Monday, July 14, 2014

Mexico, Guatemala Agree to Speed Immigrants to Border

Mexico and Guatemala have reached an agreement that is intended to make it easier and safer for Central Americans, including unaccompanied minors, to enter the United States illegally.

Though largely unreported in the U.S. mainstream media, the two nations agreed on July 7, in a presidential-level meeting in Mexico, to make it legal and safe for Central

American immigrants, including unaccompanied minors, to cross Mexico’s border with Guatemala and transit Mexico
en route to the U.S. border at the Rio Grande.
The agreement apparently does not recognize that the result of such trips – entry into the United States – remains illegal.

But to facilitate the program, the Mexican government announced plans to issue a new “Regional Visitor Card” that will provide documentation for the Central Americans to remain in Mexico as long as it takes to get to the United States. . . 
Of course they do. For nations south of the border, immigration, and the remittances  that they bring back to the home country, are enormously important. They're just fertilizing and cultivating the roots of their own economy.

But it also makes sense to them from a humanitarian point of view. While it might be a week end trip for a wealthy US family to drive from Mexico's southern border to its norther border, the trip from Guatemala is long and difficult for people without many resources.  In most cases they have to gather what cash they can, and promise even more to the Mexican criminals who help them cross our southern border. Traffickers are even applying to the agencies to get their indentured servants back:

Human Traffickers Are Asking HHS for Immigrant Children
Individuals associated with human trafficking organizations are asking Health and Human Services officials to hand over the children who have immigrated to the United States during the recent border surge, according to a congressman who toured a facility where the children are being housed.

HHS is trying to release the children to sponsors in the United States, but those sponsors aren’t always parents. “There have been cases of people who have attempted to be sponsors actually being identified as associated with trafficking organizations,” Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla) told National Review Online after visiting a housing facility at Fort Sill.

“Not only the official, but the contractor as well indicated that that has happened, but they didn’t know how many times,” he said during a Saturday afternoon phone interview. ”And they kept saying ‘we’ll have to get more information on that because we don’t have the numbers.’ But, it has happened. Again, I’m talking to a lower-level individual at one facility in Oklahoma, so it’s hard for me to say definitively that this is a large-scale problem, but it was very clear that it has happened.”
Of course, one problem with being "undocumented" is there is no paper trail to show where you belong. We can be sure that if the traffickers are attempting to get these "kids" back (and we know some of them aren't kids), that some of those attempts are succeeding.  And that's actually a favorable outcome compared to some:
“If you can’t pay your coyote or your criminal organization, they will force you into slave labor or they will force you into prostitution,” the congressman said. And of the children who did make it to American custody, “a significant percentage of the children in these facilities have been abused, in one way or another, coming to the United States,” according to Bridenstine.

Many others didn’t survive the trek. “There have been cases where the parents couldn’t pay, or somebody in the United States couldn’t pay, and large groups of these children have been, no kidding, massacred,” Bridenstine told NRO. ”And there are recent gravesites in Northern Mexico with a number of dead bodies.”
But this is all worth while if it forces the Rethuglicans to accept Democratic plans for "comprehensive amnesty immigration reform", right?

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