eNewMexican

Pandemic refugees arriving at U.S. border

Already-poor countries have seen economies devastated

By Miriam Jordan

YUMA, Ariz. — Standing by the hulking border wall, a U.S. Border Patrol agent watched as a car dropped off passengers at the edge of a road on the Mexican side. “Oh, no,” he muttered. “Here come some more.”

In the next hours, dozens of people would descend a bare hill, pass a puddle where the Colorado River trickles and, without fanfare, pass through a gap in the rust-beam barrier that soars between the United States and Mexico. They had completed the final leg of journeys that began weeks or months earlier in Brazil, Cuba, India and Venezuela.

Carrying dusty backpacks and dreams of new jobs in new cities, the unauthorized migrants did not sprint

across the road to hide in the vast alfalfa fields as so many border crossers have in the past. Many of them walked toward the agent, arms raised in surrender, confident that they would not be turned away. Javier Gomez fell to his knees and prayed, his daughter, Maria, by his side.

“We sold our house, everything, to come,” said Gomez, an itinerant salesman whose family left Venezuela three months ago to make the journey northward over land. “We are blessed to have made it.”

The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. In April alone, 178,622 people were encountered by the Border Patrol, the highest number in 20 years.

Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters.

But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees.

They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible.

According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge.

The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year.

At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.

More than 12,500 Ecuadorians were encountered in March, up from 3,568 in January. Nearly 4,000 Brazilians and more than 3,500 Venezuelans were intercepted, up from just 300 and 284, respectively, in January. The numbers in coming months are expected to be higher.

From India and elsewhere in Asia, they embark on globe-spanning journeys. Some reported taking buses in their hometowns to a big city, like Mumbai, India, where they boarded planes to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and then connected through Moscow, Paris and Madrid, finally flying to Mexico City. From there, they embarked on the two-day bus ride to reach the Mexico-U.S. border.

Many of them are entering the United States through wide openings in the border wall near Yuma, Ariz., sparing them from the risky routes through remote desert regions, where migrants frequently lose their bearings, or across the Rio Grande in Texas, where migrants occasionally drown.

Border Patrol agents working in the Yuma sector said the number of migrants arriving there now dwarfs the surge of Central Americans two years ago that prompted some of the harsh immigration measures imposed by former President Donald Trump. They said they were struck by how far people had traveled.

U.S. asylum law grants protection to those suffering persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

FRONT PAGE

en-us

2021-05-17T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-17T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.pressreader.com/article/281608128325712

Santa Fe New Mexican