Transcript 0:00 [intro music] Hi, everybody, and welcome to Trendlines, a podcast on global affairs brought to you by World Politics Review. I'm Judah Grunstein, WPR's editor-in-chief. 0:13 For this week's report, we'll be looking at a significant shift in migration patterns that has seen a growing number of Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries but seeking asylum in Mexico rather than continuing on to the United States. 0:27 That is putting Mexico's already weak asylum system under strain, and given U.S. President Donald Trump's hardline approach to immigration, the burden is only likely to grow heavier. 0:38 Laura Weiss will join Peter Dury a little later to discuss Mexico's migrant crisis. 0:43 Before I talk with WPR senior editor Freddy Deknatel, I want to mention a way you can support our free podcast through patron pledges at a site called Patreon. 0:53 I'll give you more details at the end of the show about the benefits you can get through pledging as little as $1 per month. But the short version is go over to our page at Patreon. 1:02 The Bitly link for that is bit.ly/wpr-patreon. That's B-I-T.L-Y/W-P-R-P-A-T-R-E-O-N. Freddy, one of the last times we talked, you were, in your own words, surviving. 1:21 Are you feeling any better these days? I am feeling a bit better, though I'm, uh, a little weary after another long week of news about Trump. 1:31 The, the week that started with, uh, the resignation or the firing of Michael Flynn, Trump's national security advisor, for discussing U.S. sanctions, uh, uh, on Russia with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. 1:47 during the presidential transition period. 1:50 Uh, now, one of the things that I wanted to talk about is the way in which leaks led to this, uh, to this crisis or this scandal, uh, in the sense that, uh, essentially it was the U.S. 2:02 intelligence community that intercepted the calls by, uh, wiretapping the Russian ambassador's phone line. 2:10 Uh, and when their, uh, uh, alerts to the Trump administration, to the White House, didn't seem to be having effect, they went to the media, essentially. Uh, is this the new normal, and is that okay that the U.S. 2:25 intelligence community, uh, intervenes in this way in the executive? 2:30 I think it is the new normal, um, and it's not surprising when Trump has spent months, uh, attacking the intelligence community, really sort of daring them to, 2:41 uh, push back or, or stop him from, from doing the things that he said he wants to do. 2:46 Um, and I, I can understand some of the risks on the one hand of, of, of having, um, intelligence agencies, whether the CIA or the NSA, um, really checking policies, but at the same time, um, that has always been a check on presidents. 3:02 Um, certainly this is more. There's a lot more leaking already than, than any previous presidency that anyone can really remember. 3:09 But, um, I would put that in, in context of, uh, it's a natural reaction, in my mind, to, to Trump. 3:17 I- in this case, the, the actual warnings, uh, were pretty serious because Tr- uh, Flynn had essentially lied to the press, lied to the vice president, lied to the White House about the content of, of his conversations. 3:31 Uh, and once that became public record, uh, given that the Russians actually knew there was a discrepancy, it made him vulnerable to blackmail. 3:38 That at least was the argument of the Justice Department and the intelligence communities. Um, so it's a question of the, the ends justifying the means. 3:48 Uh, but in, in any other country of the world, if this were going on, we might be talking about a deep state, a crisis between, uh, the, the civilian or the elected government and the bureaucracy and the intelligence community. 4:03 Um, I, I, I feel similarly to you that, uh, i- in this particular case, the, the ends very obviously justify the means. 4:12 The problem, of course, is that, uh, when it comes to intelligence and things like this, it's always very opaque, so it's hard to ve- to, to know, uh, are the leaks that we got accurate? Is the information true? 4:24 Uh, that's always harder to, to tell for us because we're not privy to all the information. 4:29 Um, I'm a little more concerned maybe about the kind of precedent it sets, uh, in this case, uh, because Trump represents such a, a sort of, uh, a- an outlier in terms of the American political class and the, the consensus. 4:46 Uh, it seems like he also presents certain unique risks and, and threats. Um, but I'm just a little concerned. 4:54 Uh, I think, for instance, the reaction would've been a lot different if this sort of thing had taken place, uh, uh, on, again, uh, under the, uh, administration of Barack Obama, for instance. 5:05 Yeah, I mean, I think on Obama, um, you know, he, early in his, in his presidency, there were leaks from the military over Afghanistan when he was publicly, um, you know, reappraising U.S. 5:17 policy there and trying to decide whether they should cut down on troops, and then he was sort of backed into a surge partly through, um, leaks and another reporting that made it very clear at the time that the Pentagon dis- disagreed with him. 5:30 Um, so I think, you know, the, again, the leaking has, has always been a, a, a fact of American politics. 