Neither side of border understands immigration details fully
I couldn’t believe how easy it was to cross from one country to the other. Not a single immigration officer stopped me — just vendors hawking beer and fresh tortillas. In the distance, the evergreen water lay still under a sunless sky. A long line of buoys delineated where one nation ended and the other began. I didn’t even have my passport on me. Yet in about half an hour I had crossed, gone to the bathroom, taken some pictures and come back.
Many people imagine such a scene when they think of Joe Biden’s big ole “open border.” Except that easy-peasy crossing wasn’t anywhere near the United States. It was a different southern border: Mexico’s with Guatemala, that last barrier to North America every migrant making their way northward by land must go through. And if it was easy to cross then — in 2016, when I visited the area on a family vacation — it’s even easier now. At least, that’s what Alfredo tells me. He was our local tour guide during our stay in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
I caught up with him recently to get a better understanding of what’s happening on Mexico’s southern border now. I never imagined how much his own story would represent the larger issues driving the immigration crisis at our U.S. border.
Here’s the context: After peaking in December, migrant apprehensions on the U.S. side of the Mexico border dipped radically in January. The historic 50% drop was largely attributed to ramped-up Mexican enforcement efforts.
Did Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken give Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) a stern Christmastime talking-to? More likely, they pleaded with him and offered sweet deals in exchange for Mexican cooperation. AMLO, who like Biden, is facing election-year scrutiny, seems to have listened, beefing up military presence in the Mexican states bordering the U.S. I imagined he did the same in the south, much like in 2019 when Donald Trump used the threat of higher tariffs to pressure AMLO to deter more migrants.
Turns out, the story is more complicated than that. As Alfredo described it to me, his home state of Chiapas, once seen as a beautiful and relatively safe jungle oasis in a country often roiled by conflict, has become unrecognizable to him. A few years ago there were established, easily avoidable routes both for the trickle of migrants heading northward and the drug traffickers moving product. Now, though, both migrants and traffickers have spilled across the state.
The number of migrants crossing into Mexico has skyrocketed at the same time that a cartel turf war has displaced locals in Chiapas. Both locals and migrants now must make camp wherever they can, including in Alfredo’s hometown.
The surge in newcomers has tested a state that, despite having the nation’s highest poverty rate, is known for its hospitality toward strangers.
“As Chiapanecos, we’ve historically been in solidarity with migrants, supporting them on their journey north,” Alfredo said in Spanish. “But they used to come in groups of 20, and now they’re in the thousands.” Many, seeing only a slim chance in the U.S., are seeking asylum in Mexico.
“Y ahora están estancados,” he said of the migrants, using a word that often describes water stuck in one place, stagnant and confined, eventually becoming an open invitation for opportunistic pests — diseasecarrying mosquitoes, disturbingly resilient roaches, an army of ants.
Stuck in legal limbo, the migrants have “become a great business for bad actors,” Alfredo explained.
Alfredo’s tourism business, on the other hand, has suffered. So much so that he has been considering making the trek to the United States himself.
When I met Alfredo, he was a young single man who spent his days giving intrepid Americans, Europeans and other Mexicans eco-tours through the Lacandon Jungle, kayaking across rapids and wielding his machete to reach Mayan ruins hidden behind thickets of vine. Now, he’s a married man with two young kids to feed. It’s the wrong time for business to drop off.
When he tried to figure out how he would get to the U.S., he told me, asylum seemed “the cheapest and easiest option.”
At least that’s what he’d heard, both from other Chiapanecos and the migrants passing through. He explained confidently that his own wife’s family members had just crossed into the U.S. and, within a few days, gotten asylum.
Skeptical, I asked, “Are you sure they actually got asylum, and aren’t just waiting for a court date many years in the future?”
He was sure.
The thing is, it’s highly unlikely that’s true.
Listening to Alfredo’s thought process, I felt torn. Too many times I had heard Americans, mainly conservatives, insist that migrants were taking advantage of asylum, using it to get to the U.S. when their cases had no real merit. I had fought that argument tooth and nail, defending asylum-seekers, who I felt sure were truly fleeing persecution.
But Alfredo’s story illustrates how hard it is to paint a binary picture of migrants. He is certainly fleeing something — a home overrun with bloodshed, declining tourism and uncertainty surrounding his family’s future. Does that fit the definition of persecution under any of the five narrow categories — race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion — that form the standard for asylum? No.
Does that mean he shouldn’t have a chance to seek better economic opportunity in a country outside of his own? No.
What it means is, the same way Americans themselves don’t fully understand their own immigration system, much less the alphabet soup of U.S. visas, many hopeful migrants don’t fully understand their options either. And in an election year in which immigration has risen to the top of U.S. voters’ concerns for the first time since 2019, getting to the root of that misunderstanding will be key.
After talking with Alfredo, I felt lost. Immigration, more than ever, felt like a tangled mass of thorny jungle.
But ultimately, his story helped me understand what so many of us miss about immigration policy — why our broken system can’t keep up with people on the move, and what we can do to fix it. More on that soon.