There is a lot of noise about migration coming from political campaigns, and from all sides. Most recently the U.S. government has limited asylum applications at the border in order to stem an ever-growing flow. Congress couldn’t pass bipartisan legislation to do essentially the same thing, because on the political right, politicians want to use the issue to rally their base.
There is an extraordinary lack of empathy in the narrative, and one has to question whether the politicians are really interested in solutions, or are they are simply using migrant suffering to score votes. Without this issue to “rally their base,” would they win elections?
Empathy is the starting point of Quixote Center’s approach to migration. Most migrants flee poverty, violence and environmental degradation because they cannot find another solution to support a future for themselves and their families. They seek and choose life, a future free of fear, and they endure the struggle of leaving home and danger on the journey in order to achieve those dreams. They are strong, and they are resilient.
Empathy will take us to the right solutions, and those solutions don’t include spending giant sums of money on walls, border militarization, detention centers, and deportation flights. These types of costly measures generally force already desperate migrants to seek out even more dangerous paths.
Solutions do include finding ways to address the issues that lead people to leave their homes, which describes our work in Haiti, and historically in Nicaragua as well. Solutions also include working to influence U.S. policies that make things worse, such as our work on ending the illegal trafficking of weapons from the U.S. to Haiti and all over Latin America.
Solutions also include our partnership with the Franciscan Network on Migration (FNM). Quixote Center accompanies several of the FNM country teams, including Panama and southern Mexico. We help with humanitarian assistance, so that they can receive migrants with dignity and humanity, and assistance to their teams so that they can advocate with their own governments for policies that uphold the human rights of migrants. The FNM works for welcome, and for safety.
Most recently Quixote Center provided funding to support an initial organizing meeting for the FNM team in Brazil. According to UNHCR, by the end of 2023, Brazil hosted over 667,0000 forcibly displaced people, predominantly from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, Colombia, Syria, and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands more pass through Brazil on their way north. Migrants in Brazil face challenges in accessing employment, housing, and other services. Indeed, we have spoken to a number of Haitian migrants who went to Brazil first, only to leave for the United States because they could not access employment.
The RFM Brazil team was officially established in December 2022, the newest in the FNM network. To develop this new team they needed to hold a face-to-face Assembly, which took place, with Quixote Center support, from April 11 to 14, 2024. The objective was to organize in order to promote a welcoming and supportive environment for those seeking opportunities in Brazil, and to promote integration and inclusion of migrants. You can find a full report from the Assembly here.
Quixote Center condemns the most recent U.S. government attempts to stem the flow of migrants into the United States by limiting asylum applications. This inhumane policy leaves migrants stranded without addressing the reasons migrants are at the U.S. border in the first place.
Your support makes possible our work to do just that.
Thank you.