5:37 I think the mention, too, of the deep state, and we've seen more articles elsewhere, um, this week, really overlooks also that when you talk about the deep state in a place like Turkey or Egypt, um, that is, you know, these are places that had dictatorial governments, um, places where the military was actually, you know, in, in lieu of an elected government running things. 6:00 Um, and the, you know, i- institutional rivalries or institutional battles between the intelligence community and one of the branches of the government in the US is a long, long way from what the deep state in places like Egypt and Turkey is and was. 6:16 So I think that, uh, that word's getting thrown around a little bit too carelessly. Um, I don't think that, you know, there aren't risks and precedents of the amount of leaking that we're seeing. 6:28 But also I think that Trump in a lot of ways created this situation because he broke precedent by calling out the intelligence services, by questioning their information, by, you know, again, sort of daring them to cross him. 6:42 Uh, so I, I, I don't think that he, um, really should be that surprised with the reaction. 6:49 Now, an- a- another, uh, sort of risk or danger of this kind of l- these kind of leaks and, and leaks at, at this point, uh, a little more than... 6:57 a little less than a month actually into the administration, uh, leaks isn't even the right word. This is like a flood of information, uh, draft memos, draft executive orders, uh, just rumors, uh, factional infighting. 7:11 I mean, it is essentially, uh, you know, Trum- Trump was a reality TV host. Uh, he's running essentially a reality TV White House with, with this, with... It's almost like glass, a, a glass house you can see in. 7:26 Um, the danger that I see in terms of that is that it creates this real, uh, it creates a, almost like a paralysis because it, it reveals so much division within the executive branch. 7:39 Uh, the, the, the United States government and s- system of government, and especially its foreign policy, is predicated on this idea of a unified ex- executive. 7:49 When the president decides something, the entire federal, the entire executive branch of the federal government is in line with it. 7:56 Now, obviously we know that there's always bureaucratic infighting and, and resistance, but in this case, it's also a, a, an, a question of chaos and, and policy paralysis, uh, to the point where foreign governments, uh, I imagine, don't really know who they need to talk to in order to get a straight answer whet- and, and whether they can get a straight answer at this point. 8:18 So the other risk in terms of, in terms of all this leaking, um, 8:23 especially what it reveals in terms of this, this almost like, uh, ground level insurgency in the federal bureaucracy, is that it creates a, a vacuum of American power, uh, in the world, uh, at a time, for instance, right now, where there's the G20 summit going on in Germany, uh, there's the Munich Security Conference, uh, thereafter. 8:44 Uh, I imagine that there are a lot of governments around the world that have no idea what the US government thinks about various important issues. Yeah. 8:52 I think that, uh, certainly people are, are not only wondering who's in charge, but how long will it be until somebody is at least, you know, pretending to call the shots. 9:04 I mean, it's, it's so haphazard and, and there's so many offices that are empty. 9:08 Um, you know, I was reading about Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, who's in Germany for G20 meetings, and it might seem small, but he couldn't, you know, they didn't have a room in Bonn for him, so he stayed, um, you know, outside the city and, and small details like this that he can't, you know... 9:25 The meetings he's been, he's been holding with people are clearly just dashed together. Um, and those are very small things, but they add up obviously to, to really big policy vacuums. 9:35 I, I've, I've taken to likening the Trump administration, uh, to the, the geopolitical equivalent of OJ Simpson's white Bronco. Uh, you don't want to be watching it, but you can't take your eyes off it. 9:48 Uh, it just seems, uh, almost surreal in a way that is both horrifying and fascinating at the same time. Um, that, that just about does it for us. 9:57 Before we turn it over to Peter, uh, were there any briefings or coverage on WPR that you wanted to call people's attention to? Um, yeah. 10:06 One was a, a briefing by Patrick Corcoran, um, on Argentina and a strict new immigration order that people have been likening to Trump's own travel ban on seven Muslim majority countries. 10:20 And I wanted to flag Frida Ghitis's column from this week, uh, where she talks about, uh, perhaps a un- unexpected or unanticipated, uh, effect of Trump's election and the Brexit referendum, which is, uh, not just empowering, uh, illiberal, uh, populist nationalist movements, but also a liberal counter reaction, uh, now that, uh, the, the actual, uh, stakes have become a little more clear. 