mobility Law to increase the grounds for deportation, such as “representing a threat to security”, and Colombia – which has received the largest number of Venezuelans – eliminated the office for the attention and socioeconomic integration of the migrant population.

Panama will require visas for those deported from Central America or Mexico, Peru is working to change regulations for the migrant population, and the government of Chile, which in the past has expelled hundreds of migrants on flights, announced that it will take measures to prevent unwanted immigration.

Of the 7.1 million Venezuelans registered as of September as migrants by U.N. agencies, the vast majority of them having left the country since 2013, almost six million were in neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Entire families have not only sought to reach the United States or Europe, but have traveled thousands of kilometers, in journeys they could never have dreamed of, with stretches by bus but often on foot, through clandestine jungle passes or cold mountains, to reach Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina or Chile.

Others tried their luck in hostile neighboring Caribbean islands and dozens lost their lives when the overcrowded boats in which they were trying to reach safe shores were shipwrecked.

Faced with the explosive phenomenon, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) established a platform for programs to help migrants in the region and host communities, which is coordinated by a former Guatemalan vice-president, Eduardo Stein.

Of their budget for 2022, based on pledges from donor countries and institutions, for 1.7 billion dollars, they have only received 300 million dollars, in another sign that Venezuelan migrants have ceased to play a leading role on the international stage.

A migrant child is escorted by a U.S. immigration enforcement agent. Credit: cc by 2.0

By Michelle Brané
SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

In recent months, an unprecedented surge of refugee women and children has been traveling alone to the United States to seek protection at our southern border.

The vast majority are fleeing their homes in the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and risking their lives as they make long and incredibly dangerous journeys to seek refuge on our soil.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has been closely monitoring this population since 2011. Through our research, we concluded over two years ago that without major changes in U.S. aid or foreign policy to the Central America region, the United States would continue to receive more vulnerable migrants due to the humanitarian crisis developing in the region.

Courtesy of Michelle Brané

Organised crime, forced gang recruitment, violence against women, and weak economic and social systems are all contributing to the pervasive insecurity in these countries.

The flow of refugees fleeing from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala has not only continued, but has increased dramatically and rapidly as violence in the region has escalated.

And refugees are not only coming to the United States. The United Nations has found that asylum requests in the the neighbouring countries of Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize have skyrocketed by 712 percent since 2009.

While some children may be seeking to reunite with their parents or family in the United States, the motivating factor forcing them from their homes is violence and persecution. The children we spoke with told us they feared they would die if they stayed in their home country, and although they might die during the journey, at least they would have a chance.

Particularly concerning about the recent surge is that the children making the perilous migration journey are now younger than in years past. It has become common for children as young as four to 10 years old to be picked up and arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Additionally, a higher percentage of the children are girls, many of whom arrive pregnant as a result of sexual violence. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently conducted research with this population and found that 58 percent of the children interviewed raised international protection concerns.

Children also come to the United States with their parents. Since 2012, the number of families arriving at the southern border of the United States has increased significantly. The vast majority of these families are made up of women with very young children and are fleeing the same violence and insecurity driving the refugee children.

Our country has a long and dedicated commitment to human rights, due process and the assurance that individuals who arrive at our borders seeking safety are not turned away without addressing their claims.

Under international and domestic law, we have an obligation to properly screen and provide protection for unaccompanied minors, trafficking victims and asylum seekers who arrive at our borders.

In recent months, however, the government has been unprepared and overwhelmed by the numbers of children and families in need. Rather than addressing the issue in a manner that is in line with our American ideals and recognising it as a regional refugee situation, the Obama administration is looking for a quick fix and compromising our values and the lives of women and children in the process by responding as though it were an immigration issue.

We are deeply concerned by the government’s recent announcement that it will drastically expand detention of families and will expedite the processing of asylum cases.

Harsh detention and deportation policies endanger the well-being of children and families, present a risk that individuals with legitimate claims to asylum and other forms of protection will be summarily returned to countries where their lives are seriously threatened, and do not work as a deterrent against future migration.

Additionally, the administration has proposed to roll back laws that are in place to protect children, in order to quickly and with no due process, deport kids back to the dangers they escaped.

This humanitarian refugee crisis is a complex human tragedy and needs both short-term and long-term attention. It requires a holistic approach that prioritises additional resources for addressing the root causes of this crisis, strengthening protection in the region, and reinforcing our protection and adjudication of claims, not blocking access to protection and sending women and children back to the dangerous situations they are fleeing without adequate due process.

The United States must not compromise its long-standing commitment to humanitarian principles in the hope of finding a quick solution.

Michelle Brané is director of the Migrant Rights & Justice Programme at the Women’s Refugee Commission. This article was originally published by New America Media – a network of ethnic news organisations in the U.S., and is reproduced here by arrangement with them.

A child holds a sign at a rally for immigration reform. Credit: Progress Ohio/cc by 2.0

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 29 2014 (IPS)

Rights advocates and lawmakers are expressing increased concern over the United States’ handling of the sudden influx of tens of thousands of undocumented child and female migrants from Central America.

Last week, President Barack Obama announced that military bases would be converted to detention centres to house the nearly 50,000 unaccompanied minors that have arrived at the southern U.S. border in recent months. Recent data says some 3,000 are being apprehended daily, though the reasons for their arrival remain debated.

Meanwhile, sentiment is building against the plan, with some suggesting the detention centres could violate international rights obligations.

