Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries, Turns Into a Mass Exodus
Haitian standoff in Texas reflects broader mix of nationalities fleeing pandemic-hobbled economies from around the hemisphere
By Juan Montes, Ryan Dube and Kejal Vyas
Migrants, many from Haiti, cross the Rio Grande River near Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALCIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—The gathering of thousands of Haitians at the Texas-Mexico border this past week reflects a stark change in migration patterns to the U.S., driven by Covid-19.
A far broader mix of nationalities is turning up at the border than in the past.
For decades, most crossers were Mexican men and, in recent years, families from the troubled Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, known as the Northern Triangle.
Suddenly Ecuadoreans, Brazilians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans are turning up by the hundreds of thousands, a trend that accelerated sharply in the past six months.
From October 2020 through August, nearly 300,000 migrants from countries other than Mexico and the Northern Triangle were encountered at the border, a fifth of all crossings.
For all of fiscal 2020, when the pandemic slowed the flow of migrants, the figure was nearly 44,000, or 11% of crossings.
In fiscal 2019, it was 77,000, or 9% of crossings; and the year before it was only 21,000, or 5%.
As recently as 2007 such migrants represented less than 1%.
Among the fastest-growing groups are Haitians.
From October of last year through this August, about 28,000 Haitians were arrested trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
That is six times the 4,400 arrested during the entire 2020 fiscal year that ended last September.
The broad wave includes single mothers from Ecuador, Nicaraguan teenagers and farm laborers in Chile.
Many cite the same reasons for uprooting their lives and heading north: economic hits from the pandemic that cost jobs and income, the allure of a booming U.S. economy and the belief that President Biden’s administration would welcome them.
“We’ve never experienced anything like this before,” said Austin Skero, who retired this summer as chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol in the agency’s Del Rio Sector in South Texas.
“All of these folks who are kind of surging in Del Rio proper, groups of 150, 100.
It’s a mix of Haitians and Cubans, or Venezuelans and Cubans.”
In July and August, migrants from other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as a group outpaced those from either Mexico or individual countries from the Northern Triangle for the first time
Volunteers hand out supplies to migrants in Ciudad Acuña. / PHOTO: SERGIO FLORES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALThe influx poses a challenge for the Biden administration. Encounters of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are near a 20-year high.
Border apprehensions are expected to reach about 1.7 million this year, twice the number from 2019.
It is unknown how many cross undetected.
The administration this week sent hundreds of Customs and Border Protection agents to stabilize the border and try to keep more migrants from entering.
It began deporting Haitians at the border in flights back to their home country.
Many of those apprehended are currently being sent back across the border under a public health authority known as Title 42 that both the Trump and Biden administrations have argued allows the U.S., during a public health emergency, to deny migrants’ rights to request asylum.
Some, usually with small children, are allowed to enter and ask for asylum, adding to an already-overwhelmed asylum system.
More than 9 in 10 of the migrants from other countries come from just six Latin American nations: Ecuador, Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Migrant families arriving at Bajo Chiquito camp after walking through Panama's Darien jungle for several days.Struggling to put food on the table after the pandemic closed her small coffee business, Mayra Aguilar sold her car and left her home in Ecuador’s southern Andes last month, hoping for a better life in the United States.
Ms. Aguilar and her 4-year-old son crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves over to the U.S. Border Patrol, believing they would be welcomed after her smuggler said the border was open for migrants.
Instead, they were apprehended and sent back to Mexico, leaving the single mother broke and depressed, living in a shelter in this violent border city filled with other migrants.
“I was cheated. I thought I would be able to stay in the U.S., but it was a total lie,” said Ms. Aguilar.
The number of Ecuadorean migrants encountered by U.S. border officials since last October hit 88,342 through August, compared with 13,000 in the 2019 fiscal year and just 1,495 in 2018.
Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole suffered the world’s steepest economic contraction last year, and the region’s biggest decline since the Great Depression, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The pandemic cost some 26 million jobs.
“After the pandemic, what we are now seeing is like a pressure cooker in which the valve has exploded,” said Enrique Vidal, coordinator of Fray Matías de Córdoba Human Rights Center, a pro-migrant nonprofit in Mexico.
