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The President of the United States, Joe Biden, and other leaders of the Western Hemisphere are expected to announce this Friday, June 10, a roadmap for countries in the Americas to receive a large number of migrants and refugees. What would be the largest pact during the Summit of the Americas comes to light just one day after the US president assured that irregular immigration is “unacceptable”.
The United States is leading a series of measures aimed at containing migration. The White House announced that several countries in the Americas and Spain have agreed to undertake a roadmap to stop the increase in the phenomenon.
The set of measures, which will be made official this Friday, June 10, on the last day of the Summit of the Americas, includes legal channels to enter the countries, help for the communities most affected by migration, humanitarian management at the borders, and responses coordinated emergency response, according to a senior US official.
The same sources indicated that the project is largely inspired by the model followed by countries such as Ecuador and Colombia, the latter the largest recipient of the nearly six million Venezuelan citizens who have been forced to leave their nation of origin due to the strong economic, social and political crisis that the country is going through. A situation exacerbated by the constant questioning of the ruling party for rigging the elections in their favor in an attempt to perpetuate themselves in power and control public institutions.
In the case of Colombia, among other measures, the Government of President Iván Duque launched a Temporary Protection Statute that grants residence for ten years to refugees from the neighboring nation. His Administration indicates that it has granted temporary status to one million Venezuelans in the last 14 months and that it is processing another 800,000 applications.
“We did it out of conviction,” Duque said at the Summit amid applause for those actions.
“They were invisible (…) They couldn’t open bank accounts, they couldn’t work, they couldn’t get medical care. They were practically a community without a future,” said the president regarding the motivations for launching the programs for migrants.
For his part, the Ecuadorian president, Guillermo Lasso, announced last week the temporary status for Venezuelans in his country, whose figure is estimated at around 500,000 citizens.
Lasso said this week in a panel discussion that with its actions the government seeks in some way to repay the generosity of Spain and the United States for receiving a large number of Ecuadorians who fled more than two decades ago.
Although these examples have been highlighted during the meeting, the responses of Colombia and Ecuador would not be replicated in the same way, emphasized José Samaniego, regional director for the Americas of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The official considered that migration from Central America to the United States is more complicated than that of Venezuela. “You don’t want to copy and paste (…) but there are good practices,” he stressed.
It is not yet clear what would be the proportionality of refugees that would be distributed among the countries that have reached the agreement.
“It is a hemispheric challenge”
The pact tries to solve the migratory crisis that in recent years has been evident in the border crossings from Central America to the United States.
The United States has been the most popular destination for asylum seekers since 2017, posing a huge challenge to the Joe Biden administration, as it did to his predecessors Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
But the United States is far from being the only one that faces most of the migratory problem. In addition to Colombia and neighboring countries that host millions of people who have fled Venezuela, Mexico registered more than 130,000 asylum applications in 2021, triple the number in 2020.
Many of the requests were presented by people from Haiti, the nation most affected by poverty in the entire continent and whose situation has worsened in the last year after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Likewise, many Nicaraguans flee to Costa Rica, and in Aruba, displaced Venezuelans represent a sixth of the population of the small island.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas stressed that the Summit declaration recognizes the regional dimensions of migration.
“It is a hemispheric challenge,” he said, highlighting Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica for hosting a large number of refugees.
The so-called “Declaration of Los Angeles” is considered the greatest achievement of the Summit of the Americas, a meeting that was marred by controversy over the three banned countries: Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for not being led by democratic governments, agree with Washington’s assessment.
Due to the controversy, the presidents of other countries that were invited, such as Mexico, were not present and instead sent high-level diplomats.
With AP and EFE
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