10:51 All right, Freddy, thanks a lot. Thanks, Judah. And now we'll turn it over to Peter for the report. [instrumental music] It is dawn on the Guatemala side of the Suchiate River. 11:03 Thousands of migrants and potential refugees from across Central America cross this river to get from Guatemala to Mexico. 11:11 In Honduras, homicides tripled from 2005 to 2012, and its murder rate is 12 times the international average. 130,000 Salvadorans were displaced in 2012 alone. 11:23 And what we are doing as a country is we have paid, uh, Mexico tens of millions of dollars to stop these refugees from arriving at our border and claiming, asking for refuge. 11:34 [instrumental music] Mexico is mostly thought of as a transit country for migrants and refugees passing through to the United States. 11:44 But Laura Weitz, a freelance journalist and web editor at the North American Congress on Latin America, says this is changing. 11:52 She is joining me now to discuss the changing dynamics in the migrant flows passing through Mexico and why an increasing number of Latin American refugees set their sights on staying in Mexico instead of continuing to the United States. 12:07 Starting last summer, I started noticing a trend that an increasing number of Central American asylum seekers as a result of changing policies in Mexico and the U.S. deciding to stay in Mexico. 12:23 Just in the past year between 2015 and 2016, the number of refugee applicants in Mexico rose 150%. 12:31 So just a few years ago, there was a trickle of people applying for asylum in Mexico, less than 1,000 people in 2013, and now we have, you know, almost 10 times that. 12:43 And while this number is still lower than the number of people who are seeking the United States, uh, it's growing. 12:51 And it's estimated that around 400,000 migrants, um, which includes asylum seekers, have crossed, um, the Mexico-Guatemala border in the last year. 13:01 Um, and these are people primarily coming from the Northern Triangle of Central America, which is El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. 13:09 Um, and of that, uh, in the past year, um, nearly 9,000 people applied for asylum status in Mexico. It's estimated that this is only about 1% of the number of people who could be eligible to apply for asylum in Mexico. 13:26 The Northern Triangle states, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where most of the migrants entering Mexico are coming from, are both economically much less developed and more violent than either Mexico or the United States. 13:41 Migration, according to Laura, is primarily a coping mechanism of people faced with extreme hardship and threats to their life or liberty. 13:49 El Salvador and Honduras are, are vying for the top spot in most violent, um, country that's not currently technically at war. 13:58 Um, so the primary reason a lot of people are leaving is due to gang violence, which affects life, you know, both from a survival standpoint as well as an economic standpoint. 14:10 In a lot of places that are controlled by gangs or there's warring gangs in various municipalities, um, people are forced to pay kind of a gang tax for protection or are regularly extorted. 14:24 Um, so you hear from a lot of people who maybe ran small businesses, uh, in their home countries and were unable to survive, um, because they were constantly being threatened and harassed by gangs to sort of essentially pay them off. 14:37 And if anybody were to, say, report a crime or accidentally get on the wrong side of one of these gangs or simply refuse to join, um, often that results in threats to their lives. 14:48 Um, and so the, the level of violence is, is pretty extreme. 14:52 According to international law, if somebody shows up to a country and says that if they go back, they will face a threat to their life, it's illegal according to these laws to turn that person away. 15:06 That is, of course, the legal theory. In practice, Laura says, asylum seekers face a number of challenges when trying to reach a safe country and apply for refugee status. 15:17 Unfortunately, uh, due to immigration policy both in the U.S. 15:23 and in Mexico, increasingly so in Mexico, what you see is a lot more detention and deportation instead of people being made aware of their right to apply for asylum and their right to international protection. 15:38 A really big problem is that Mexican migration officials are not informing people who they apprehend of their right to apply for asylum, 15:49 um, and in some cases are even, even go out of their way to dissuade people from applying for asylum. There's a number of reasons why people are increasingly applying in Mexico rather than continuing on to the U.S. 16:02 I think it's impossible to ignore, um, kind of the current, the current state of immigration policy in the U.S. Um, you know, of course, there's a lot of anxiety, uncertainty, um, involved in, um, the new administration. 