Nervousness on Mexico’s southern border a month before US elections

With one month to go before the US presidential election , there is a lot of nervousness on Mexico’s southern border, where activists and migrants fear the formation of a “migratory bottleneck” due to more restrictive policies in North America.

Migrant advocates in Tapachula, the largest city on the border between Mexico and Central America, expressed to EFE on Sunday their concern about a possible return of former President Donald Trump (2017-2021) to the White House, but also about a continuation of the measures of the current president, Joe Biden.

“We believe that this type of measure by the United States government will lead to deportations and persecution of migrants and the criminalization of the migration phenomenon, including children, women and defenders,” Luis García Villagrán, director of the Center for Human Dignity (CDH), told EFE.

Republican candidate Trump will face US Vice President Kamala Harris on November 5 , a Democrat who has promised to sign a bipartisan bill that would increase security on the border with Mexico and restrict asylum applications.

Still, Pascual Necochea Valdez, president of the Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) of the Chiapas Coast , a state on Mexico’s southern border, said Harris ‘ victory could encourage migration from Central and South America that would get stuck in Tapachula.

“Everything will depend on how the exodus from Central America, South America, the Caribbean islands begins, because if uncontrolled exoduses begin we will be the first bottleneck, but we are prepared because we have learned from mistakes, this migration that we are receiving, we are no longer as before,” he told EFE.

 Migrants trapped in Mexico

Daily migrant apprehensions at the U.S. -Mexico border fell by nearly 66 percent from December to September, according to the Mexican government, but irregular migration through Mexico rose 193 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year to more than 712,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Unit.

 In this context, foreigners who have arrived in Tapachula see a complicated panorama with the American candidates, such as the Venezuelan Omar Antonio Pérez, who is stranded with his family waiting for his appointment in the United States with the ‘CBP One’ application to avoid suffering the insecurity of the migration route through Mexico.

“They give us hope that we can get there (to the United States), because there are people who go to work and, unfortunately, there are others who go to do bad things, but we all have hope that what God wants will be done for those who are up there as well as for those of us who are down here, an opportunity is what we are looking for,” he said.

Similarly, his compatriot Nelson Fernández said that what is worrying is that the migratory flow in Tapachula has grown, because he perceives that thousands of migrants arrive every week, but they are stranded waiting for their documents to cross Mexico.

For this reason, he asks the Mexican government to “help them move forward” before the elections.

“Because the president, the one who is going to throw himself out, is Trump, and he doesn’t want (migrants), that is, he wants to eliminate the migrants from there, that is what we don’t want, we want to get through before the elections there, it makes life difficult for us to move forward,” he said. EFE