generalspeaking

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Give Me Your Auspices to Advance Into a Future of Security and Opportunity...

"The Caravans are a disgrace to the Democrat party. Change the immigration laws NOW!"
"Every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws!"
"We will now begin cutting off, or substantially reducing, the massive foreign aid routinely given to them [Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador]."
U.S. President Donald Trump

"[The United States, Canada and Mexico should work out a joint plan to fund development in Central America and southern Mexico]."
"In this way we confront the phenomenon of migration, because he who leaves his town does not leave for pleasure but out of necessity."
Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

"We have had people who have ankle or shoulder injuries, from falls during the trip, and even though we have offered to take them somewhere where they can get better care, they have refused, because they fear they'll be detained and deported."
"They want to continue on their way. They are going to continue walking, and their feet won't heal as long as they keep walking."
Ulises Garcia, Red Cross official

"You have to help the next person. Today it's for them, tomorrow for us."
"From them we learn to value what they do not have."
Jesus Valdivia, Tuxtla Chico, Mexico

"There isn't a single terrorist here. We are all people from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua."
"And as far as I know there are no terrorists in these four countries, at least beyond the corrupt government."
Denis Omar Contreras, Honduran-born caravan leader, Peubo Sin Fronteras

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, in the outskirts of Tapachula, Mexico. Photograph: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images

Those with authority within the caravan movement are themselves uncertain about the exact route they will direct the thousands of participants toward, much less where they want to arrive on the U.S. Border. Central American migrants on their own have in recent years taken a direct route to Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas. A much smaller caravan in the spring organized by the Contreras' organization arrived in Tijuana, about 4,000 kilometres from Tapachula, where the current four-thousand-strong caravan is resting before resuming their journey.

There they are, in their numbers, remaining together for moral strength and some assurance of safety in numbers, but with nowhere to stay other than in public, on the streets, in squares, wherever they can shoehorn their bodies into sleeping positions overnight, coping with wet ground from recent heavy downpours. They huddle together wherever they can, in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, tired and only mildly dispirited, determined to forge forward to their final destination; the U.S. somewhere.

The caravans include families, single parents with young children, and unaccompanied minors. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)

"We are going to sleep here in the street, because we have nothing else", 42-year-old Jose Mejia explained, having taken his wife and four children from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to Mexico on a long, exhausting trip. "We have to sleep on the sidewalk, and tomorrow wake up and keep walking. We'll get a piece of plastic to cover ourselves if it rains again." And it will, repeatedly, on the route the caravan is taking.

When the caravan of migrants set out a week earlier there were fewer than 200 participants; since then more people have joined the caravan along their journey. It finally swelled to an estimated 5,000 on Sunday, with migrants crossing from Guatemala into southern Mexico even as police blocked official crossing points. Another group of roughly a thousand migrants entered Mexico from Honduras. Migrants speak of widespread violence, poverty and corruption in Honduras; they flee to find a better, safer world.

Sympathetic Mexicans along the way offer the weary migrants food, water, clothing, with locals driving pickups, vans and cargo trucks stopping to give migrants a lift. Offers to take the migrants by bus to shelters set up by Mexican immigration officials, seven kilometres outside of Tapachula by civil defence officials have been refused. The migrants convinced that boarding buses would make them vulnerable to deportation.

The world, from Africa to the Middle East, Central America and Latin America is on the move as people seek alternatives to their desperate situations at home, where corrupt, inefficient, and uncaring governments oppress them, and criminals associated with drug cartels and weapons-running create atmospheres of lurking danger particularly in efforts to recruit the young into the drug trade and all the violence attendant on it. Their plight is obvious; their governments unstable and disinterested.

They look toward opportunities they know exist in the United States where once those such as they were welcome. There are legitimate channels for emigration from their countries of birth, but the question of qualifying for visas and eventual transition as immigrants is time-consuming and uncertain. Countries seen as places of haven from the threats and disorder they leave already face the reality of unregistered and illegal residents in the millions.

The wholesale movement of people willing to undertake arduous and dangerous journeys to find a new reality for themselves of promise for the future belies the facts and the needs of countries they aim for to remain in control of their borders, to be able to select whom and the numbers of those they are willing to accept. The assumption that once reaching the border they can declare themselves refugees is utterly flawed with no base in reality.

Theirs, however, is a reality of desperation. The answer to which creates a moral quandary all of its own. Accepting those thousands will do nothing if not incite many others to do the same. And the numbers will grow and the overland marches become unstoppable. The way the world now turns is wholly dysfunctional. No one is advantaged by this turmoil.