Trump & other world leaders bar Africans
TAPACHULA, Mexico — President Trump isn’t the only world leader making it virtually impossible for many Africans to get asylum in the United States. He’s getting plenty of help from allies in the Americas.
Ecuador is closing its doors as one of the few countries in North and South America to welcome African visitors, depriving them of a starting point for their dangerous journeys north by land. If asylum-seekers make it to Mexico, they face a virtual barricade near its southern border with Guatemala.
Trump’s allies are blocking a path for Africans fleeing violence in their homelands as those countries face a U.S. president who has used economic leverage to get help curtail immigration. Ecuador is pursuing a trade deal with Trump, while Mexico is trying to stay in his good graces after his threat to increase tariffs prompted its crackdown on illegal immigration last year.
People from Cameroon, who are escaping bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands, often win asylum in the U.S. even more than other Africans, but they first must reach American soil. Most are English speakers fleeing torture inflicted by a Frenchspeaking government at war with separatists.
Dozens of them are languishing in Tapachula, a Mexican city of about 300,000 people in a coffee- and bananagrowing region along the Guatemalan border.
“I can’t go back to my country. I can’t go forward. I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do,” a 25-year-old Cameroonian said recently at a guesthouse where he’s staying and relies on handouts to eat.
The man spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his immigration status in Mexico.
Trump has called asylum “a scam” and adopted several policies to reduce claims, including denying asylum to anyone who passes through another country on the way to the U.S. without seeking refuge there first. Border arrests plummeted 78% in January from a 13-year high in May.
While Ecuador’s 2008 constitution embraces “universal citizenship” that allows almost anyone to visit, its government said in August that people from 11 countries need a visa to come, including from Cameroon and six other African nations. Twelve countries already faced visa restrictions, half of them in Africa.
Jose Valencia, Ecuador’s foreign affairs minister, said the latest visa restrictions followed a detailed study of migration trends.
“Universal citizenship is a principle that is not open to debate and not questioned in the sense that it is valid, an aspiration,” he said in an interview published in El Universo newspaper. The challenge, he said, is “to avoid a regime of universal citizenship that is so open we have to be subject to threats that can affect us and third countries.”
Ecuador’s crackdown comes as Trump dangles a trade deal. He said he was working on it when President Lenin Moreno became the first leader of the small South American nation to meet with a U.S. president in Washington in 17 years.
Trump drew a contrast between Moreno and his leftist predecessor.
“Ecuador had a very unusual outlook on life but, with your great president, he realizes how important it is to get along with the United States,” Trump told reporters of Moreno.
After the Oval Office meeting last month, the acting deputy U.S. Homeland Security secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, said on Twitter: “Hopefully we can all work together to reduce illegal immigration out of Ecuador.”
Cameroonians won U.S. asylum in 81% of cases in the 2019 fiscal year, compared with 29% for all nationalities, according to court data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Ethiopians had a 77% success rate; Eritreans, 67% and Nigerians, 58%.