Ricardo Pascoe Pierce.
Migration of Mexicans to the United States, mainly undocumented, has increased massively since 2020, driven by the economic crisis produced by the Covid pandemic and the government’s de facto amnesty policy for organized crime.
The migration of Mexicans to the United States has grown by more than 400% between 2020 and 2022. Both academics and migrant advocacy NGOs explain the reasons are twofold: the economic crisis and the violence of organized crime in Mexico.
When the Covid pandemic hit Mexico, the closure of businesses, especially mini, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which employ 85% of the country’s workers, led to the instant unemployment of 12 million workers. López Obrador’s government boasted that it did not offer them any emergency support, as much of the world did. “Let them spend their savings,” said the President, revealing his enormous ignorance. He confused the global pandemic situation with FOBAPROA (a government bailout program to rescue the banks), thinking they were the same when they were obviously completely different.
Covid’s global pandemic demanded a different response than the response to the Mexican government’s economic policy mistakes in 1994. But Lopez Obrador’s rigid thinking, the product of a mistaken black and white analysis, led him to equate the two phenomena, express his contempt for private enterprise in general, and equate mini, small, and medium-sized enterprises with the large multinational corporations installed in the country.
This analytical error by the President caused the unemployment of 12 million workers due to his omission in economic policy. Two million were from the formal sector and large companies, while 10 million of the unemployed were MSMEs.
This unemployed mass explains a significant part of the Mexicans who now seek to cross the border to the United States, convinced that job opportunities in Mexico have been extinguished or will take years to recover their viability. They vote against the 4T government’s policies with their feet, walking north.
But also, the accelerated growth of organized crime in Mexico is fueling the northward migration of large portions of the population as it occupies ever-larger areas of the country. The 4T’s policy towards criminal elements fuels the phenomenon of violence against towns, villages, and cities because it neither sees nor hears them. Apparently, the President does not care about the problem of insecurity. Notoriously in the face of evidence of his coexistence with organized crime, such as what happened this recent weekend, when he went on a working tour being guarded by the armed militias of the Sinaloa Cartel. The most chilling aspect of the affair is that the President found it quite natural that the Sinaloa Cartel was protecting him: he said that “nothing happens”. Nothing happens to him, but to the populations harassed by the Sinaloa Cartel or the CNGJ, everything happens: death, kidnapping, robbery, rape.
This phenomenon causes the movement of entire populations to the northern border, according to testimonies that migrants share with U.S. authorities, to be considered recipients of special visas as people or populations in danger of death if they return to their places of origin. There is no official data on this phenomenon, given that the López Obrador government does not want to acknowledge these people’s reality.
The exponential migratory growth of Mexicans, men, women, girls, and boys, is the direct product of the misgovernment that reigns in Mexico. There is no other explanation. The government is totally responsible.
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