From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Apr 29 2009 - 17:26:29 EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/28/AR2009042803379_pf.html
African immigrants risk lives on epic trek to U.S.
By Mica Rosenberg
Reuters
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 8:05 PM
TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) - Jailed repeatedly for his political views,
Ethiopian immigrant Sharew paid smugglers around $10,000 to move him
through a dozen countries and leave him a year later in the grubby southern
Mexican city of Tapachula.
Once on Mexico's southern border, which has grown into a major
stepping-stone for hundreds of migrants fleeing conflicts in the Horn of
Africa, he was still 2,000 miles away from his destination: the United
States.
The immigrants, mainly from Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, are increasingly
following a new, epic route down the continent to South Africa, across the
Atlantic by boat or plane and then a trek overland though South and Central
America.
"It is an enormous voyage. They've told us that along the way some lose
their lives in Africa because they are attacked, sometimes even by lions,"
said Jorge Yzar, head of Tapachula's detention center, where dozens of
immigrants from all over the world sleep in dormitories before being
deported or let go.
Risking jail or even death, their lengthy trip by plane boat, truck, bus
and foot can cost thousands of dollars -- some pay as much as $20,000 --
often borrowed from relatives.
While experts say illegal immigration by Latin Americans has fallen as the
economic crisis bites and jobs dry up in the United States, East Africans
are coming in increasing numbers to try to find a better life.
African immigrants have traditionally sought jobs in European countries
near the Mediterranean Sea like Spain, Italy and France but governments
have tried to discourage the inflow by offering financial incentives for
migrants to return home.
"After a journey like this you realize there is no safe haven anywhere in
the world. Only the strong survive it," Sharew, 29, said sipping a warm
soda in a Tapachula diner.
After dodging authorities across three continents, immigrants like Sharew
receive some respite in Mexico.
Thanks to a legal window for immigrants from conflict zones, citizens from
Horn of Africa countries hand themselves over to Mexican officials in
return for a 30-day pass that eases the last leg of their months-long
odyssey.
UPWARDLY MOBILE MIGRANTS
The small number of Africans passing through the Tapachula detention center
jumped to more than 600 last year, three times as many as in 2007, said
Yzar. Before 2004, no Africans are recorded in Mexico's official
statistics.
The Africans tend to be well-dressed, educated and upwardly mobile young
adults and stand out from the often impoverished Central Americans who flow
through Tapachula by the thousands on their way northward.
Under Mexican law, immigrants who show up from certain places with violent
conflicts are given a temporary permit, but most stay only a few days, long
enough to get to the U.S.-Mexico border and ask for asylum or try crossing
illegally.
After wading through the shallow, muddy river that divides Mexico and
Guatemala and spending two-weeks in the Tapachula detention center, Sharew
-- a student who said he disagreed with the Ethiopian government -- and a
dozen or so immigrants released at the same time bought plane tickets to
northern Mexico.
Business has been so good in Tapachula that one local travel agent printed
T-shirts with "Mexico + Africa" in a big red heart.
With the daunting illegal crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border still to come,
most of the migrants said the worst was already behind them.
STUFFED IN CONTAINERS, DANGEROUS BOATS
International human smuggling rings use local traffickers in each country
to shuttle the migrants across borders from Africa to Latin America using
fake documents, border security blind spots and corrupt officials.
The migrants are fleeing Somalia, wracked by factional violence since a
dictatorship collapsed in 1991, mandatory military service in Eritrea, or
protests in Ethiopia after post-election violence killed close to 200
people in 2005.
They sometimes have to flee across African borders on foot, walking long
distances where they risk meeting wild animals, said Yzar.
Many arrive from Africa by boat or plane to Brazil or Ecuador, where visa
restrictions are lax, and then they move overland thousands of miles, often
robbed or abandoned by handlers along the way. One Ghanaian-led ring in
Mexico stuffed people in bus luggage compartments for 12 hours at a time.
Not all countries have laws like Mexico and in many places immigrants can
languish in jails for months.
Mohamed Ahmed Hassen, 31, a truck driver in Mogadishu, sold his land to
leave Somalia in July 2008 and paid $1,500 to be shipped as a stowaway on a
boat from South Africa to Brazil.
>From there he traveled up the Amazon river to Colombia where he was put on
a tiny, unseaworthy vessel to Panama.
"It was too small and the water was coming in over the sides. That time was
dangerous, I feared for my life, I was thinking I was dying," Hassen said,
after being caught in Guatemala.
Guatemalan police found Hassen, four other Somalis and three Nepalese,
hidden in the back of a truck by chance when they pulled the driver over
for being drunk.
Almost all the migrants are heading to the United States and Canada but
Hassen said he would stay in Guatemala and look for work if the country
would allow it. Immigrants will rarely settle in Latin American countries
like Costa Rica or Panama where migrants from Guatemala are finding work.
Once in Mexico, most try to leave as quickly as possible, but since they
usually arrive in Tapachula with no documents, it is hard to track where
they end up, worrying U.S. officials.
The goal is to settle with relatives and friends already living in the
Unites States, either by trying to obtain legal documents or living without
them below the radar.
Sharew said in an e-mail that some of the Africans he traveled with were
detained yet again in the United States while immigration officials decided
either to grant them asylum or send them halfway around the world back
home.
(Additional reporting by Sarah Grainger in Guatemala City; editing by
Philip Barbara)
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