Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The issue of migration was central to the conversations during the Summit of the Americas, held recently in Los Angeles, California, at the invitation of the President of the United States, Joe Biden.
The agreements on the migratory phenomenon revolved around the structural problems generated by the massive migratory movements in the south-north areas of the American continent and the possible responses that the different countries could give.
At the heart of the agreements on how to manage the migration crisis, a shared vision emerged: desperate emigration is the product of national economies that have not made sufficient progress in terms of job creation, the need to promote appropriate investment policies, fiscal stimuli for growth and the promotion of international supply chains for valuable goods. And it was agreed to promote a social response of empathy and continental coordination to solve the social problems arising from the migratory phenomenon.
This shared vision is transcendent because it contradicts the version of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and their allies, notoriously the President of Mexico, that migration is a by-product of the neoliberal policies of the United States that have been forcibly imposed on Latin American countries, denying the phenomena of repression, violence, and lack of democracy in their countries.
The final communiqué of the Summit of the Americas describes the accepted interpretation of the historical difficulties of economic growth and proposes regional coordination to achieve the insertion of all the Americas into the global economy. The countries attending the Summit signed the declaration, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico (by Foreign Minister Ebrard).
Los-Angeles-Declaration-on-Migration-and-Protection-_-The-White-HouseIt is noteworthy that none of the attendees defended the position of “Bolivarianism” at the Summit, despite having made the issue of their attendance the object of an attempted boycott of the Summit. It only served as a pretext for the Presidents of Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia not to attend the event.
At the same time, official statistics confirm that the majority of the emigrants crossing the northern border into the United States are of Mexican nationality. There is a perception in Mexico that most migrants are from other countries, including Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Indeed, migrants from all these areas cross the national territory. But the truth is that most migrants are Mexicans, fleeing the severe economic crisis that AMLO’s government has been unwilling and unable to lessen, in addition to entire displaced populations fleeing the violence of drug trafficking.
U.S. government data show that 2022 is the third year in a row in which deportations of Mexicans far exceed those of people of the Northern Triangle nationalities (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) and, of course, the rest of the nationalities present at the U.S. border. At the beginning of 2020, the relative stability maintained in the flow of Mexicans to the United States for more than 12 years was broken. At that time, around 20,000 undocumented migrants were registered monthly. Today it exceeds 100,000 per month.
Reality overtook ideology at the Summit of the Americas. The Bolivarian narrative of blaming others for their problems was buried in the face of the need for all the region’s governments to assume their internal economic and social problems and find solutions to the migratory crisis in a cooperative and coordinated manner.
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