This Sunday came to Colombia the Undersecretary of State for United Statess for Migrants and Refugees, Juliet Valls Noyes. She will have various meetings with government officials from Gustavo Petro and other international and non-governmental organizations.
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According to the State Department, it has scheduled stops in Bogotá, Medellín and Necoclí and its agenda will be focused on “discussing efforts to continue addressing the high levels of irregular migration and displacement in the region and assess the effectiveness of US-funded humanitarian support.”
This is a highly relevant issue for both countries in which there are some coincidences, but also profound differences.
For the Joe Biden administration, the central objective is to stop the flow of migrants that are arriving at the gates of its southern border and that includes Colombians, Venezuelans and citizens of many countries around the world who use our country as a route to achieve the American dream.
For several years, Washington has been contributing resources (more than US $300 million), but the needs are endless
And from there the stop in Necoclí, where there is a whole humanitarian crisis due to the high volume of migrants who arrive in this small city in Urabá Antioquia with the idea of crossing the dangerous Darien Gap to reach Panama and from there go up through Central America towards the United States.
The issue is a priority for the Democratic administration, which since coming to power in January 2021 has seen record numbers of migrants arrive at its border seeking asylum or trying to enter illegally. An explosive issue with great political ramifications in this country as the Republicans hold Biden responsible for the border crisis and often use him for electoral purposes.
In that context, both governments are on the same page. The Petro government urgently needs US support to face a situation that impacts its public finances, is causing a health emergency and is generating high crime rates. USAFor his part, he wants Colombia it helps to stop the migratory flow.
For several years, Washington has been providing resources (more than US$300 million), but the needs are infinite and, on his journey, Valls Noyes intends to harmonize strategies to be more effective.
But there is another component of the migration agenda where the coincidences are rather few, but which are a priority for Petro government.
Since he took office, the ambassador Luis Gilberto Murillo It has been pushing several initiatives before the US government to facilitate the access of Colombians to this country.
One of them, where concrete results have already been presented, has been to speed up the procedures for the issuance of visas at the United States embassy in Bogotá, where a whole bottleneck was present with waiting times of more than two years. to get an appointment. These times have already been reduced to less than half and everything indicates that they will continue to drop in the coming months.
In this case, it is about returning to the waiting times that existed before the coronavirus pandemic for the processing of tourist, business and study visas but that do not “extend” by themselves the access of Colombians to the United States.
But there are two other initiatives that do seek the latter but are much more complex. One of them is for Colombia to enter to the visa waiver program or “visa waiver program”and which includes nationals of some 40 countries who are not required to have a document to travel to the United States.
In Latin America, only Chile has this category. In order to enter this select club, the country must first meet a series of strict requirements, including that the rate of rejection of visa applications be below 3 percent and others.
Although many of the demands are procedural, basically what the United States seeks to ensure is that it is a stable country with a good economic level that guarantees that visa-exempt citizens will not travel in order to stay in United States territory. illegally. Criteria that Colombia is far from meeting. Especially now that they are being arrested almost 20,000 Colombians a month at the southern border with the intention of requesting asylum.
Murillo himself acknowledges that this is a process that takes years and has already announced that this month there will be meetings with the counterparts Americans to document progress and, if possible, speed up the process. But the background is not the best. The government of Juan Manuel Santos, for example, spent more than six years promoting this same initiative, but ended up abandoning it because it was unable to comply with what was required.
And few believe that Petro can achieve a different result. Especially because of how controversial the immigration issue is and will continue to be in domestic politics in the United States and because nobody expects, in the short or medium term, that Colombia will become a country where there is no longer any interest in migrating to US soil.
The other vehicle that Murillo has raised is that Colombians who are currently in the United States illegally or waiting for an asylum application to be approved be granted what isn Washington is known as Deferred Enforced Departure or DED (for its acronym in English). Under the DED, the US president can defer the deportation of nationals for a specified period of time and grant them a work permit during that period.
In this case, Murillo has said that it would be for 18 months while these Colombians organize themselves with the aim of returning. But for this case the criteria are also very difficult to meet. First, because it is a rarely used concept (currently there are only two in force, Liberia and Hong Kong) and it is reserved for cases where there is a civil war, a humanitarian crisis or clear political persecution.
Already the Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Brian Nichols, has said that Colombia does not meet these conditions and it would be very difficult to justify that status. Among other things, because the United States knows that the majority of citizens who are granted that DED end up staying permanently in the country and because if it is granted to Colombians, many other countries will want similar treatment later.
But what makes it almost impossible is that it would be seen – by Republicans especially – as a “reward” for many people who come to the United States illegally. And although Colombia, as Murillo insists, is the great ally of the United States in the region and its citizens deserve humanitarian treatment, there is not the best atmosphere in this party either to benefit a leftist government with which they are not comfortable.
And less at a time when the electoral campaign is starting for the 2024 presidential and legislative elections where the immigration issue will be central.
Murillo has also said that, in parallel, he also plans to ask the United States for two other benefits. On the one hand, he grants the visa exemption – even if it has not been decreed for the entire country – to some Colombians who “have been coming to the United States for years, who have never had a problem and have not stayed and do not want to.”
On the other, it allows pre-registration of travel to the United States – that is, the immigration process that is generally done when arriving at a US entry point – from Colombia. Something that is currently done with the citizens of some countries that are part of the visa exemption program.
Although these two objectives are more viable than admission as such to the “visa waiver program” or the DED, they are also complex and require both a political decision and an administrative component since the United States would have, for example, to set up offices in Bogotá and other cities to advance the pre-registration.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
EL TIEMPO correspondent
Washington
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