Central American refugees are our responsibility too

Mexico faces its own refugee surge, say Carlos Parra and Stacey Wilson-Forsberg.

Canada’s recent efforts to resettle more than 50,000 Syrian refugees have been hailed as a model for the world by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

However, the withdrawal of financial support for asylum seekers by the Doug Ford government in Ontario, and the Trudeau government’s announcement of a new Ministry for Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction, are among several worrisome indicators that Canadians’ patience for receiving refugees may be wearing thin. Such doubts are both ill-timed and unfortunate as a migrant crisis ignites in our own back yard.

The Northern Triangle region of Central America (primarily Honduras, but also El Salvador and Guatemala) continues to suffer from extremely poor political and socioeconomic conditions. The region has some of the world’s highest homicide rates and widespread gang activity involving torture, rape, death threats, extortion, kidnappings and the forced recruitment of youth. Migration is not a choice for most of these people. More than 294,000 Central Americans have already fled their homes seeking refuge in the north in a desperate attempt to protect their children from the violence. The number of refugees from Nicaragua is also expected to increase as political violence and repression intensify in that country.

Central American families enter Mexico through its southern border with Guatemala and make the dangerous journey north to the United States on foot and on the top of a freight train known as “la Bestia” (the Beast). Along the journey, they are subjected to grave human rights violations by drug cartels, human smugglers and Mexican authorities. Upon crossing into the United States and turning themselves in to U.S. migration authorities to claim asylum, these families confront another nightmare.

The Trump administration’s controversial zero-tolerance border enforcement policy has led to family separations, the detention of more than 2,000 children (many under the age of five), and the deportation of parents prior to reunification with their children. The administration has also removed the option of requesting international protection from domestic or gang violence, effectively nullifying almost all asylum claims from the Northern Triangle countries.

Since Central Americans are not coming directly from a territory where their lives are threatened, but rather are transiting through Mexico, the United States wants to make them Mexico’s problem by pressuring the outgoing Peña Nieto administration to accept a Safe Third Country Agreement similar to the agreement it has with Canada.

Mexico, however, is dealing with its own refugee surge. Mexico’s refugee protection system is massively under-resourced. Furthermore, since 2014, with funding from the United States, the Mexican government has prioritized securing its southern border, and detaining and deporting Central Americans. Mexico has accepted 93 per cent of asylum applications from the largely middle-class professional Venezuelans, but its acceptance rate of rural, poor Hondurans hovers below 30 per cent. In short, these people are unwanted. They have nowhere to go.

Canada is geographically cut-off from the Americas, of which Mexico is the gateway. The luxury of distance makes it easier for Canada to circumvent the mass movement of people and cherry-pick new residents. However, this reality is changing. The number of asylum-seekers crossing into Canada from the United States through unofficial ports of entry has increased with more than 27,000 asylum seekers walking across the Canada-United States border since Donald Trump took office in 2017. The United States is no longer a safe and welcoming place for refugees. We join critics in calling on the Trudeau government to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States and direct more financial support to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada to process asylum claims as quickly and objectively as possible.

We also encourage the government to take a leadership role in the Western Hemisphere by working with the UNHCR to open Canada as a safe third country for the resettlement of Central American refugees. Given Canada’s membership in the Organization of American States (OAS) and its unwavering support for human rights and democracy as core values in the Americas, it needs to do more to help mitigate this humanitarian crisis.