East Goes West: Dangerous Passage and Uncertainty in Europe Push Migrants, Refugees to Americas

By Laura Dixon , Pedro Noel, Andrea Arzaba, Sally Hayden, Mauro Pimentel, Selase Kove-Seyram

With him were scores of other migrants. “Somalis, Indians, Senegalese, Nepalese, Ghanaians, Bangladeshis, Cubans, Haitians and Nigerians,” he recalled. Although the group was mostly made up of men and women in their 20s and 30s, some had brought their children with them. Their “guide” pointed to a path through the jungle. “Keep going this way. It’s not very far,” he told them.

What followed was a week-long trek through the dense unknown, every step marked by fear in an untamed jungle, home to wild animals, armed drug traffickers, and people smugglers. At one point, the group stumbled across the corpse of a pregnant woman.

Instead of heading north to Europe, where the crisis at sea has led to thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean, a growing number of migrants like Majeed are now choosing to head West. They fly across the Atlantic on a route that goes first to Latin America, and then north through Mexico to the United States and Canada.

a 40-year-old migrant who had travelled from Ghana to the northern Mexican border town of Tijuana. (Carol and others interviewed for this story asked that their full names not be used. Some fear discovery and deportation while others worry about getting on the wrong side of the traffickers who brought them.)

Like many migrants, Carol had taken advantage of Ecuador’s liberal visa system to fly into Quito. She then traveled overland through Colombia and the Darien Gap, the roadless forest on the border with Panama that was, until recently, partially controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Most of those headed north take an overland route, cutting through Latin and Central American countries preoccupied with armed criminal gangs, petty thieves, and unscrupulous traffickers.

Some migrants and refugees stay in Latin America. 100Reporters and Journalists for Transparency found asylum applications rising in Brazil and Mexico, boosted by a new flow of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Many, however, are using the region as a stepping stone on a journey north.

Panama’s migration authorities run a shelter at the Darien Gap, for the migrants, many desperate and sick, who make it across. Somalians, Congolese, Ghanaians, and Asians of different nationalities, were among the migrants recently occupying the shelter, said Javier Rudas, a government representative in the region. In 2016, he said, authorities saw 22,000 “extra-regional” migrants cross the border into Panama, while figures show the total number of people crossing the Colombia-Panama border irregularly increased to 30,000 last year from 2,000 in 2013.

The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, acknowledges this new dynamic in international migration, noting, “the region is receiving an increasing number of asylum-seekers, often mixed with economic migrants, particularly from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.”

Cesar Mesa, who works in the UNHCR office in Turbo, a Colombian town that’s the jumping off point for the Darien Gap, remembers meeting two Ghanaians who had been told they were two days away from the American border.

Although it is almost impossible to verify the numbers of people making this trip – since migrants tend to travel with coyotes or smugglers and in an “irregular” way through poorly guarded border crossings – Mesa says they have known of people from the Caribbean, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Eritrea, and Ethiopia making the journey.

“in the context of ever-stricter policies in Europe and north America combined with the liberalization of the visa regime in some South American countries.”

“Every day things are more restricted in most of the world,” explains Juan Pablo Terminiello from the UNHCR’s Quito office, the landing point for many migrants heading to the region. “Many of these [migrants are from] countries that in most parts of the world they will ask for a visa, but here, they don’t.”

Migrants interviewed for this reporting project said liberal visa rules were key to their choosing this particular route. They could enter a country like Ecuador without many questions.

“We can’t do anything because we have the passport of Iraq – nobody respects this country, we can’t do anything with that,” another asylum seeker said.

The routes became popular first with local migrants, then with extra-continentals.

Just in Colombia – one of the key countries on this trans-continental trail – Piedrahita Bustamante estimates that this trade brings in $5 million a year.

Or as Josef Merkx, the head of UNHCR in Colombia puts it in the national context: “It’s a business, and whenever there’s business there’s armed groups involved.”

while it’s clear that there’s organized crime involved in smuggling and trafficking, without them, the migrants wouldn’t be able to make this journey.

As to how smugglers work, the networks themselves are complex, and the dynamics ever-changing. Many coyotes work as in a relay race, passing on groups of migrants from one place to the other, according to Soledad Alvarez, a researcher who has investigated the smuggling networks that start in Ecuador.

One Somali migrant who had made it to the US-Mexico border said the smugglers he met had his photograph so they would know they could trust him, and charged him fees only to cover each step of the journey.