“We’re very disturbed to hear that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centre spots, starting with a large facility in New Mexico,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“There’s evidence that detaining children causes severe and sometimes lasting harm, including depression, anxiety and cognitive damage. That’s why detaining children for their immigration status is banned under international law.”

Friday morning the Artesia Detention Centre in New Mexico began housing families, mostly women with children, with plans to deport them within two weeks.

In 2009, fewer than 20,000 minors were apprehended in the United States on immigration charges. Yet between October 2013 and May, there have been more than 47,000 apprehensions, more than a 50 percent increase.

Following the marked increase of children with refugee concerns, the United Nations has interviewed more than 400 children on their experiences in their home countries. Nearly 60 percent reportedly meet the requirements for international protection, in what the U.N. called a conservative estimate.

“We heard stories of children watching classmates tortured, dismembered, threats against girls,” Leslie Velez, of the U.N. Refugee Agency, told reporters last week. “This wasn’t just about gangs but criminal armed groups, drug trafficking, cartels, transnational criminal organisations – all operating with greater and greater impunity.”

Detention as deterrence

When a child is apprehended by border patrol, they are typically held at a border patrol station and, within 72 hours, are moved to a federal resettlement office. From there, some 90 percent are released to a sponsor in the U.S., usually a family member, and then must appear before court.

The recent influx, however, means that many kids are now staying at border control offices for more than the 72-hour limit, according to the Inter-American Commission for Human rights (IACHR). Over 100 reports of physical, verbal and sexual abuse by agents towards children have also been filed in a complaint by NGOs against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“We understand that we need to get people away from the border and process them, so we don’t necessarily object to a short-term facility,” Michelle Brane, of the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“But there’s a lot of talk about ‘stopping the flow,’ to use detention as a deterrence, which we are against … Stopping people’s access to asylum is not in compliance with international refugee law.”

Brane notes that the United States regularly asks countries around the world to uphold international protection standards, with Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan currently accepting millions of Syrian refugees into their much smaller countries. “The numbers here are small in comparison,” she says.

In 2006, Brane visited a family detention centre where she found children who were losing weight, were stressed and could not go outside.

“When we asked children and mothers how they were doing, they broke down … there is no humane way to lock babies in,” she says.

Brane describes community alternatives to detention centres that she calls cheaper and more efficient. Under such programmes, she says, undocumented migrants report to court 96 percent of the time.

Others say that conditions today are not as bad.

“It’s definitely a place where everyone going through feels that it’s not an ideal place for children. But are children’s basic needs being taken care of? Yes, they are,” Juanita Molina, executive director of Border Action Network, a rights group, told IPS about her recent visit to a detention centre in Arizona.

Molina said that many government officials were doing their best to treat the children well, with some facilities now having toys. But she warns that the lack of facilities and staff can defeat even the best-intended workers.

“The federal government needs to reframe how they look at this,” she says, “not as a detention crisis, but as a humanitarian and refugee crisis.”

Both Molina and Brane both voice concerns over the speed with which the government is able to process cases.On Friday, the Obama administration announced it would process cases at Artesia within 10 to 15 days.

“The lack of due process feels irresponsible,” Molina says. “It’s possible that it’s lawful, but it’s not moral.”

Root causes

Meanwhile, immigration specialists argue that the root cause of the issue is violence in Central America – not lenient U.S. immigration policies, as many conservative lawmakers here are claiming.

“This child migration is not a result of failed border security,” Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

“It is the result of profound push factors in Central America – violence, instability and lack of economic opportunity – coupled with the consequences, sometimes unintended, of humane, well-meaning U.S. laws, policies and court rulings … and increasingly sophisticated human smuggling networks that have telegraphed to Central Americans that their children can enter the U.S.”

To address violence in Central America, Vice-President Joe Biden announced from Guatemala last week some 254 million dollars in related aid.

“The Obama administration’s response, thus far, hits on some of the immediate and longer-term responses necessary to deal with this significantly increased flow,” Mittelstadt says.

“The various forms of assistance for Central America represent a recognition of the deep factors in the region that are responsible for part of the flow, including endemic poverty, lack of economic opportunity and gang violence.”

Yet she notes that it remains unclear whether the new assistance represents a one-time commitment or a longer-standing pledge.

Also unclear is the effect this crisis will have on legislative attempts to overhaul the United States’ immigration policies.

“I think this crisis underscores the dire need for comprehensive immigration reform,” Human Rights Watch’s Long says.

“Immigration reform would simultaneously address ongoing rights abuses in the immigration system, including family separation and communities living in fear. It would also provide certainty about the law and who is or who is not eligible for legal status.”

Crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria. Credit: Graneits, CC 2.0 on Flickr

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, May 15 2014 (IPS)

Since November last year, Bulgaria has virtually closed its borders to an inflow of Syrian asylum seekers and other migrants trying to enter the country from Turkey, while EU institutions concerned appear to have acquiesced to this. 

Faced with a massive inflow of asylum seekers in 2013 – around 11,000 people lodged asylum applications in the country in 2013 compared with 1,000 on average in previous years – Bulgaria implemented a plan in autumn last year “to manage the crisis resulting from the enhanced migratory pressure.” Its main elements included building a 33 kilometre fence on the border with Turkey and increasing by 1,500 units the border police contingents patrolling that border.

"HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection.” - HRW report from April 29
It seems to have paid off: just over 100 asylum seekers managed to enter Bulgaria each month in the first part of this year, while at the start of the implementation of the plan, as many as 100 people on some days were being prevented from entering the country, according to statements of the Ministry of Interior. Svetozar Lazarov, Secretary General in the ministry, told Bulgarian media at the end of April that, since the beginning of 2014, 2,367 people have been prevented from crossing the border into Bulgaria.

