We cannot stay here. We are spending a lot of money. … So it is not easy. They have to let us go. We are more than 2,500 people here in Tapachula. We cannot move out of this place.
By Allan Wall
09/10/2019
Above, a Mexican police officer squares off with a black rioter.
Since the Trump tariff threat and the resulting U.S.-Mexico border deal, the number of illegal aliens crossing the southern border has been reduced considerably, though it’s still higher than it should be. But it’s progress.
Border agents apprehended a fiscal-year high of 144,255 in May. In August, the number fell to less than half that: 64,006 [Southwest Border Migration FY 2019, CBP.gov]. Consequently, hundreds of angry, complaining, trouble-making Africans are holed up in Mexico in the hope of entering the US. The Mexican government isn’t happy about it, and ordinary Mexicans are showing a notable lack of Third World solidarity.
This week Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard summed up the Mexican government’s unhappiness:
[W]hat these persons ask is that Mexico allow them to pass to the United States without a legal status, equivalent to saying that there is no border. So, they have been offered refugee status. … They have been offered various types of visa so they can be in Mexico legally. We have another problem, which is the problem of identification, because they have no identity and some of them are from countries that have no embassy here. So refugee status has been offered them, for example, that could be a solution, but they don’t want that. Thus the original request was to let them pass freely through Mexico without identifying themselves and with no legal status … a solution is being sought, but the solution cannot be to violate all Mexican laws. I hope that the majority will accept the refugee status and that they will have legal residence in Mexico, that is what we hope will be the result.
[Stenographic record of the morning press conference, Mexican presidential website, September 6, 2019. Emphases added]
And how many Africans are in Mexico?
Data from Mexico’s interior ministry suggests that migration from Africa this year will break records. The number of Africans registered by Mexican authorities tripled in the first four months of 2019 compared with the same period a year ago, reaching about 1,900 people, mostly from Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which remains deeply unstable years after the end of a bloody regional conflict with its neighbors that led to the deaths of millions of people.
[U.S. dream pulls African migrants in record numbers across Latin America, by Daina Beth Solomon, Reuters, July 5, 2019]
That comports with a report from the Center for Immigration Studies in July, as VDARE.com’s A.W. Morgan observed in his latest offering.
Aside from the very real threat that some of these Africans might carry Ebola, they’re fighting with migration officials who won’t let them pass into the United States.
One recent skirmish was in Tapachula, in the state of Chiapas that borders Guatemala, at the Siglo XXI (21st Century) migratory station.
Several thousand migrants, mainly Africans (and some Haitians) are living on the streets in Tapachula and demanding visas to get to the United States. They didn’t fly to Mexico to stay there, they say. They expect passage north to take up life here.
A Mexican website, Animal Politico, produced a Spanish-language video that shows a mob of Africans in front of the Mexican migratory station. They’re chanting, dancing, and banging objects as drums. And they’re scuffling with Mexican security agents.
The Africans in the video can be heard speaking English. An estimable fellow in a striped shirt (face blurred by videographers, probably at his own request) explained that conflict between French-speakers and English-speakers forced him to leave Cameroon:
We cannot stay here. We are spending a lot of money. … So it is not easy. They have to let us go. We are more than 2,500 people here in Tapachula. We cannot move out of this place.
Well, the Mexican authorities will let him go if he returns to Guatemala, from which he entered Mexico. Better yet, he can go back home … to Cameroon.
This Stocking-Cap Guy is angry that Mexican authorities listed him as apátrida (stateless) on a document.
I’m a Cameroonian. … I have a nationality. .. I want to have my nationality on this paper and they give me an exit date to leave Mexico. …
I passed 15 countries to reach Mexico. Why is Mexico the only country that is keeping me here? This is not my final destination. They cannot keep me here. I don’t speak Spanish, I don’t understand Spanish and they want me to stay here. What am I going to do here in Mexico where I cannot speak the language?
Well, he probably should have thought about that before crossing the Atlantic. And, again, he can return to Cameroon any time. He is Cameroonian, after all.
Stocking-Cap Guy isn’t the only one complaining about the language issue.
“We don’t understand their language — I talk only English,” says White-Cap-Red-Shirt Guy.
It’s more than a little amusing to hear English-speaking Africans in Mexico complain about Mexicans’ speaking their own language. Why that’s a surprise in the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world is something of a mystery.
Another video shows the fighting between Africans and Mexican security agents:
This includes comments from a Spanish-speaking African. Also commenting is Irineo Mujica, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico from Phoenix Arizona, and an activist with Pueblo sin Fronteras [People without Borders], the Treason Lobby group that helped organize the border-busting caravans. “This is specifically a crisis created by the Mexican state to directly aid the re-election of Donald Trump,” he opined.
In fact, the Africans who showed up in Mexico created the crisis, with help from the Open-Borders Left, which has persuaded the Kritarchy repeatedly to overrule Trump’s executive actions to stop the flood of “migrants.” Thus did the world get the message: The U.S. is open to refugees from anywhere and everywhere.
Eventually, the protesting Africans at Siglo XXI in Tapachula blocked the entrance to the station [Migrantes bloquean accesos de estación del INM en Chiapas (Migrants block access to INM station in Chiapas), Milenio, August 26, 2019], and on August 27, Mexican security personnel used tear gas to break the blockade, though migrants stayed around the building. [Retiran a migrantes que protestaban en estación del INM en Chiapas (“Migrants evicted from protest at INM station in Chiapas”), Milenio, August 27, 2019]
By the next day, 300 were actually sleeping in front of the station [“Nos sentimos encarcelados”: africanos varados en Chiapas (“’We Feel Imprisoned:’ Africans stranded in Chiapas”), Milenio, August 28, 2019].
Fatima from the Congo, who landed in Tapachula with nine (!) family members, was quoted complaining: “We just want to leave here, we want documents to travel freely through all of Mexico. Here we feel imprisoned.”
Actually they are free to leave — just not in the direction they wish to go.
On September 3, African migrants vandalized property around the station [Migrantes lanzan sillas y mesas a estación migratoria en Chiapas (“Migrants throw chairs and tables at the migratory station in Chiapas”) by Abraham Jimenez, Milenio, September 3, 2019].
INM personnel had “set up tents, tables and chairs at the request of the Africans,” Milenio reported.
Nevertheless, the migrants … began to throw seats and tables toward the migratory station. Also, they threw metallic fences … which provoked INM’s personnel to leave the site. Moments later, elements of the Military Police and Federal police arrived to control the situation.
An obvious question: What do ordinary Mexicans think of their guests?
Comments below the Animal Politico video sternly criticized the Africans. In some cases, “criticized” is an understatement.
Translated from Spanish, here’s a selection that would get you into big trouble north of the border:
And then there’s this gem:
American citizen Allan Wall (email him) moved back to the U.S.A. in 2008after many years residing in Mexico. Allan’s wife is Mexican, and their two sons are bilingual. In 2005, Allan served a tour of duty in Iraq with the Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are archived here; his Mexidata.info articles are archived here; his News With Views columns are archived here; and his website is here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.