Photo: HERIKA MARTINEZ / AFP / Getty Images
South America’s middle class is joining the poorest migrants to seek asylum in the United States.
According to The Wall Street Journal, more and more middle-class migrants fly to Mexico to cross the country’s northern border . According to reports from authorities and humanitarian workers, most of the people who come to the United States through Mexico are among the poorest in the world, fleeing poverty and organized crime.
An example of this is the thousands of Haitians who recently formed a makeshift camp in Del Rio, Texas.
However, they are not the only ones, the growth of migrants from the middle class reflects the continuous difficulties in countries such as Brazil and Venezuela due to the Covid pandemic – 13, as well as the economic recessions and political instability that resulted from it.
“They got off the plane and took a taxi or a bus. They were literally driven and they just came over and surrendered to us, ”said Chris T. Clem, the lead agent for the US Border Patrol in Yuma.
Officer Clem says that almost every day agents intercept people who say they have recently flown into a Mexican border city.
“The global recession really made people lose hope. It is very important to go from being middle class in your country to being undocumented in the United States, ”said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan group of experts based in Washington.
The total job losses in South America and the Caribbean during the past year was around 26 million, this places the region as the one with the largest economic contraction in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Brazil exceeded 600 thousand deaths from Covid- 19, is the second globally only after the United States, according to data from Johns University Hopkins.
Illegal migrant status gives these people the same opportunities as anyone who enters the country illegally: most are handed over to shelters and then travel to another location to wait for your claims to be resolved, a process that can take years, due to backlogs accumulating in immigration courts.
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