The influx last year, which frightened Bulgarian authorities, came about in the context of a tightening of Greece’s borders and consequent shift northwards of land migrant routes from Turkey. Over half of the asylum seekers lodging claims in Bulgaria last year came from war-torn Syria. Over two million Syrians are currently seeking protection abroad, half of them children. Turkey alone is currently hosting over 700,000 Syrians.

Human Rights Watch published a report on April 29 in which it documents how, as part of implementation of the Bulgarian plan, people crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria were being summarily pushed back into Turkey, without being given a chance to lodge asylum applications and sometimes suffering abuse from border guards. The evidence of pushbacks comes from 177 interviews HRW conducted with migrants in Bulgaria, Turkey and Syria, during which 44 cases of summary return involving 519 people were reconstructed.

“From the situation in the countries of origin of most of the irregular border crossers – Syria and Afghanistan – it is reasonable to believe that many are seeking protection, yet the people we interviewed who were rejected at the border or from within the territory of Bulgaria were not given the opportunity to lodge asylum claims upon apprehension,” Bill Frelick, Director of HRW’s refugee programme, told IPS.

“HRW believes that the Bulgarian government has, since November 6, 2013, embarked on a systematic practice to prevent undocumented asylum seekers from crossing into Bulgaria to lodge claims for international protection,” says the report.

According to the rights group, this strategy by the Bulgarian government breaches the non-refoulement principle (not returning or expelling people to places where their lives and freedoms could be threatened) included in the 1951 Refugee Convention that Bulgaria has ratified, as well as in EU legislation that Bulgaria is bound to implement (the EU’s Return Directive, the Schengen Border Code and the EU Charter of Fundamental Human Rights).

“The border pushbacks documented in this report follow no proper procedure and carry a negative presumption that irregular border crossers are not seeking asylum when the presumption, at least with regard to people fleeing Syria and Afghanistan, ought to be that they are,” explains the report.

The study was lambasted in Bulgaria, including by the head of the State Agency for Refugees and the director of the Bulgarian Red Cross – one of the non-governmental bodies that works most closely with authorities – though both individuals have admitted to not having read the analysis. While critics focus on the fact that conditions for migrants in Bulgaria have improved since last year – a fact that the HRW report mentions anyway – no one addresses the main allegation, that the country has been implementing a systematic refoulement plan.

Bulgaria’s Minister of Interior Tsvetlin Yovchev, the main figure behind the plan, disputed claims by HRW that violence had been committed by border police against migrants entering the country. He told Bulgarian media that a guarantee of proper behaviour by Bulgarian police is the constant presence in border areas of specialists of Frontex, the EU border management agency.

That Frontex lends credibility to the Bulgarian government, at least in front of domestic audiences, is further hinted at by the fact that the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior tends to play up the numbers of Frontex troops present in the country. According to Frontex, only 40-50 Frontex officers have been present in Bulgaria at a time since 2011, and the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior is adding up numbers to report for example that, “in 2013, 3 joint operations were conducted on Bulgaria’s external borders which are also external for the European Union, with a total number of 216 experts and 30 translators from Frontex.”

Asked by IPS about Frontex’s participation in the plan implemented by the Bulgarian authorities, Frontex spokesperson Ewa Moncure replied that Frontex is an operational agency which merely implements border surveillance and second line activities (such as interviewing of migrants) agreed with the government in Sofia. According to Frontex, whatever measures the Bulgarian government has taken since November, even if Frontex was involved in implementation, are Bulgaria’s primary responsibility. Frontex also says that it investigates any complaints received about human rights abuses but that it had not received any in Bulgaria that refer to the violations cited by the HRW report.

In November last year, the European Ombudsman rejected “Frontex’s view that human rights infringements are exclusively the responsibility of the Member States concerned,” invoking as a case in point the deployment of EU border guards to Greece where migrant detainees were kept in detention centres under unacceptable conditions..

Given that refoulement is contradictory to EU legislation, human rights groups have said the European Commission could potentially start infringement procedures against the country (this can lead to legal action in front of the European Court of Justice and sanctions), but no decisive steps have been taken so far. Michele Cercone, spokesperson for the EU Commission on Home Affairs, responding to claims in the HRW report, told IPS that “the Commission is closely monitoring the asylum situation in Bulgaria and is in regular contact with the Bulgarian authorities.”

He said a so-called “pilot letter” has been sent to Bulgaria with a request for information, on the basis of which the EC will decide on the next steps; this, however, does not constitute the start of an infringement procedure, which would require a “letter of formal notice” coming only if the Commission were unsatisfied with the performance of the Bulgarian authorities.

3,000 people crossing the Bulgarian border in October 2013 compared with 99 in January 2014 are “figures which speak for themselves,” Ana Fontal from the European Council on Refugees and Exile, a pan-European alliance of 82 migrant rights groups, told IPS.

“The European Commission should examine without delay border practices at the Bulgarian/Turkish border to investigate possible breaches of relevant provisions in EU asylum and migration law and consider initiating infringement proceedings if Bulgaria fails to take action to remedy the breaches identified,” said Fontal. “Other EU countries should not send asylum seekers back to Bulgaria until conditions there improve and authorities comply with international and EU law.”

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Puzzled by the immigration debate in the United States? Remember the Maginot Line.

