Oscar Lopez -
Aurelien crossed seas and treacherous jungles for a better life - but the social cost has proved high. No family, no friends, not even a bed or day off for this refugee from Cameroon.
And his is a relative success story.
“My goal was to bring my family here, but...I couldn’t get enough money together,” Aurelien, who did not use his real name, said from his new Mexican home.
“Living without them is like being in hell.” With the number of refugees doubling over the past ten years, the United Nations is battling to help migrants like Aurelien eke out a basic living while confronting the challenges of settling into a new life far from home.
The 38-year-old, who moved to Mexico City in 2017, was earning $300 a month working in construction. When he realised this would never meet the cost of bringing over his family, he changed tack.
Last month, Aurelien joined the 4,000+ refugees and asylum seekers relocated this year by the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, to northern Mexico, where wages are higher.
“(Now) my dream is a life in Monterrey with my children,” he said, referring to the northern manufacturing city of 4 million that is now home.
The UNHCR programme, begun in 2016, aims to mitigate one of the most persistent conundrums of Mexico’s refugee crisis: While most asylum seekers arrive in the country’s rural south, the greatest economic opportunities lie in the industrial north.
It is these kinds of challenges that will occupy the inaugural Global Refugee Forum, a two-day United Nations conference to be held in Geneva next month. The forum will explore how to help host countries cope, as well as settle refugees, whose numbers have swelled to over 25 million in the past decade.
Mexico is a case in point. Once a transit country to the United States, violence in Latin America and an increasingly strict US immigration policy has turned Mexico into a refugee
destination, too.
According to Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, the number of asylum applicants has already doubled this year from 2018.
Of these, two-thirds applied for asylum in the southern border state of Chiapas, where some 75 per cent of people live in poverty, according to the government. In the northern state of Nuevo Leon, where Aurelien is now, the figure is only 14.5 per cent.
“There are regions of the country that have all the capacity to not just receive arriving migrants, but to receive them without any problem,” said COMAR coordinator general Andres
Alfonso Ramirez Silva. — Thomson Reuters Foundation
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