Mexico appears willing but unready to hold US refugees
TIJUANA, Mexico — Mexico’s willingness to accept U.S. asylum seekers while their applications are processed appears to be yet another sign of the blooming honeymoon between leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and President Donald Trump, though it is also causing concern among o cials in Mexican border cities already struggling to deal with thousands of Central American migrants.
Mexico could have simply refused, as it historically has, to accept the return of non-Mexicans. But this week’s announcement of $10.6 billion in U.S. development aid and the personal relationship between the two presidents appeared to smooth the path. It is the same relationship that helped resolve stalled negotiations on Mexico’s free trade agreement with the United States and Canada.
“Right now it’s a honeymoon, in part because even though one is on the left and the other is more to the right, they have things in common — protectionism, the anti-establishment thing, each one’s nationalism,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Training. Crespo noted Trump was getting along better with Lopez Obrador than with his conservative predecessor, Enrique Pena Nieto. “Up to now it’s been a honeymoon, who knows how long it will last.”
Mexico, meanwhile, is struggling to say how it will house and protect what could become tens of thousands of Central American migrants who might wind up in its cities along the border with the United States. It is clearly not ready to shelter so many.
Tonatituh Guillen, the head Mexico’s immigration agency, said, “In the short term, the National Immigration Institute does not have the organizational capacity to operate this kind of program ... the current legislation also doesn’t help us.”
Mexico is already hosting thousands of Central Americans who arrived as part of a migrant caravan in November. Those migrants were dismayed by Thursday’s announcement.
“This is bad, because every country has its sovereignty, it doesn’t have to depend on another country,” said Luis Miguel Conde, a Guatemalan who travelled to Tijuana with his wife and two children to request asylum in the U.S. “When you apply for asylum in Mexico, they don’t send you to Guatemala to wait. You wait for your application within the country’s territory.”
Tijuana is currently the most popular crossing point for asylum seekers waiting to submit claims in the United States, but the border city is already weary of housing over 7,000 migrants who arrived in the caravan in November.