Foro de Migraciones

Last night I attended a Forum on Migration, cosponsored by the Jesuit Migration Service, a program run out of the Universidad Centroamericana, where I have good contact here in Managua. The Forum included an update on the status of Nicaraguans migrating abroad, mainly through data obtained from returned migrants at two border receiving facilities, one on the southern border with Costa Rica, the other near the northern border with Honduras, where Nicaraguans and other Central Americans being returned from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are processed. Many cases of human rights abuses were shared, all violations of the "Convention of 1990", an international legal framework for the protection of the human rights of migrants, which, not surprisingly, the U.S., Canada, Spain, and other migrant-receiving countries have refused to sign on to. One of the demands of migrants rights advocates here is for better documentation, e.g. for the Nicaraguan consulate to more efficiently process visas and passports so that Nicaraguans can migrate abroad with the legal protection such documents afford. Currently, an estimated 70% of Nicaraguan migrants abroad lack such documentation. Other useful information was shared, but for now I'll leave this post with a quote from event:

"Si tu dios es judío, tu carro japonés, tu pizza italiana, tu gas venezolano, tu café mexicano, tus cosméticos londineses, tu camiseta indonesia, tus zapatos brasileños, tu televisor coreano, tu reloj chino, tu marimba africana, tus cifras árabes, tus letras latinas... ¿cómo te atreves a decir que tu vecino es extranjero?" (if your god is jewish, your car japanese, your pizza italian, your gas venezuelan, your coffee mexican, your cosmetics from london, your shirt indonesian, your shoes brazilian, your TV korean, your watch chinese, your marimba african, your numbers arabic, your literature latin, how dare you say that your neighbor is foreign?