US Alarmism Denies Complicity in Rising Mexican Asylum Requests Peter Watt - NACLA
go to original November 29, 2013

“No sane Mexican would want to live in the U.S.,” explains legal scholar Edgardo Buscaglia, “because of the discrimination there.” “But they have to do it,” he notes, because there simply are not enough jobs in Mexico. The massive migration that has taken place in recent decades is predominantly the result of economic policies that have had the effect of expanding wealth disparities. Migration from Mexico represents the “largest wave from a single country to the United States,” and in the last forty years, about 12 million Mexicans have migrated north.

By 2008, one in ten Mexicans, some 11.4 million people, resided in the United States. However, the global financial crisis, combined with the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the numerous costs and perils associated with emigrating to the United States from Mexico and Central America, have dissuaded increasing numbers from taking the risk. In the early 2000s the Mexican and Central American exodus to the United States represented the largest migration of people across a border on the planet. But between 2005 and 2010, the number of migrants (many with U.S.-born children) returning to Mexico was roughly equivalent to that of those who journeyed north (about 1.4 million), resulting in a net standstill in the number of new arrivals in the United States. Nevertheless, as migration to the United States appears to have declined, the number of requests from Mexican nationals seeking asylum has doubled in the last three years.

This recent development has raised fears among immigration hawks in the U.S. who contend that claims of “credible fear” made by asylum seekers from Mexico are illegitimate. Republican House member Bob Goodlatte, for example, argued that undocumented migrants were exploiting legal vulnerabilities in the United States with unfounded assertions that their lives would be in danger were they to be deported back to Mexico. A similar view is repeated throughout the mainstream U.S. media. One Wall Street Journal article, for example, discussed how undocumented migrants use the legal obligation of the U.S. authorities to hear claims of “credible fear” in order “to disappear into America's underground economy.” While it is possible that a minority of asylum requests come from individuals hoping to stay in the United States in order to find employment, there is every reason to believe that most of the requests are genuine.

In order to be granted asylum, claimants have to prove that persecution is related to race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. These make the Mexican cases difficult to argue in immigration courts unless claimants can prove that they belong to a “social group” which itself is the target of maltreatment by criminal gangs.

In any case, the actual number of requests granted to Mexicans would not appear to justify the alarmism common in the media and among politicians. In spite of the indisputable climate of violence and insecurity in the context of the guerra al narco, the authorities have rejected the overwhelming majority of asylum requests from Mexican nationals

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