Across Latin America, governments are enacting new visa restrictions or returning to old requirements in response to an uptick in migration. The new visa requirements especially impact migrants and are meant to limit their movement through the region and restrict their access to asylum.
The Women’s Refugees Commission, a global NGO based in the United States, issued a report in June 2022 detailing the U.S.’s hand in the increase of visa restrictions across the region. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden Administration has pressured governments to change entry requirements in countries like Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, and Ecuador. The requirements affect migrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti, and Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba, which have all seen a massive uptick in people leaving for the United States in recent years.
“Developing and improving measures such as increased access to asylum and refugee status and complementary legal pathways…are welcome areas of regional collaboration to ensure the rights of migrants,” the Women’s Refugee Commission report states. “However, visa regimes can threaten the ability for individuals to seek protection and serve to externalize U.S. obligations under domestic and international refugee law.”
While countries across the region have an interest in controlling migration through their territory, experts point to U.S. influence as the main factor behind these changes.
“Mexico is getting pressure from the United States to put new visa restrictions on Venezuelans, among the other populations,” Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, tells The Progressive. “When I have talked to the [Biden] Administration about that, what’s a little frustrating is that they typically say these are not our policies, these are the policies of other governments.”
The new measures and the continuation of the Trump-era Title 42 expulsions of migrants from the border—until it was temporarily suspended by a federal judge on November 15—mean that migrants have been unable to gain access to asylum.
These changes to visa regimes were part of the discussions at the 2022 Summit of the Americas, which sought to put in place new controls over the mass migration occurring in the region. The measures put in motion by the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which was signed at the summit, are meant to make migration more orderly, but they function to limit a migrant’s ability to apply for asylum.
New visa requirements mean that migrants are closed off from safer routes, such as flying through Mexico to cross at the U.S. border. The result has been massive ground travel through Central America and Mexico.
“When I have talked to the [Biden] Administration about that, what’s a little frustrating is that they typically say these are not our policies, these are the policies of other governments.”
“People could physically leave for a destination, but now that’s all been made impossible,” Nicole Phillips, the legal director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, tells The Progressive. “The whole situation changed last year. And so Brazil and Chile no longer allow Haitians to arrive in their country legally. And most of the countries in South and Central America have done the same.”
Rather than making it easier for migrants to access asylum options, these longer routes place migrants in more peril, opening them up to direct violence, extortions, and other dangers.
These restrictions “steer people away from actually safer air flights to more dangerous routes,” Schacher says. As a result, there was “an increase in people going through the Darien [Gap], because that was their only option.”
The Center for Democracy in the Americas, along with 103 other organizations, including the Women’s Refugee Commission, issued a letter calling on the Biden Administration to take immediate action to remedy the humanitarian crisis. One key action, they say, is to end the visa regimes.
While the route for migrants towards the U.S. border has become difficult, so has the route to return home. Many Venezuelans have found themselves trapped in countries like Guatemala or Mexico—unable to leave because they are unable to legally enter into countries like Panama in order to return back to Venezuela.
These policy changes did not begin with the Biden Administration, but were initiated years earlier under President Barack Obama. Each subsequent administration has exported policies to deter migrants, leading analysts to argue that the U.S. border is effectively being moved further south.
“Massive flows of migrants began to activate alarms,” Ursula Roldán, a researcher at the Jesuit Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala, tells The Progressive. “But the countries of Central America have become other countries of containment of migrants.”
Guatemala has cracked down on migrants passing through the country irregularly, as well as on migrant guides, known as coyotes, and their drivers who provide passage. In October 2022, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) launched operations in conjunction with Guatemalan authorities to break up coyote networks. Twenty people have been arrested, according to the U.S. agency.
In another operation by Guatemalan National Civilian Police, two bus drivers were arrested on November 13 for allegedly providing transport for 111 migrants. The migrants, who came from Cuba, Venezuela, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic, were expelled from the country. In total, more than 9000 migrants were expelled from Guatemala between September and November 2022, according to the Guatemalan Institute of Migration.
“The visa regimes and the policies right now [are considered] as stabilizing people,” Schacher says. “But the people themselves actually see it as stranding them.”