On January 10, the presidents of Mexico, the United States and Canada met in the Mexican capital within the framework of the X Summit of North American leaders. Central America was not absent from said summit, both because of the explicit references that the Mexican president made about the isthmus.
From what was mentioned at the summit, the most relevant action for Central America on the migration issue is the confirmation of the Biden (USA) government measures to control flows that have either the USA or Canada as their final destination.
These measures consist of creating a legal channel so that up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can receive visas and temporary work permits per month, through an online application that they must make from their countries of origin, apart from the fact that the Entry into the country will have to be by plane and not by land at the northern border of Mexico with the USA. On the other hand, those who do not meet these requirements will be deported to the Mexican country.
The totally servile Mexican president gave his support to such measures, celebrated that the US government had decided to “order the migratory flow” and assured that it will collaborate with the reception of migrants who are rejected from the United States. The US president, for his part, clarified that this immigration program had already been implemented for Venezuelan migration and that it had proven successful “in providing safe, humane, and orderly processes” for those seeking asylum.
The truth is that this program, despite the praise it receives from the leaders who met at the Summit, will rather generate greater difficulties to implement this type of necessary management, as well as worsen transit and waiting conditions in our countries for migratory flows. Clearly, it is a totally negative approach for the working classes of the region because the interest of imperialism is to maintain looting and exploitation at all costs.
In the first place, with this measure, the US government will reject more migrants than it will receive, given that, as Biden himself recognized, during the year, more than 1,000 people arrived at the US-Mexican border every day. In addition, a good part of these migratory flows are not from the countries specified in the program, but rather come from other Latin American countries (such as Ecuador, among others) or from places as distant as Africa and Asia. What will happen to those dozens of thousands of migrants?
Probably, many of these people remain stuck in some of the countries that precede the US border in the path of these migratory flows (such as Mexico itself or other Central and/or South American countries). In this way, the US government uses Central America (at least) as its “backyard” to retain hundreds of thousands of migrants whose desire is to reach the US country, and leaves them in a situation of great vulnerability to the fate of the actions of governments that do not take the issue of migratory flows as a humanitarian emergency but as a problem that is better to ignore or criminalize (as is the case of Costa Rica with Rodrigo Chaves as president).
These measures only benefit the governments of the USA and Canada, while transferring the problem to Latin American countries without providing the necessary economic support so that, from our territories, we can guarantee dignified attention to migrants on their way to the north of the continent, letting in only the number of people required by US companies that exploit foreign labor in the most difficult and worst paid jobs in the US.
From the rest of Central America and Latin America, we must demand that the dignified life of these migrants be a priority over the interests of big national or foreign capital and fight so that the different governments allocate funds to finance humanitarian care programs and/or of insertion to migrants or asylum seekers. For this, we must demand the cessation of the payment of the illegitimate public debt, more taxes for big capital and the nationalization of key sectors for migratory flows (such as transportation and lodging).