16:17 You know, the Trump campaign built its campaign off of anti-immigrant sentiment, and I think that people are definitely aware of that in Mexico, in Central America. 16:27 Um, I think also, um, something else that I heard a lot, um, from different people working in shelters and from different people I spoke to in Mexico is that people, 16:40 when they leave their countries, they don't necessarily have a plan in mind of sort of where they would ideally like to end up. 16:47 What you would hear a lot is, you know, people wanna stay in the first place where they feel safe. And so I think staying in Mexico for a lot of people seems like a viable option. 16:57 Um, there's less of a linguistic barrier, and I think that that appeals to some people. 17:03 Um, starting during, uh, the civil wars in Central America, especially in Guatemala, there's been a large population of Guatemalans who have settled in, um, in Southern Mexico. 17:14 And so I think, you know, when there are already communities of people in these areas, um... 17:21 On the other hand, there's a sense of proximity to the threats that people are facing, and so that would be a reason why people would want to continue to the, to the United States or at least further north, I would say. 17:32 Um, and there's a sense now that with the, uh, threats of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border that there's, there's no hope for anybody applying for asylum now. 17:42 I mean, you have an increasing number of Haitians and also, uh, Cubans who are trying to get to the border before, um, the inauguration on January 20th. 17:53 And when I was doing my research, it was, um, a week or two before the inauguration. 17:58 There was definitely a sense of, you know, I would hear from people that they're in a large group who had left very recently in order to kind of try to, try to beat the inauguration in a way. 18:12 The Mexican government has been caught off guard with the new influx of people applying for asylum instead of traveling on to the United States. 18:21 While the Mexican government, with support of the United States, has heavily invested in its capabilities to detect, arrest, and deport illegal migrants, very little has been done to guarantee due process and a quick and transparent asylum procedure. 18:36 Mexico has a very limited capacity, um, to intake refugees. The, their refugee agency, the National Refugee Agency, has only kind of had the capacity to even do asylum request intake since 2011. 18:53 And so they're assisted by, um, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, um, which has three offices, uh, in Mexico and are in the process of opening a few satellite locations. 19:06 But the, the refugee agency, COMAR, is spread extremely thin. As of about a year and a half ago, um, there were only 15 officials who were able to adjudicate asylum requests. 19:19 Um, since this past September, um, there's been an opening of about 20 more positions and, like I said, a new satellite office. Um, but despite the rise in asylum processing needs, as I mentioned before, between, uh, 19:38 2015 and 2016, the number of asylum cases rose about 150%, and that represents about a 10% increase per month. 19:48 Um, and despite that, um, if you look at the government budgets, um, the budget for COMAR, the refugee agency, was reduced by 15% in 2015. 19:58 Meanwhile, you see the strengthening of the kind of deportation, detention and deportation apparatus. 20:05 Um, starting in the summer of 2014, when there was kind of a large so-called border surge of, um, Central American children and, uh, families, especially single mothers and, and young children, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border. 20:22 There was sort of a lot of government pressure to, to do something about it, and some of that pressure, you know, kind of went southward in the sense that the U.S. 20:31 really encouraged Mexico, both, uh, materially as well as rhetorically, to be able to stop people before they arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, which resulted in something called the Southern Border Plan. 20:44 So the Southern Border Plan in Mexico consisted of a large surge of money and resources and training to, uh, Mexican migration officials, including the construction of several so-called comprehensive checkpoints, which involves, um, you know, large detention centers, um, increased detection capabilities, um, modernized checkpoints, um, increased staff. 21:10 Um, and so you see a much, much higher number of migrants being apprehended, detained, and deported from Mexico over the last few years, uh, since this policy was enacted. 21:23 The details, the specific details about this policy are notoriously opaque. 21:28 Um, this was a law that was passed by decree, and there isn't a lot of legislation or budget information about what this project really consisted of and what state, state it is at now. 21:42 Um, regardless, the capacity of the Mexican government to detain and deport people has increased exponentially, whereas, as I mentioned, the, the ability to adjudicate asylum claims and the ability to, um, provide international protection to the tens of thousands of people who are traveling through the country, um, has not followed suit in the same, uh, to the same degree. 