That formidable French system of fortifications was built in the 1930s by André Maginot, the French minister of war, to guard against invasion from the east. Unfortunately, the Nazi blitzkrieg did an end run around it and overran France in six weeks.

Poor Maginot has become shorthand for “fighting the last war”. But at least he was trying to confront an existential and imminent threat.

The dreaded invasion of “illegal aliens”, against which our own Maginots have built hundreds of miles of border walls, called out the National Guard and scrambled the drones, actually peaked in 2000 and has long since been over.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, slightly more Mexicans have gone home to Mexico than have come here, and currently net migration appears to be near zero. The total population of undocumented immigrants is down about eight percent from its 2007 peak.

And ultimately, rather than devastation, the influx has brought modest but widespread benefits to our economy and society.

This exodus began in the mid-1990s, driven by powerful push and pull forces. In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement drove many poor farmers off their lands, and the Peso Crisis of 1994 slashed real wages by some 20 percent. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy’s technology-fuelled upswing raised wages even for low-income workers.

Such an economic convergence is unlikely to occur again. The ups and downs of the Mexican economy are now more tightly coupled with ours. And declining birth rates In Mexico along with increasing education and job opportunities suggest that factors pushing emigrants towards El Norte may continue to shrink in the medium to long term.

But our Maginots are still hunkered in their bunkers, demanding measures that were never cost-effective and often counter-productive against a phantom enemy.

The U.S.-Mexico border runs nearly 2,000 miles, much of it across the Sonora Desert, between a very rich country and a moderately poor one. It can never be completely secured against migration no matter how much it’s militarised. We long ago reached the point of diminishing returns for throwing money, technology and manpower at it.

Maginot-isation has made crossing more grueling and dangerous, but nearly all those willing to keep trying get across eventually. Meanwhile, an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the undocumented simply entered legally and overstayed their visas. The only things that effectively deter determined immigrants are tight job markets here or improved ones back home.

The border enforcement surge has also had some nasty unintended consequences. The resulting tripling of the cost of a coyote (guide) has provided an effective subsidy to the drug cartels that control key areas of the border and prey on migrants. Heavy enforcement in populated areas has driven more crossings out into the desert wilderness, where outrageous numbers of people continue to perish.

The fortified border has also discouraged circular migration. Since the beginning, the dominant pattern has been to travel back and forth every year or two and eventually build a better life back home. Now growing costs and dangers have led more immigrants to stay longer in the U.S. or to settle here permanently and bring their families.

After over a century of rising and falling with the economic tides of both countries, unauthorised immigration is deeply embedded in both cultures and economies. It’s illegal in the same way that speeding or parking overtime is.

You can also look at it as a kind of international trespassing, and if you trespass for a benign purpose over a long enough time, U.S. common law allows you to acquire title through “adverse possession”.

As to economic effects, most labour economists have found overall benefits to U.S.-born workers, the broader economy and fiscal balances. Even for the six percent of native workers without a high-school diploma, most research shows close to a wash between negative and positive effects.

Most tellingly, organisations that actually represent low-wage workers, from labour unions to community groups, heavily favour bringing migrants out of the shadows into legality and working in solidarity with them, which would help raise the floor of the labour market.

So let’s see: if undocumented immigrants didn’t do anything wrong and they’re contributing to U.S. society, why is a pathway to citizenship an “amnesty”, as restrictionists often call it?

Rather than debating how many more miles of Maginot Line to build, we should be focusing on how best to integrate unauthorised immigrants into our economy while raising living standards for all low-income families.

Instead of lavishing corporate welfare on Boeing, Raytheon and Corrections Corporation of America to militarise the border and jail non-criminal immigrants, we would get far more bang for the buck by sending a small fraction of that money to immigrant-sending regions in Mexico and Central America for jobs, housing, education and health care. And if we wanted to be over-the-top sensible, we could spend the rest of it on the same things here at home.

Unauthorised immigration to the U.S. is very unlikely to reach the levels of 10 to 15 years ago again. But if it picks up once more in a genuine economic recovery, immigration reform must grant enough visas to unskilled workers to meet the demands of the economy for their labour without squeezing low-wage workers already here.

That will require continuous negotiation and adjustment. A good way to enable this would be to create a public commission of immigration stakeholders from labour, business, communities and academia, such as we already have in communications, trade, banking and other areas.

To deal with the real security issues at the border, we could do worse than to listen to former Arizona State Attorney General Terry Goddard. The detailed plan he has laid out would hit transnational criminal cartels where it hurts by attacking their ability to launder money, and to move it and product across the line.

As satirist Stephen Colbert said of the “border surge” proposed by anti-immigrant politicians, “It worked in Iraq. You hardly see any Mexicans sneaking into Baghdad.”

Peter Costantini covered migration issues from 2006 through 2009 for IPS. He has also written for many publications about Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua and international economics.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant prepares to head to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 28 2013 (IPS)

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators on Monday unveiled a set of principles that will serve as an initial framework for a legislative push that many are increasingly optimistic could result in the largest overhaul of the country’s immigration system in decades.

While the exact details of any future legislation will take months to be formulated, some advocates are warning that too much emphasis is being placed on enforcing security along the U.S.-Mexico border, an element that has stymied progress on immigration reform for years.

The announcement comes just a day ahead of a planned major address by President Barack Obama, in which he will outline his own vision for such an overhaul. While some are suggesting the congressional package may have undercut the president’s announcement, on Monday the president’s spokesperson called the new proposal “a big deal … an important development”.