“It’s a humanitarian drama.”
Even when the pandemic recedes, the new migration patterns will likely persist.
Immigrants to the U.S. often create a network of pathways that spur new migrants to head north, as those who succeed provide advice to family and friends, causing word to spread, immigration experts say.
Sidmar Pereira, a 34-year-old Brazilian, hopes to reach Massachusetts and join his cousin, who settled there with his entire family.
Last month, Mr. Pereira flew with his wife and three children from São Paulo to Mexico City and then traveled to Ciudad Juárez.
He’s now waiting with his family in a shelter for the U.S. to resume processing asylum requests at the international bridge, which was suspended during the pandemic.
He says he would like to work in one project tied to President Biden’s proposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan.
“They don’t have enough workers,” he said of U.S. companies, “and we are doing nothing here in Mexico.”
Other migrants are fleeing political repression as crackdowns intensify in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Latin America’s three authoritarian regimes.
Some 37,000 Venezuelans were arrested at the border up to August, compared with 2,200 in all of 2019 and just 62 in 2018.
Apprehensions of Cubans jumped to 33,000, compared with 11,600 in 2019.
About 42,500 Nicaraguans, who traditionally migrated to neighboring Costa Rica, were apprehended, more than tripling arrests for the whole of 2019 and surpassing migration from Salvadorans for the first time in July.
“In Nicaragua, our fate is prison or death,” said Cristhian Espinosa, a 19-year-old Nicaraguan who hoped to get asylum in the U.S. after saying he received death threats from a pro-government paramilitary group. “We need help.”
At the start of the pandemic, experts expected more migration from poor countries hit by rising poverty and hunger.
The outflow was initially stemmed because of closed borders and strict lockdowns.
The downturn in the U.S. economy also curtailed interest in traveling north.
But with borders opening back up and lockdown measures lifted, migrants are on the move, attracted to an improving U.S. economy.
Desperate for a better life, they are being encouraged by coyotes—or human smugglers—who are operating in more countries around the region, said Blanca Navarrete, the director of a pro-migrant nonprofit in Ciudad Juárez.
“They often mislead vulnerable people, telling them that the U.S. border is open, when it is not,” she said.
At a Methodist migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Father Juan Fierro, says he’s seeing growing numbers of migrants from much further south than ever before.
“This shelter is increasingly looking like a tower of Babel,” said Mr. Fierro, a folksy, mustached man.
“You have people coming from more countries than in the past, people with different cultures and different languages.”
While thousands of Haitian and other migrants have already turned up at the U.S. border, there are tens of thousands still on their way, overwhelming border crossings in Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.
In Panama, Haitian migration drove a record 70,000 undocumented migrants from January through August, more than the previous three years combined, according to government figures.
“We can’t answer why a citizen of Haiti living in these countries would decide to sell all his belongings and start such a dangerous trek north with no documents, but this is what’s happening,” said Samira Gozaine, the chief of Panama’s migration agency.
Migrants carry supplies across the Rio Grande River near Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. / PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALSome of the Haitian migrants who turned up in the U.S. recently fled the country after President Jovenel Moïse ’s assassination in July, which has put the country on the brink of anarchy.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a boat with over 100 Haitian migrants on board some 18 miles off the coast of Miami’s Biscayne Bay.
But the overwhelming majority in Del Rio had left Haiti in the years after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 people, moving to South American countries like Chile and Brazil that had lenient immigration rules.
At the time, economists described it as a new wave of immigration from one developing country to another.
Many of those migrants had been living near the bottom rung of the economy, selling food or footwear at street markets.
That has made them particularly vulnerable to the economic shock caused by the pandemic.
Chile, one of Latin America’s wealthiest nations, also tightened immigration requirements after receiving hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans in recent years.
Earlier this year, Yanisleidys Diaz began her trek to the U.S. after she was told she had to leave Chile in 180 days.
The 39-year-old single mother from Cuba arrived in Chile in 2019 with her two sons, seeking informal work because they lacked a work permit.
Her oldest boy, 17-year-old Leodan Riveros, worked construction and as a fruit picker at a farm, earning less than minimum wage.
They struggled to make ends meet even before the pandemic.
