The Trump administration’s deal with Mexico on Friday to avoid tariffs could lead to Mexico adopting the same agreement Canada has with the U.S. regarding refugees: Whatever country gets the refugees first keeps them.
Mexico has resisted such an arrangement, known as a “safe third country agreement,” and is pushing instead to get other Latin American countries to take their own actions to accept refugees.
“In the meeting with the vice president of the United States, they were insistent on the safe third country issue,” Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard told reporters Monday in Mexico City. “We told them — I think it was the most important achievement of the negotiations — ‘Let’s set a time period to see if what Mexico is proposing will work, and if not, we’ll sit down and see what additional measures'” are needed.
The U.S. has a safe third country agreement with Canada, requiring that any person seeking refugee status must make that request in the first safe country they arrive in. Exceptions are allowed for people with relatives legally in the country, unaccompanied minors, and other “public interest” cases.
The deal with Canada, agreed to in 2002 and signed in 2004, was initially a U.S. favor to its northern neighbor, which was being overwhelmed with asylum applications at the time thanks to the generous terms of its own laws.
“They were getting 44 times the number of requests from people going through the U.S. than the U.S. was getting from people coming through Canada,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
A U.S.-Mexico version would mean the country south of the border would take the burden of the refugees because the majority of current immigration involves people from Central America and other Latin American countries passing through Mexico on their way north. Taking on those refugees would be a heavy burden on Mexico.
Mexico hasn’t agreed to such an arrangement. The deal struck Friday says Mexico will deploy its national guard to its southern border and take other unspecified actions to “dismantle human smuggling and trafficking organizations.” Ebrard said Monday that the situation would be revisited by U.S. and Mexican officials after 45 days.
If there hasn’t been sufficient progress — the deal does not indicate how that would be determined — Mexico must pursue an “ongoing regional strategy” that would involve the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Ebrard indicated in his Monday press conference that Panama and Brazil would likely be involved in the regional strategy as well, and it would effectively require the other Latin American countries to agree to take in refugees if they get them first.
“This has to do with Cubans and Africans also coming into the U.S. via Mexico. Cubans travel to Panama, and Africans somehow travel to Brazil in order to go all the way to the U.S.,” said Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Latin American policy specialist for the free market Cato Institute. “There have been several violent incidents between Cubans and Africans and the Mexican authorities. Thus Mexico’s interest in involving other countries to tackle those flows too.”
That creates a real dilemma for Mexico, Hidalgo said. It is not a regional power that has the ability to impose immigration policies on other Latin American countries. On top of that, it has traditionally been isolationist and refused to get involved in its neighbors’ policies. “I haven’t seen much interest in other countries to restrict things,” he said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters Monday that the Trump administration had “high expectations” they could get regional cooperation. “We have teams that’ll be working there this week to get agreements with those countries to put the onus where it is for them, to make sure that their citizens are not the ones transiting through Mexico to the United States,” Pompeo said.
Ebrard told reporters that Mexico would have to get its own legislature to sign off on a broader regional agreement, in addition to getting the other countries on board. “If we have to participate in a regional model like the one I have just described, we would have to present that to Congress,” he said.
Trump alluded to this in a Tweet Monday, saying his administration had gotten a firm agreement with Mexico that “will need a vote by Mexico’s Legislative body!” In a follow-up tweet, Trump said, “We do not anticipate a problem with the vote but, if for any reason the approval is not forthcoming, Tariffs will be reinstated!”
If Mexico cannot get regional cooperation, then the safe third country agreement between just the U.S. and Mexico would come into play. Pierce said Mexico isn’t equipped to handle the refugees itself. It is struggling to deal with the level of asylum-seekers it has, she said, and has required help from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“It is a great idea to aspire to. We should have a regional agreement on asylum-seekers. But Mexico is just not ready,” she said. “It is really just an effort to get this burden off of the U.S. doorstep and just push it down further south. If we are just relocating this asylum crisis, we are just relocating it to places that aren’t as well equipped to handle it as the U.S.”
The advantage to the White House in promoting the idea is that it points out the extent to which the U.S. is shouldering this burden for other countries, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports restrictionist policies. Mexico is not an impoverished country, he noted.
“Mexico is a signatory to the international refugee convention and has an asylum system,” Krikorian said. “But Mexico doesn’t have that much interest in taking them in because then it would end up with all of these Central Americans, Africans, Middle Easterners, and what have you.”