“Other bipartisan groups of senators have stood in this same spot, but we believe this will be the year Congress finally gets it right,” one of the members of the eight-senator team that put together the framework, Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator and a key Obama ally, told journalists Monday.

“The politics on this have been turned upside down. For the first time ever, there is more political risk in opposing this type of reform than in supporting it, and we believe we have a window to act.”

The new proposals outline cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, increasing visas for skilled workers, and establishing an agricultural worker programme. Critically, and most controversially, they also foresee creating a “tough but fair path to citizenship” for the 11 million unauthorised immigrants currently thought to be living in the country.

Schumer says the legislation will hopefully be out of the Senate and headed to the U.S. House of Representatives by late spring or summer, while the House is reportedly already at work on its own bill.

“The Senate immigration framework is a welcome step forward toward identifying the core issues to address and negotiate,” Manuel Orozco, director of remittances and development at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The requirement of a two-stage legalisation process for undocumented migrants, accompanied by improved measures to reduce the number of visa overstays and to respond to demands for skilled foreign labour, set important parametres for a pathway to citizenship and for an orderly process of integrating foreign labour into the U.S. economy with fewer disruptions.”

Border obsession

Worrying some advocates, however, is that the new proposal makes that path to citizenship “contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required”. In part, this threatens to offer a retread of the debate that has so polarised U.S. politicians in recent years, with conservatives demanding that the border be “secured” before any broader reforms can progress.

“It sounds like using the word ‘contingent’ means that border protection will again be an obstacle to reform, and the reality is that it doesn’t need to be that,” Vicki B. Gaubeca, director of the Regional Center for Border Rights, a programme by the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told IPS.

“I don’t think the American public is aware of how many resources are already deployed along the border, and really you don’t need more Border Patrol agents – we have enough boots on the ground. Instead, we need to shift back to the many other parts of the immigration system that haven’t been updated in decades.”

Gaubeca says that recent years have led to such an increase in the number of personnel along the border that there are now 10 Border Patrol agents per mile. The result is a 40-year low in apprehensions.

“What’s ironic is that immigration is actually less problematic now than it has been for decades,” Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of economics at Duke University, said Monday.

He notes that the flow of immigrants has slowed “to a trickle” from Mexico, where the birth rate has fallen over the past generation. Such trends, Vigdor says, suggest that the intensity of the Mexican immigration to the United States of the past quarter-century is most likely now a thing of the past.

“To do reform the right way, though, Congress will have to stop obsessing about last decade’s problem – the porous Mexican border,” Vigdor says, “and instead focus on the future, when the United States will be competing with other developed countries to attract the most talented, entrepreneurial workers.”

First step

Reforming the United States’ massive and unwieldy immigration system has for decades been politically explosive on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Although major new legislation was put in place during the mid-1980s, since that time millions of undocumented migrants are estimated to have come into the country.

Those communities have played a significant part in undergirding the country’s economy, but they’ve also galvanised conservative reaction on the issue. A massively heavy-handed response by the U.S. government has not only funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars towards anti-immigration efforts, but also forced illegal immigrants to live shadowed and marginalised lives.

With 70 percent of the country’s Latino population having supported President Obama’s re-election bid, however, a newly bipartisan understanding of the political, economic and humane impetus has now led to an unprecedented legislative push.

On Monday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, expressed its “strong support” for the new Senate proposal as a starting point, broadly mirroring sentiment expressed across ideologies on Monday.

“This (framework) represents an important start to the legislative debate, particularly since this is a bipartisan effort and represents a new willingness to work together,” Doris Meissner, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington think tank, and a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, told IPS.

“The proposal succeeds in attempting to balance the demands for effective enforcement with the practical reality that 11 million people are living and working in this country without legal status and that their situation must be addressed.”

Earlier this month, MPI published the first comprehensive look at how the U.S. immigration complex has grown in recent years. According to that report, Washington spends more on immigration enforcement each year than on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, and keeps more people locked up for immigration purposes – around 430,000 in 2011 – than the entire federal prisons system.

Maria Lourdes, a Cuban, has two passports, one from the island and another from Spain, but until now traveling was only a dream.

“With the new regulations it will be easier, because as a Spanish citizen I don’t need a visa to leave, but to get to the United States I will still have to go through another country,” she told IPS.

In order to take advantage of a historic new migration policy that came into effect in Cuba on Monday, Jan. 14, this 50-year-old woman expects that her passage will be financed by one of her relatives in the U.S. or Spain, the land of her grandfather, thanks to whom she got this European citizenship.

“My cousin told me that in both countries I could work caring for the elderly. I want to leave to make some money and return,” Lourdes, who says she is “very poor”, added.

However, the severe economic crisis affecting Spain discourages Cubans intending to emigrate, even those more qualified than Lourdes.

The immigration reform, anxiously awaited by Cuba’s 11.2 million people, includes the elimination of permits to leave the country, and renders obsolete the letter of invitation from abroad that was required to obtain the permits.

Both documents had become cumbersome to acquire, and prices soared to about 300 dollars for any trip for personal reasons.

Starting Monday, Jan. 14, it will be enough to have a simple passport, which is issued by the offices that provide identity cards, and of course a visa for the country of travel.

While there are some nations that Cuban nationals can visit without a visa, those of greatest interest, the United States and Spain to name just two, do require it, making entry difficult.

Another Cuban named Teresa, an economist who resigned in 2012 from the company where she held a management position, recently obtained Spanish citizenship for herself and her son.  Now, she is unsure she took the right step to improve their economic situation.

