Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras “spent $ 2.2 billion a year” going regularly and irregularly to the United States in the past five years, most of it paying traffickers, a report said Tuesday.
“In view of the high cost of hiring a smuggler or coyote, it is estimated that, of that total, migrants spent around 1.7 billion dollars a year on irregular movements with a smuggler,” says a report on migration in Central America presented by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Poverty, food insecurity, climatic shocks and violence pushed an annual average of 378,000 Central Americans to migrate to the United States during the last five years, it highlights.
55% of the migrants, the report added, hired a smuggler, known as “coyotes”, at an average cost of 7,500 dollars per person (through regular channels to migrate they would have paid 4,500 dollars). 89% of them want to go to the United States.
The report has been prepared with data collected in surveys of thousands of households, both face-to-face and online, in the three Central American countries.
In just two years the percentage of people who considered migrating has skyrocketed, going from 8% in 2019 to 43% in 2021, but only 3% of them made concrete plans, for fear of “family separation and high costs” .
– The reasons for migrating –
Among the main causes of migration, the report cites food insecurity, violence, the climate crisis and currently the covid-19 pandemic.
Many feel “they have no choice but to go north,” WFP Executive Director David Beasley said Tuesday.
The report lists several recommendations to solve the migration crisis, such as promoting national social protection programs that alleviate poverty and eradicate hunger and development initiatives, such as helping small farmers or training youth and women.
He also advocates creating incentives for the diaspora to invest in public works and calls for destination countries such as the United States to implement policies that expand legal migration pathways for Central Americans.
Washington assumes that “migration flows are not only from the south to the north, but there are also internally, between countries, in such a way that allowing access to work within the Americas is a solution”, for example by giving more visas “to generate some order, “said Ricardo Zúñiga, assistant secretary for Americas affairs at the US State Department on Tuesday.
The three Central American countries, highly dependent on remittances sent by their nationals abroad, defend the right to migration in unison.
During the presentation of the report, the Salvadoran Foreign Minister, Alexandra Hill, defended the right to migration “without it being forced” and her Honduran counterpart Lisandro Rosales added that the tragedy occurs when it is carried out “for adverse reasons.”
The phenomenon must be approached “through the perspective of the human right to migrate,” agreed his Guatemalan counterpart, Pedro Brolo.
“We have been implementing migration containment policies for years, which have proven to be insufficient,” said Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), which supports the report together with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
“The time has come for a strategy that goes beyond the execution of unilateral actions,” says Andrew Selee, president of the MPI.
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