MEXICO .- The elected deputy Raúl Torres has the knowledge and will to place the agenda of interest to migrants in the congress of the City of Mexico. He is the first legislator in the history of the country elected by the same diaspora that he represents and, due to his personal history, knows the bi-national weaving and handling by heart.
He only lacks the budget and the will of the majority party, Morena , to carry out his ideas.
Plans how to create a commission on migrant affairs in the local Chamber of Deputies or a Support Fund for deportees; offices for legal and professional advice or scholarships to avoid brain drain.
“He has a very difficult task with a ruling majority in congress,” warns Daniel Tatcher, coordinator of the Binacibal Observatory of Citizen Initiative Daniel Tatcher, who was an advisor to activists for the consolidation of the figure of migrant deputy .
“The local government and Morena in the city have established cuts and austerity, have eliminated programs in favor of migrants and have not been interested in the issue.”
In this he agrees Juan Carlos Guerrero, founder of the Chilangos Club in Los Angeles. He remembers that when a group of activists proposed all the migrant candidates for the Chilanga deputation ( as the figure is popularly known) sign a “decalogue” of commitments, each of the party representatives accepted, except for the candidate for Morena, Verónica Puente.
The migrant decalogue , He explains, “it is very, very important” because it is about committing to respond to the needs of Mexicans abroad and not to the party’s, as well as creating an interdisciplinary group to protect the human rights of the capital’s community outside the country.
Currently there 800,000 chilangos with four relatives abroad on average. “In total there are 3.2 million that must be attended regardless of the color of the party,” says Guerrero.
The decalogue also includes the promotion of the 3X1 program —which the current president disappeared at the federal level Andrés Manuel López Obrador— in Mexico City.
Since 2015, when the program was implemented in the country to help the communities of origin to develop infrastructure and businesses with funds from Mexicans abroad multiplied by the federal government, states and municipalities, in the capital of the country a single project was never carried out with this fund.
Mainly because the diaspora was not so organized unlike in recent years in which it has managed to become a vanguard in the battle for political rights.
In 2018, Morena and the Labor Party joined forces to eliminate the possibility that the chilangos migrants could be elected as legislated res, but, through various legal and electoral strategies, the activists on the issue managed to reverse the decision.
Finally they voted for Raúl Torres, from 32 years, proposed by the National Action Party, whose father emigrated in 1994 in Los Angeles looking for work and created a furniture sales company. The son was able to emigrate to study in Boston and Washington specialties in international affairs.
Battles in Congress
“I am confident that Morena will help us.” Raúl Torres tells this newspaper that he is confident that the ruling party will have a vision of the future and will show solidarity with the migrant cause and will be seen in the first 100 Government days, when the time comes to fulfill the first task, which is to create a special commission on Migration Affairs.
“It is very important because from there they could push all laws ”, he warns. Without this commission, the deputation would have no life. ”
Until now they have the majority of the opposition parties (PRI, PAN, PRD) that signed the decalogue and they only hope that the bloc de Morena approves it even if migrants are not his priority.
The ruling party is required to start because it still has enough deputies and its endorsement is essential to create the special commission for International Affairs through an initiative that modifies the organic law. But it will also be important for other future plans and the respective funds to achieve them in times of austerity.
For example: to combat the Brain Drain from Mexico Raúl Torres proposes to create a Trust that It will support more Mexicans to study abroad, but this idea has two vital questions: where will it get the initial money for the trust if a commission is not created? And, how to achieve a trust when President Andrés Manuel López Obrador eliminated them at once last year?
In the same way, the deputy will need a lot of determination to activate the Migrant Fund in Return because he calculates that he can obtain money from the more than 85 million dollars that CDMX receives in remittances, but There is already a negative record in the attempts to channel money from there to migrant programs.
Former federal deputy José Jacques Medina, one of the first migrants to occupy a seat in the federal congress through the plurinominal route (although there was still no 2006 a law that would oblige the parties to include them), suggests not having resources from remittances.
“It is true that there is an important income via remittances, but it is untouchable ”, he warns. “The problem is that the remittance goes from the worker in the United States to their family members and they can make the mistake of wanting to tax families and that would be unfair because that money that Mexicans send abroad does not go directly to the State. If it is paid through VAT, consumption, and those families consume mainly food, then it would be very complicated “, he warned.
” Yes we are the first place to receive remittances, but also in separated families living on one side and on the other and you cannot hold their hand. ”
Jacques medina suggests that the new migrant deputy could, from September, make an approach to the Chamber of Deputies, the institution that decides budget items in December. States such as Zacatecas have more experience of this, where the figure of migrant deputy was approved long before to implement laws that benefit this community.
The idea of activist groups like the one that Juan Carlos Guerrero is headed by the fact that the resources for the programs proposed for the migrant chilanga agenda also come from other institutions such as the North American Development Bank. “They are binational resources and some changes could be made to the statutes.”
Deputy Raúl Torres is confident that he will achieve the consensus of the deputies of Morena to carry out the commission first and then the endorsement for the budget. “I am optimistic,” he says.
There was another time when the CDMX government was at the forefront of immigration issues around the time when the current chancellor ruled Marcelo Ebrard (2006 – 2012) when the Mexican capital was declared a sanctuary city where no person could be persecuted due to their immigration status and special offices were created to provide legal, psychological and special financial aid.
The analyst Daniel Tatcher recalls that at that time an intercultural law was also created that still asks the city government for a program of attention to migrants and their families and even Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas headed an office international affairs, but both projects now “Practically do not exist” due to lack of budget.
Political will
Among the pending issues in There are many of the Chilanga migrant agenda that do not require a budget but rather political will. On these matters, analysts reckon there may be a better start and consensus work. “It is a complicated lobbying, but it can be achieved,” Tatcher warns.
The first of these – and deputy Raúl Torres is very clear about it – is to form the International Affairs Committee that does not It costs nothing but acceptance of the rest of the deputies; Another task is the creation of a database. “We want to identify them very well and know where they are,” he says.
Eunice Rendón, former head of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (IME) remember that there are already databases to start locating the Chilangos. There is, for example, in the IME, a Network of Talents who are highly studied Mexicans, with a migration focused on employment, scientific, academic or business contracts.
It also stands out Club associations that have their own records are very important. “You should think about including all kinds of migrants,” he says. “A platform to consult these data is essential.”
To make these binational links grow, Torres will propose to the 16 mayors open offices to make “twinning” with cities in the United States where there is a greater presence of citizens of those places and achieve cultural, development, economic and social exchanges as binational peoples .
“We want to know where all the migrant chilangos are,” he details.
The database would serve to group projects by age or gender as it happens for the women. The idea of the deputy is that a woman in the US serve as a mentor for another woman in Mexico or vice versa in different projects.
Other purposes of the agenda that do not require extra budgets are those related to procedures bureaucratic. The analyst Tatcher points out that if the services of the civil registry, revalidation of studies or labor certifications are improved, for example, it would greatly help the migrant community that has problems with these documents.
But He warns that the most important of the tasks of the migrant deputy will be that the programs in favor of the diaspora are supported by the law and cease to be programs of political will because then they only work if the officials want.
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