Mexico stops hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fleeing northward to the U.S. Many are deported, and many more are stuck in the country’s south, vulnerable to crime and rising xenophobia. With U.S. and European help, Mexico should work harder to protect migrants and foster economic development.
Principal Findings
What’s new? Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweets to the contrary, Mexico is vigorously policing its southern border, stemming the northward flow of Central Americans escaping poverty and violence. It is deporting thousands and accepting thousands more as refugees, though many remain in legal limbo.
Why does it matter? Central Americans have long contended with abuse on their way north. Today they run a gauntlet of threats from criminals and corrupt officials. If Mexico is not better equipped to handle the influx, the human costs and the risk of conflict will rise. Already xenophobia and violence are increasing across Mexico’s south.
What should be done? Mexico should stop using migration policy as a bargaining chip with the U.S., and instead redouble efforts to protect migrants and refugees, fight crime and promote development in the southern states. The U.S. and EU should provide material assistance for refugee processing and protection, and support efforts to reduce poverty and crime in Central America so that fewer people are compelled to flee.
Executive Summary
The relationship between Mexico and the U.S. is most fraught in the domain where cooperation between the two countries is the closest. At its border with Central America, some 1,500km south of the line where U.S. President Donald Trump wants to build a wall, Mexico effectively acts as an operating arm of U.S. immigration control.
It stops hundreds of thousands of Central Americans from travelling north, deporting more of them than the U.S. since 2015, while also granting thousands refugee status. For Mexico, control over its southern border offers some protection from the spasmodic blows of the Trump presidency. But as Central Americans continue to flee poverty and violence at home, Mexico’s buffers are turning into bottlenecks.
Xenophobia and criminality make southern Mexico increasingly perilous for refugees and migrants. The Mexican government, with the support of Central American states, the European Union (EU) and Washington itself, should strive to reinforce refugee protection, crime prevention and development in the area.
Elected in part on a tough anti-immigration stance, President Trump has planted deep uncertainty in the minds of many who might seek to enter the country. After falling sharply in 2017, arrests by the U.S. Border Patrol are again on the rise. Humanitarian workers and migrants themselves report acute anxiety over what lies in wait for those who do get across. For many of those leaving Central America, their final destination is now closer, and often less welcoming. The number of Latin Americans applying for refugee status in Mexico jumped 66 per cent in 2017. Understaffed and overstretched, the Mexican system for adjudicating asylum cases is close to collapse: when two earthquakes struck Mexico in September 2017, the national refugee agency was briefly paralysed. Many applicants, including children, languish in detention centres, awaiting the verdict as to whether they will be granted protection.
Moreover, Central American refugees’ escape from violence is far from assured.
In 2017, Mexico tallied its highest number of murders since the country’s modern record-keeping began. Homicide rates in the southern states of Oaxaca, Quintana Roo and Veracruz are above the national average and rising. Kidnappings have soared across the south since 2015. Not only are the border states now the main conduit for cocaine trafficked from Colombia’s Pacific coast, but violence is fuelled by the fragmentation of the once dominant Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel, combined with the rise of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the spread to southern Mexico of Central American street gangs, notably the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The proliferation of cartels and gangs has intensified turf battles over protection rackets. Long the victims of crime while travelling north, Central Americans must now run an extended gauntlet of criminal organisations ready to kidnap, physically and sexually abuse or kill them. Gangs have even staged raids on migrant shelters.
Yet, in many border towns, locals perceive Central Americans themselves as responsible for the rise in crime, prompting a backlash, including calls for southern Mexico to build a wall of its own. Refugees and migrants face increasing discrimination and are often trapped between erratic state institutions, predatory criminals and alarmed locals.
Mexico is entitled to secure its borders and manage migration flows to ensure refugees’, migrants’ and host communities’ lives and well-being are not endangered.
But the realities of its southern frontier impede effective and judicious migration management. The long and porous border, unceasing flight from Central America, and the presence of potent trafficking groups make border control fitful and ineffective.
Combined civil and military operations to seal the border have not halted the flows, and the coercive measures Mexico relies upon appear not to identify adequately those in need of protection, or ensure those in transit are free from threats and abuse by criminal groups and corrupt state officials.
As southern Mexican states become assembly points for migrants and refugees from the region, Mexico, with the support of Central American countries, the EU and potentially the U.S., should strive to mitigate the risks of those in transit coming to harm and of friction between them and Mexican host communities. With a new president due to be elected on 1 July, the Mexican state, supported by foreign donors, should redouble crime prevention efforts; ensure that all national and international bodies engaged in refugee and migrant protection, including UN agencies and Central American consulates, coordinate efforts and target areas where threats are most acute; and promote a realistic regional approach to the migration issue that helps Northern Triangle countries deter emigration through greater economic opportunity and a reduction in crime and violence. Latin American governments should expand their efforts to distribute refugees more evenly across the region, building on existing initiatives to strengthen shared regional responses to the challenge.
Mexico’s border policy, currently part of the government’s efforts to get what it wants in negotiations with the U.S., should turn instead to preventing the festering local resentments, crime and violence that lurk along its southern frontier. The geopolitics of migration must not delay or dilute attempts to lessen the perils that refugees and migrants face.