As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants

Since the coronavirus pandemic started to spread at the end of March, there has been a significant decline in migratory traffic from South America, Central America, and Mexico to the United States. A migrant shelter in southern Mexico that serves as a way station for migrants saw around 2,000 travelers last year. In the past weeks, COVID-19 slowed down migration from Mexico on an unprecedented scale. The shelter has seen less than 100 migrants pass through.

Farms in western Europe are seeing labor shortages as a result of travel bans. Thousands of Venezuelans who had been working in Colombia have been heading back to Venezuela, as have Afghans from Iran and Pakistan, and Haitians from the Dominican Republic. Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner for protection at the United Nations Refugee Agency, notes in in a recent NY Times article that “Many of those [immigrants] who are returning barely had a toehold in the informal labor sector in their adopted countries, and were denied access to social safety nets.”

The Trump administration tightened border restrictions in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19. As a result, however, the processing of undocumented migrants and blocking access for asylum seekers has halted. Governments are closing their borders to refugees not only in the United States but around the world as well. More than 120 countries have ordered some form of the border closure. 30 of these countries are giving separate consideration to asylum seekers. Hundreds of Rohingya refugees on boats have been turned away in Malaysian ports by authorities citing pandemic restrictions. Stranded migrants are not able to practice social distancing, putting them at a more prominent risk of exposure to the virus.

Post written by Isabel Wang, Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: Semple, Kirk. “As World Comes to Halt Amid Pandemic, So Do Migrants,” The New York Times. May 4, 2020.

Border Economies

In our trip to the US-Mexico border, we spent four days in El Paso, Texas and Cuidad Juárez, Mexico. Effectively, El Paso and Juárez constitute one large city split by the border fence, where people move between the two cities going about their daily lives.  Many people live on one side of the border and (legally) work on the other side.  Families are spread across the two cities (and hence the two countries). Mexicans living in Juárez regularly come to El Paso to shop.  Dollars are widely accepted in Juárez, and both cities are bilingual.  There are several bridges in which people can walk across to the other country (but still have to go through border security).  Border patrol is present throughout both cities.   The El Paso-Juárez sector epitomizes a border economy, with goods, services and people flowing across the border each direction throughout the day. On our drive through Juárez, we saw literally dozens of maquiladoras (often referred to as maquilas) –  huge manufacturing plants set up by US corporations (Boeing, Lexmark, and Electrolux to name a few) to take advantage of lower wages in Mexico (maquilas became prevalent as the result of North American Free Trade Agreement established in 1992).   As Chapter 9 discusses, immigration between countries can have important impacts on international trade, product diversity, and the price of goods and services in each country.  This is exactly the case in El Paso and Juárez.     

Trip to US-Mexico Border

A few weeks ago, Cynthia and I took a week-long trip to visit the US-Mexico border. We started in El Paso, Texas (which borders with Juarez, Mexico), visited Nogales, Mexico and ended in Tucson, Arizona. Below is a map of the route we followed.  It was an amazing trip – we participated in a border patrol ride-along in El Paso, visited nonprofit organizations in Juarez and Nogales that worked with migrant communities, walked on a migrant trail in the Sonora desert near Tucson, and saw a naturalization ceremony.  The goal of the trip was to get a real sense of the migrant experience, to witness the militarization of the border, and to better understand the humanitarian crisis taking along the southern US border.  We will write a few blog posts in the next few weeks that document different aspects of our trip as they relate to themes in the textbook.  One of our colleagues on the trip created a storify of our trip, which you can find here.