“I notice that my family is not so interested in having me, they advise me to wait a bit, at least to see how things go over there,” she admitted to IPS, referring to Spain’s unemployment crisis.

IPS collected numerous stories about the new immigration policy, many of which bore striking similarities one another.

But for some, the revised law in this Caribbean island comes too late, because they opted some time ago for permanent residence abroad.

The new measures “represent an inevitable correction and an improvement in the country’s relations with its emigrants, though the road to normalisation of ties with the exiled migrants will still be long,” Cuban journalist Boris Caro, who has been residing in Canada for more than a year, told IPS.

A list circulated by the newspaper ‘Juventud Rebelde’ (Rebel Youth), includes points as far away as Vanuatu, Palau and Tuvalu for stays of no more than 30 days without need of a visa.

The only Latin American country that does not require that document is Ecuador, for trips that do not exceed 90 days, while some neighbouring Caribbean islands also do not require it for stays of 28 to 90 days.

Argentina, for example, requires all foreigners, except those from neighbouring countries, to provide a record of the hotel booking that coincides with the days of travel, a travel ticket, itinerary and proof of economic means to afford the stay.  But if a person plans to stay with a citizen who extended an invitation, he or she will need to provide a notarised letter.

In a statement issued last Friday in Havana to accredited foreign media, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland warned that her country’s immigration policy would not change, and stressed, “Cuban citizens still require a valid U.S. visa or entry authorisation to enter the United States.”

“We continue to encourage people not to risk their lives by undertaking dangerous sea journeys, and we note that most countries still require that Cuban citizens have entry visas,” Nuland added.

The United States is currently the largest recipient of Cuban migrants.

Decree-Law 302, which amends the 1976 Migration Act of Cuba, establishes special regulations for, among others, university graduates and managers who work in activities vital for the country’s social, economic, scientific and technical development. The new rules are designed to preserve the skilled workforce.

Thus, travel authorisation for private matters requires an examination of each particular case, such as those of high-performance athletes, coaches and trainers “vital to the Cuban sports movement”, and mid-level technical expertise needed to maintain health services and scientific and technical activity.

However, additional provisions were rescinded by a ministerial decision in 2004, which created exit obstacles for health sector personnel, an official source confirmed to IPS. That means personnel from that sector will be treated the same as the rest of their countrymen, and enjoy the right to travel freely for personal reasons.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics and Information, Cuban health personnel in 2011 numbered some 265,000 people, of which 78,000 were doctors. Cuba currently has more than 38,000 healthcare employees in 66 countries, mainly in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

In what Havana has denounced as a manoeuvre to promote the leak of professionals from the country, the U.S. implemented a special entry permit (the Cuban Medical Professional Parole) in 2006 to house Cuban doctors who carry out missions in developing countries and are seeking residence in this powerful northern country.

*Marcela Valente contributed to this report from Buenos Aires.

Two Border Patrol agents and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer stationed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Credit: CBP Photographer Josh Denmark

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

The United States government is spending more on immigration enforcement each year than it is on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, according to the first comprehensive look at how the country’s sprawling immigration complex has grown over the past decade.

Likewise, on a daily basis the U.S. immigration system has more people in detention – around 430,000 in fiscal year 2011 – than the entire federal prisons system.

These numbers have grown dramatically in the context of the United States’ massively stepped-up counterterrorism programmes in the aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. Yet as years of arguments among U.S. lawmakers over how to overhaul the country’s immigration system have remained inconclusive, the result of this deadlock has been the consolidation of an ‘enforcement only’ approach.

“No nation anywhere in the world has been as determined, has made as deep and expensive a commitment or has had as deep a reach in its enforcement efforts as the U.S. has had,” Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington think tank, said here on Monday.

“This is a reach that spans from local courtrooms and jails all the way to the ability of would-be travellers to the U.S. to actually get on a plane – an extension of U.S. borders well beyond the country’s physical boundaries.”

Yet, Papademetriou cautions, “Make no mistake, it is indeed a system … in which the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

In the quarter-century since the U.S. Congress first passed legislation signalling a new, harder line on illegal immigration – the start of the ‘enforcement era’ – spending on immigration enforcement has topped some 219 billion dollars, according to a new report released by MPI on Monday, the first comprehensive look at how the many components of the U.S. immigration system have grown exponentially over the past decade.

“This report is a gamer changer, confirming that Congress should not spend any additional resources on immigration enforcement, especially when our budget is so constrained,” Don Lyster, Washington director for the National Immigration Law Center, told IPS.

“What is missing from this report is the human impact of the billions of dollars spent on immigration enforcement. Millions of families and communities have been ripped apart – parents separated from their children, spouses separated from each other – because of Congress’s singular focus on enforcement rather than on creating a process for immigrants to apply for citizenship. It’s time to change that conversation once and for all.”

Aggravated felonies

While the 1986 legislation put in place the groundwork for today’s system, the funding and implementation only really started to strengthen following the attacks of 9/11, when immigration enforcement became a cornerstone of the country’s new counterterrorism approach.

The result has been a “scored-earth policy towards illegal immigrants, especially those with criminal history,” Muzaffar Chishti, a co-author of the new report, said at a panel discussion of the report’s findings here on Monday. The new policies, he notes, have “unleashed an extraordinary nexus between the criminal justice system and immigration system, clearly unprecedented in any enforcement regime.”

