Migration slowing during pandemic
A migrant shelter in southern Mexico called La 72 has for years been a popular way station for those traveling from Central America to the United States. Last year, it received a record number of visitors, sometimes sheltering more than 2,000 a month.
In recent weeks, however, that traffic has come to a grinding halt, and even gone into reverse.
Since late March, amid the coronavirus pandemic, no more than 100 migrants have passed through the shelter. And nearly all were heading south, trying to get back to their homes in Central America.
“We’ve never seen this before,” said Ramón Márquez, the former director of the shelter. “I’ve never seen anything slow migration like the coronavirus.”
Border closures, suspended asylum programs, interruptions in global transportation and stay-at-home lockdowns have drastically curbed migration around the world, particularly from poorer nations to rich ones.
In Latin America, oncecrowded migratory routes that led from South America, through Central America and Mexico and to the United States have gone quiet, with the Trump administration seizing on the virus to close the border to almost all migrants.
But the phenomenon extends well beyond the Americas. The number of East Africans crossing the Gulf of Aden to seek work in the Gulf States has plunged. Farms in western Europe are contending with severe labor shortfalls as travel bans have blocked the movement of seasonal migrant laborers from Eastern Europe.
“The pandemic has essentially — not absolutely, but essentially — stopped international migration and mobility dead in its tracks,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-founder and president emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
In some places, migratory flows have seemingly made a Uturn, as migrants no longer able to earn a living abroad have decided to return home, even if their home countries are mired in political conflict and economic ruin.
Thousands of Venezuelans who had sought sanctuary and work in Colombia in recent years have crossed back into
Venezuela, Afghans have returned home from Iran and Pakistan and Haitians from the Dominican Republic.
“We’re finding mass numbers moving back to their countries of origin because they cannot survive,” Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations Refugee Agency, said in an interview.
Many of those who are returning barely had a toehold in the informal labor sector in their adopted countries, and were denied access to social safety nets. “They are the people who are at the bottom of the pyramid,” Triggs said. “And they are almost always the first to go.”
In recent years, one of the world’s busiest migration corridors has run through Central America and Mexico, with tens of thousands of people reaching the southwest border of the United States every month, either to apply for asylum or try to slip undetected into the country.
Arrests of undocumented migrants at that border have long stood as a measure, however imperfect, of changes in the regional migration flows.
In March, U.S. authorities arrested 29,953 migrants there, a slight drop from the previous month’s total. But migration experts say they expect April’s numbers, when they are published, to reflect a significant decrease in migration.