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Panama is on the verge of a dramatic change to its immigration policy that could reverberate from the dense Darien jungle to the U.S. border.

President-elect José Raúl Mulino says he will shut down a migration route used by more than 500,000 people last year. Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey North.

Whether Mr. Mulino is able to reduce migration through a sparsely populated region with little Government presence remains to be seen, experts say.

“Panama and our Darien are not a transit route. It is our border,” Mr. Mulino said after his victory with 34% of the vote in Sunday’s election was formalised on May 9 evening.

As he had suggested during his campaign, the 64-year-old Lawyer and former security Minister said he would try to end “the Darien odyssey that does not have a reason to exist”.

The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of organised crime in Colombia, making it an affordable, if dangerous, land route for hundreds of thousands.

It grew as countries like Mexico, under pressure from the U.S. Government, imposed visa restrictions on various nationalities including Venezuelans and just this week Peruvians in an attempt to stop migrants flying into the country just to continue on to the U.S. border.

President-elect José Raúl Mulino said May 9, 2024, he will shut down the migration route used by more than 500,000 people last year.
| Photo Credit:
AP

But masses of people took the challenge and set out on foot through the jungle-clad Colombian-Panamanian border. A crossing that initially could take a week or more eventually was whittled down to two or three days as the path became more established and entrepreneurial locals established a range of support services.

It remains a risky route, however. Reports of sexual assaults have continued to rise, some migrants are killed by bandits in robberies and others drown trying to cross rushing rivers.

Migrants dead, missing after boat capsizes off Panama coast

Even so, some 147,000 migrants have already entered Panama through Darien this year.

Previous attempts to close routes around the world have simply shifted traffic to riskier paths.

“People migrate for many reasons and frequently don’t have safe, orderly and legal ways to do it,” said Giuseppe Loprete, chief of mission in Panama for the UN’s International Organisation for Immigration.

“When the legal routes are not accessible, migrants run the risk of turning to criminal networks, traffickers and dangerous routes, tricked by disinformation.” Loprete said the UN agency’s representatives in Panama would meet with Mr. Mulino’s team once its member are named to learn the specifics of the president’s plans.

If Mr. Mulino could be even partially effective, it could produce a notable, but likely temporary, impact. As with the visa restrictions that unintentionally steered migrants to the overland route through Panama, if the factors pushing migrants to leave their countries remain they will find other routes. One could be the dangerous sea routes from Colombia to Panama.

In a local radio interview on May 9, Mr. Mulino said the idea of shutting down the migration flow is more philosophical than a physical obstacle.

“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” he said. By the time the fourth plane loaded with migrants takes off, “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.” Julio Alonso, a Panamanian security expert, said what Mr. Mulino could realistically achieve is unknown.

“This would be a radical change to Panamanian policy in terms of migration to avoid more deaths and organised crime using the route,” he said.

Among the challenges will be how it would work operationally along such an open and uncontrolled border.

“In Panama, there is no kind of suppression with this situation, just free passage, humanitarian aid that didn’t manage to reduce the number of assaults, rapes, homicides and deaths along the Darien route,” Mr. Alonso said.

Mr. Mulino’s proposal is “a dissuasive measure, yes, (but) whether it can be completely executed we will see”.

It’s also unlikely that much could be accomplished without a lot of cooperation and coordination with Colombia and other countries, he said.

Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that “without considering the risk of returning migrants to dangerous situations, in mathematical terms I don’t know how they hope to massively deport” migrants.

“A daily plane, which would be extremely expensive, would only repatriate around 10 per cent of the flow (about 1,000 to 1,200 per day). The United States only manages to do about 130 flights monthly in the entire world,” Mr. Isacson said.



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French Couple Jailed In UK For Smuggling Migrants Inside Furniture https://artifexnews.net/french-couple-jailed-in-uk-for-smuggling-migrants-inside-furniture-4394593/ Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:09:56 +0000 https://artifexnews.net/french-couple-jailed-in-uk-for-smuggling-migrants-inside-furniture-4394593/ Read More “French Couple Jailed In UK For Smuggling Migrants Inside Furniture” »

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A UK court jailed a French couple Friday for smuggling Vietnamese migrants. (Representational)

London:

A UK court jailed a French couple Friday for smuggling Vietnamese migrants including children into the country inside specially adapted sofas, the interior ministry said.

Hove Crown Court in southern England sentenced Junior Toussaint and Andrene Paul, both from near Paris, to four years and six months, and five years and five months respectively, the ministry said.

The pair, who had worked together as delivery drivers in France, pleaded guilty to assisting unlawful migration to the UK.

Travelling from Dieppe in northern France to Newhaven Port on the southern English coast in April earlier this year, they used furniture to hide a Vietnamese woman and three children in the back of a hire van.

Officers from the UK’s Border Force became suspicious when they searched the van and saw movement from inside the adapted sofas, which were buried underneath a mattress and other furniture.

Two migrants were hidden inside the sofa while others were hidden among other fixtures including a chest of drawers.

The defendants told officials they had no knowledge of the migrants’ presence in their van and had been driving it to help with furniture removal in London.

But fingerprint checks carried out by Border Force later proved Toussaint’s involvement in the smuggling attempt, according to the interior ministry.

Paul, who had also initially denied her involvement, was found to have made a series of suspicious visits to the UK earlier in the year, it added.

The ministry said she pleaded guilty when video evidence of her previous activity was shown in court.

“Criminals are going to increasingly extreme lengths to smuggle people across the UK border for profit due to our efforts to clamp down on them,” Chris Foster, of the ministry’s criminal and financial investigations section, said.

“This sentence today reflects the severity of their crimes,” he added in a statement.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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