Previously, the U.S. government tended only to deport immigrants who had committed major crimes. In 1996, however, the U.S. Congress added a new category that is only used in immigration law – “aggravated felony” – which has since come to include 50 crimes in nearly three dozen categories, many of which had previously been considered to be relatively minor or even misdemeanours.

The result has been an unprecedented increase in the number of criminal prosecutions for purported immigration violations. Between 2001 and 2009, criminal prosecutions for such transgressions rose sixfold, Chishti says, from 16,000 to 92,000 a year, while 50 percent of all federal prosecutions are now related to immigration.

According to the report, the five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border, home to around 10 percent of the overall population, now make up nearly half of all federal felony prosecutions in the country.

Many worry that the incredible growth of the U.S. immigration system has outstripped any ability, on the part of the government or external observers, to offer substantive oversight.

“When agencies grow at levels of 20 to 30 percent in a budget year – and that has happened in some years in the last decade – the accountability mechanisms can never keep up,” Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and co-author of the new report, warned Monday.

“But in addition, these agencies are not terribly transparent, so the degree to which there may or may not be oversight taking place is not easy to determine.”

A formidable machine

Several trends have recently converged in the United States that have led many to suggest that Washington may now be closer to a major overhaul of its immigration system than at anytime in the past decade. Such trends include ongoing demographics changes in the country that have changed political considerations, as well as ongoing economic crunches that have forced a rethink on nearly all government expenditure.

“In this belt-tightening era, our government can’t afford to continue to spend billions of dollars on immigration enforcement without a national immigration strategy,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, here in Washington, said in analysis e-mailed to IPS.

“The border is as secure as it can get without a functioning legal immigration infrastructure provided by broad immigration reform. Congress should get to work right away on long-lasting, practical solutions that fundamentally improve our immigration process.”

Yet even as momentum gathers for a renewed immigration discussion here in Washington, change may not be as straightforward as some hope. Among other considerations, the machinery may have simply become too large.

Although President Barack Obama has said that comprehensive immigration reform would be one of the top priorities of his second term, his first term actually set a record for deportations – some 1.6 million in the last four years.

“Many have questioned why an administration devoted to comprehensive reform would remove the greatest number of people of any administration in U.S. history,” Donald Kerwin, executive director for the Center for Migration Studies, an educational institute, and co-author of the new report, said Monday.

“The fact is that the legal authorities, operational systems, enforcement programmes and financial investments since 1986 have made large-scale removals almost an inevitability. They’ve made high levels of enforcement an institutional priority – quite simply, the machinery is already in place.”

The immigration detention centre of Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of the Polish capital Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

A recent hunger strike, involving over 70 migrants detained in heavily guarded centers across Poland, is forcing the country to face its new responsibilities as a migration hub within the European Union.

Poland currently has six detention centres, which host ‘irregular migrants’, or foreigners caught living illegally in Poland, awaiting deportation after their asylum claims have been rejected or after getting caught trying to cross the Polish border that leads deeper into the EU.

At the end of October, an estimated 375 migrants were being held in these centres. Among them were 33 children, including at least one year-old baby; three of the children were unaccompanied.

Georgians and Russians of Chechen nationality currently make up the bulk of migrants in Poland, though more recently Syrians, too, have had a significant presence in detention centers.

The hunger strikers, mostly Georgians and Chechens, were demanding better conditions in the camps, but also disputed the use of detention as a means of addressing the thorny issue of migration.

The protest was coordinated across four camps: Lesznowola, Bialystok, Biala Podlaska, and Przemysl. It lasted only a few days, ending when humanitarian organisations visited the camps and promised to work with the institutions’ management on improving living conditions.

The detention camps in Poland have functioned under the authority of the National Border Guards since 2008 and conditions inside vary widely.

Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Biala Podlaska, located in the eastern town by the same name, close to the border with Belarus, is a modern facility constructed in 2008 and funded almost entirely by the European Union.

At first glance, the two camps could not differ more. The narrow corridors at Lesznowola are replaced by shiny, freshly painted spaces in Biala Podlaska.

The non-English, non-Russian-speaking management staff at Lesznowola stand in stark contrast to a highly communicative management team – equipped with translators – at Biala Podlaska, where staff in perfectly pressed uniforms roam around the corridors wearing professional smiles.

Biala Podlaska is equipped with a green football field, while Lesznowola only has plans to eventually build one on part of its cemented courtyard surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls.

But upon entering the halls of either institution, it quickly becomes clear that, for those living behind bars almost round the clock – with the exception of mealtimes, exercises and the occasional educational activity – the situation is exactly the same.

At the first sound of visitors approaching, adults and children stick their heads out of the cells that line the hallway, their hands and faces pushed against the bars, curious, waiting. Even a mundane visit becomes a noteworthy event in a place where nothing happens.

Kicked around “like a ball”

Thirty-six-year-old Iranian Leila Naeimi, who was released in early October after spending two months in Lesznowola, has harsh words about the conditions there.

“Everywhere you see only walls, everywhere the guards are with us, they treat us like animals,” she told IPS, adding that guards make daily inspections at 6 a.m., entering the rooms without even knocking on the door.

Naeimi, who she fled Iran fearing prosecution for her work as a women’s rights activist, says that she has often been the target of sexually abusive comments from border guards, both when entering Poland and also in the detention centre.

She claims basic hygiene products were never sufficient and that the food served in the centre was of poor quality.

Her greatest grievance, however, has to do with the EU’s attitude towards migrants in general.

“They can send you from country to country whenever they want, they think they can play with people’s lives…as if I was a ball they can just kick around.

