Immediately after the horrific discovery of more than 40 dead immigrants (the number will eventually rise to 53) and several injured in a tractor in San Antonio, Texas, Governor Greg Abbott (R) tried to use the tragedy to gain a political foothold. “These deaths are for Biden,” Abbott wrote on Twitter. “It’s a result of his deadly policies on open borders.” His statement was dishonest. In fact, the circumstances that led dozens of human beings – including many children – to accumulate in a truck without water or proper ventilation are not the sole responsibility of the US President. It is a failure shared by many regional actors, including the governor of Texas himself, who has made the dehumanization of the immigrant community a recurring political ploy. The details of the horror in San Antonio also illustrate the failure of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. According to the Mexican Consul General in San Antonio, at least 27 of the immigrants who lost their lives were Mexicans. This revealing figure confirms a worrying trend: After years of stability, during which more Mexicans returned to Mexico than those who immigrated to the United States, the displacement of Mexicans to the north has increased again. During the 2018 presidential campaign and the first days of his presidency, López Obrador specifically promised that by the end of his government in 2024, immigration from Mexico would be reduced, if not eliminated. “People will work where they were born, close to their relatives, in their environment, with their customs and culture,” he wrote in his campaign book. “No one, out of necessity, to alleviate his hunger and poverty, will be forced to leave his homeland.” The Post’s View: More immigrant corpses and cynicism found on southwest border Four years later, the opposite happened: In 2021, Mexico was the largest source of illegal immigration in the United States, with 608,000 Mexican nationals arrested by Border Patrol. “When the government of President López Obrador took office, we had 12 years of stability in the flow of migrants from Mexico to the United States and now we are four or five times above that level,” said Tonatiuh Guillén Lopez, who was the first director of immigration. . policy for López Obrador, he told me. “The government has received a period of very low immigration and will leave in very high numbers.” For Carlos Heredia, a professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and an immigration specialist, current immigration trends stem from the growing number of Mexican immigrants in the United States, violence in many parts of the country and the struggling nation. economy. Between 2020 and 2021, during a worrying increase in homicides, the number of people forcibly displaced in Mexico quadrupled. The economy remains stagnant. These factors combine and leave many increasingly desperate to make the unsafe journey across and across borders. “Not enough jobs have been created in Mexico,” says Heredia. Guillaume agrees. “The number of Mexican deaths in Texas reflects exactly this reconstruction of the Mexican flow,” he told me. The responsibility of the Mexican government goes beyond its failure to discourage the flow of Mexican immigration to the north. The spread of human trafficking networks, which often operate with impunity throughout Mexico and the United States, is directly related to the horror in San Antonio. “Criminal organizations dedicated to human trafficking have found harsher and more dangerous methods for those who want to get to the other side,” writes Mexican journalist Carlos Puig. “And that includes stacking them in a trailer at 100 degrees.” According to immigration expert Heredia, the Mexican government has “failed in almost everything” in its efforts to curb human trafficking. In 2021, Mexican security officials reported a 228% increase in trafficking in human beings compared to 2020. “It is an extremely lucrative business that has avoided restraint, with anchorages on both sides of the border.” With the growing flow of migrants from Mexico and the increasingly aggressive smuggling networks that have no hesitation in exposing dozens of people to suffocation and torture, the humanitarian crisis at the border will continue. For López Obrador, it could prove to be a costly failure. In an interview at the beginning of his administration, López Obrador thought: “There will come a day during my administration that Mexicans will not go to work in the United States because they will have jobs and be happy where they were born.” The dozens of Mexican corpses stacked inside this truck in the raging heat of Texas do not live up to that promise, in the most tragic way possible.