Then Ms. Diaz said she was notified by the government that they could no longer stay without residency.
They sold their furniture and clothes to pay for five bus rides to cross Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
Yanisleidys Diaz, from Camaguey, Cuba, and her sons Leosdani Ocariz, 11, and Leodan Riveros, 17, at a camp for migrants at the riverside port of Lajas Blancas in Panama. / PHOTO: TARINA RODRIGUEZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALLike many other migrants, they tried to exit South America through the Darien Gap, one of the thickest tropical rainforests on the planet, which straddles the border between Colombia and Panama.
No road passes through the jungle, which is rife with venomous snakes and armed gangs.
Once in the Darien Gap, a gang of eight men attacked them, holding a knife to Ms. Diaz’s 11-year-old son as they rummaged through their backpacks for food and money.
Now stranded in Panama, Ms. Diaz said she doesn’t know how they will reach the U.S.
“We’re just humans who are looking for a chance,” she said.
Stevens Saintime’s sister perished in the Darien Gap. Mr. Saintime, a 33-year-old from Haiti, left his impoverished country four years ago and with a brother settled in Santiago, Chile, working illegally for a scrap metal collector.
Their sister, Jenny, found a job as a cleaner in Brazil’s capital.
Work slowed significantly during the pandemic, making it difficult for Mr. Saintime to pay rent.
He said he couldn’t afford a lawyer to help him obtain residency papers in Chile.
Mr. Saintime and his sister decided to embark on a 5,000-mile journey to the U.S., seeing it as their last hope for a stable life.
The siblings met in Peru in early August and took a bus north through Ecuador and Colombia before arriving at the Darien Gap.
They crossed the jungle with 15 other Haitians.
Armed men attacked the migrants, stealing the $200 that Mr. Saintime was carrying as well as his clothes, leaving him only with the shorts and the Chicago Bulls basketball jersey he was wearing.
Stevens Saintime, a Haitian migrant, at a camp in Panama’s Darien province. / PHOTO: TARINA RODRIGUEZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALTired and dehydrated, the group of Haitians separated.
Mr. Saintime said he walked ahead to see if he could round up food for his sister, who was getting dizzy and falling behind.
Later, at a migrant camp in Panama, a travel companion told him that Jenny fainted and stopped breathing.
She had to be left behind, the companion said.
“I don’t know how I’m going to tell my dad that my sister is dead,” said Mr. Saintime, sitting in an indigenous hamlet in Panama.
He planned to continue his journey.
Under pressure from the U.S., Mexico reinstated this month a visa requirement for Ecuadoreans, who had been able to fly in as tourists and then head to the U.S. border.
In the first seven months of this year, seven out of 10 Ecuadoreans who arrived as tourists in Mexico didn’t return home, according to Mexico’s government.
Mexico is also considering a visa for Brazilians, a Mexican official said.
Meanwhile, Ecuador announced in May that Haitians would need visas for entry.
In February, Peruvian authorities stopped at least 300 Haitians trying to enter the country by crossing a bridge from neighboring Brazil.
“They arrive here almost every day,” said Quedinei Barreto, an official in the Brazilian border town of Assis Brasil.
Makendy Timouche, a 27-year-old Haitian who also comes from Chile, did make it to the city of Tapachula, one of the last stops in southern Mexico in the long trek towards the U.S. In recent months, Haitians have often outnumbered Mexicans in Tapachula’s main plaza.
Mr. Timouche is awaiting refugee status in Mexico which, he hopes, would allow him to get to the U.S. border quickly and safely. He rents a room with five other Haitians in a poor neighborhood. A couple and their child sleep on a mattress, while Mr. Timouche and two others sleep in sleeping bags.
He spends his days recalling the suffering during the journey north and thinking of his 7-year-old son, who is in Haiti. He hasn’t seen the boy in four years.
“I dream that we reunite in the U.S.,” Mr. Timouche said. “I dream about a normal life together.”
Migrants, many from Haiti, camp along the Del Rio International Bridge near the Rio Grande, Texas. / PHOTO: JULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS—Alicia Caldwell in Del Rio, Texas, Luciana Magalhães in São Paulo, Brazil, and Santiago Pérez in Mexico City contributed to this article.
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