“We need normal lives, we wouldn’t have left our countries if things had been good there. I’ve had too many problems just because I’m Iranian, just because of my nationality,” Naeimi lamented.

Osman Rafik, a 33-year-old Pakistani man who was detained in Bialystok at the time of this interview, has already spent eight months in the camp, but decided against joining the migrants’ hunger strike, claiming its goals were too “ambitious” and “diverse”.

While he did complain about conditions in the camp and even asked IPS for help with securing medicines, his primary concern was not with everyday life in the camp but with the arbitrary nature of migration policies.

“We keep being asked why we came to this country if we are from Pakistan, but they must understand that we are not criminals just because we crossed the borders into Europe.

“I would like to stay here in Poland if I (am) released,” he continued. “After all, it has been almost one year since I have been in this country and life is not so long, people live about 50 years on average. They (the immigration authorities) have already taken away one year of my life.

“We cannot go back to Pakistan, we have problems there, but authorities here do not understand that, they treat us all the same, whether we have problems back home or not,” he concluded.

*This story is the first of a two-part series on immigration in the European Union.

By Rebecca Hanser
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

Along the borders of modern Europe, migrants have much to contend with, ranging from contradictory and confusing national immigration policies to horrific war zones, which these borders areas are slowly becoming.

Their stories and more are the subject of journalist and writer Matthew Carr’s latest book, “Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Community”, which takes the reader on a 279-page journey across the heavily debated and pressured border regions of contemporary Europe.

Matthew Carr, author of the book “Fortress Europe”. Photo courtesy of Matt Carr.

Throughout his research for the book, Carr “heard some very grim stories” and met “migrants trapped in unbelievably vulnerable situations”, the author told IPS as he elaborated on his face-to-face interviews with migrants.

These migrants, predominantly from North Africa, risk their lives to cross seas, deserts and mountains to reach the shores of Europe, a continent they believe will bring them freedom, refuge and a brighter future. Instead, they find hardship in exploitation, deportation, racial discrimination and xenophobia that together amount to violations of their human rights.

Carr spoke to IPS U.N. correspondent Rebecca Hanser about his latest book, the writing process and highlights of his research.

Q: “Fortress Europe” covers terrain similar to your last book, “Blood and Faith”, which covered the expulsion of Muslims from Spain in the early seventeenth century. Why did you choose this topic and what draws you to these themes?

A: The seventeenth century expulsion of Spain’s Morisco minority was an early example of a phenomenon that has often been repeated in European history, in which powerful societies victimise social groups depicted as alien, inferior and incompatible, and attempt to “purify” themselves through violence, persecution and exclusion.

I wrote that book as a “warning from history” in the context of Europe’s obsession with immigration, and the increasingly prevalent rhetoric that represents Muslim immigration in particular as an existential and cultural threat. So writing about migrants, refugees and borders was in many ways a logical progression from that.

Q: You mentioned that it took you two and a half years to complete the research for and write this book. Can you tell us something about this journey? What were its highlights, and how has it changed your life?

Every book you write changes your way of thinking to some extent, and this one is no exception. Travelling around these borders, I constantly heard some very grim stories. I met migrants trapped in unbelievably vulnerable situations. When I first started out on these journeys I was shocked by what I heard, but within a short time such stories became almost routine.

At the same time I was constantly struck by the resilience and strength of many of the migrants I met. And wherever I went I met men and women in non-governmental and solidarity organisations who went to extraordinary lengths to try and help them. Without their help I could never have written the book.

Q: In “Fortress Europe”, you often refer to Europe’s history to describe the atrocities and deleterious situations migrants deal with. Is history is repeating itself in Europe?

A: I wouldn’t say that it’s repeating itself – history never does. But both the European Union and “Fortress Europe” are products of history, and there are certainly some disturbing similarities and continuities between Europe’s current treatment of undocumented migrants and refugees, and the ways in which European societies have behaved in the twentieth century towards minorities and towards certain categories of immigrants and refugees.

A sense of this history can, I hope, help remind us of the dangerous consequences of the current “immigration regimes” – and also fuel a search for more humane and coherent alternatives to these policies.

Q: With the Schengen agreement of 1985, which eliminated internal border controls among 26 of its countries, Europe was extolled, to a degree, for its “borderless policies”. However, your book has shown not only a dark side to globalisation but also of Europe, highlighting human rights violations at its borders. What effects could these practises have on Europe’s reputation?

One of the reasons the architects of the European Union placed human rights at the heart of its political identity was because they wanted to differentiate the new Europe from the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century. Today the EU’s “hardened” border enforcement efforts have helped create situations in which stateless migrants are routinely exposed to death, violence, marginalisation and official harassment.

These consequences are often overlooked or unseen by the general public, but they nevertheless represent a glaring contradiction between Europe’s commitment to human rights, openness and solidarity, and the way these principles are implemented on the ground.

Q: In your book, you mentioned that the Nigerian journalist Emmanuel Mayah went under cover as a migrant in 2010, crossing the Sahara and joining other migrants in overcrowded trucks to reach Spain. Could his example perhaps be the inspiration for a sequel to “Fortress Europe”?

A: Maybe, but I think the story of these Saharan crossings is something that someone else should tell. It’s certainly a very difficult story to tell right now, given the current situation in Mali and Libya, for example, and any journalist who chooses to undertake it would have to be a lot more intrepid than I am – and they would need a lot of luck! But going undercover like that – I don’t think I would be a very successful chameleon. My acting range is rather limited!

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