22:08 Um, and so the number of migrants who were apprehended in Mexico, um, reached 166,000 people in 2015, which was higher than the number of people being deported from the U.S. Um, and so this, this policy has been, 22:26 uh, criticized quite a bit. Um, the Mexican migration authorities are notorious for being corrupt, notorious for extorting people, notorious for not telling people about their right to apply for asylum. Um, and the U.S. 22:43 government knows this, and Mexican deportation of Central American children has far eclipsed U.S. deportations of Central American children. 22:54 So for every 100 minors Mexico apprehends, it deports 77, compared to three for every 100 by the U.S. 23:02 The election of Donald Trump has shocked both politicians and civil society members working on migration policy in Mexico. 23:10 But while the Trump administration's plans and their consequences remain largely unclear, they will almost certainly build on measures established by his predecessor, President Obama. 23:21 In terms of civil society and government, I think that the main sentiment we see is, is really uncertainty as well as anxiety. Um, I think that there's a sense that if migration policy was already 23:39 bad and worsening under previous administrations, that we can only expect it to get worse under Trump. 23:47 Unfortunately, a lot of the sort of mechanisms to create this deportation machine that Trump is threatening, a lot of these mechanisms already exist. 23:58 Um, for example, uh, Obama's policy was, it was called the felons not families policy, where he said that he would prioritize deporting people with criminal records over people who were in the country who had committed no other crime than unauthorized entry. 24:16 A number of, of people were offered protection from deportation if they had arrived as children, which is what's known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, uh, DACA. 24:27 750,000 people, um, were I guess, conferred this status under the Obama administration. Um, the problem with the felons not families sort of framework is that, 24:44 um, the definition of who is a felon, of who is a criminal is really quite wide. 24:50 And I think that we'll see Trump, and we already have seen Trump, um, kind of take advantage of the latitude of this definition and expand it further. 24:59 Um, for example, unauthorized entry, if you've already been t- if you already have a deportation order, is considered a felony. And so that's not... 25:08 You know, I think that Trump and his administration can really take advantage of the rhetoric of, "Oh, we're deporting dangerous criminals," when really these so-called dangerous criminals, 25:19 really their only crime could be unauthorized entry into the country. Um, and so I think that we'll see that definition be expanded and taken advantage of. 25:30 That, um, is really scary, I think, for the Mexican government and for a lot of people in Mexico because 25:40 Mexico's ability to take in, um, you know, if millions of people are deported, Trump has threatened to deport anywhere between 2 million and 11 million undocumented people in this country. 25:53 Um, I think that Mexico will have a really hard time 25:58 sort of reabsorbing these people, especially when a significant part of their economy depends on remittances sent back from people working in the US to their families in Mexico. 26:09 Um, the peso in Mexico is, is doing really, really badly right now. It's in free fall. Um, and there just aren't enough jobs for the people who would be deported. 26:22 Um, that's not to mention, you know, kind of the moral crisis of people being sent back to Mexico to a country that maybe they don't know. 26:31 So there's that situation, and then in addition to that, you have the, the Central American refugees. 26:38 And so if Mexico is already inundated by deportees, there's gonna be no way that they're going to have the ability to also share some of those resources with Central American refugees. 26:50 And if these refugees can't go to Mexico and they can't go to the US, where will they go? Many thanks to Laura Wisse for joining us this week. 27:01 If you'd like to read more about the shifting patterns of migration in Mexico, you can find her in-depth article on worldpoliticsreview.com. 27:09 If you like what you hear on Trendlines, go ahead and subscribe to it in the podcast app of your choice. 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Trendlines is produced and edited by Peter Dury, who also conducts the report interviews. 28:06 You can follow him and World Politics Review on Twitter, and you can find links to pieces covering the issues we talked about in the show notes on worldpoliticsreview.com. 28:15 Have a great weekend, and see you next week for a new episode of Trendlines. 28:19 [outro music]
