Africa's Treacherous Trip To The United States

With another controversial piece, our blogger Ganya Dua questions the brutality of the immigration ban in the United States by President Trump.

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Tijuana, Mexico - Kombo Yannick, a 30-year-old pastor from Cameroon, waited in line with about 100 other asylum seekers at the US-Tijuana border on a chilly afternoon in late December.

He and his wife had been in Tijuana for two days, and were speaking with an aid worker about where to find a bed for the night.

"My only goal is to find a way to cross the border," Yannick said, rubbing his gloved hands together to keep warm.

"We don't know exactly where we will go, we just have to wait, he exclaimed!

The line at the border can last for hours or even days, so many of those who wait camp out in tents, waiting for their turn for an interview with US Customs and Border Protection.

"We saw corpses along the way," said Yannick of their week-long trek through the Darien Gap, between Colombia and Panama .African migrants in Mexico. Migrants from African countries began arriving in Tijuana in May, but the city has become so saturated with migrants that many are leaving the Mexican border town, just south of San Diego, and heading eastward to Mexicali. Migrants say Mexicali offers more room and shorter wait times to request asylum to U.S. immigration authorities.Most of the migrants in Mexicali are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A half dozen interviewed by the Desert Sun said they fled their country because there aren’t enough jobs and the few jobs available don’t pay enough to support a family.There is also fear of a looming civil war. The country has not had a peaceful transition of power since 1960. Just this week, 44 people were killed in a confrontation between police and anti-government protesters, who accuse the Congo's president of plotting to stay in power after his term ends in December by delaying elections.

Mexico strongly condemned US President Donald Trump’s administration Tuesday for its policy of separating immigrant children and parents detained after crossing the US-Mexican border, calling it “inhuman.” Along with the Trump administration’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border, this situation has dealt an historic blow not just to Muslim immigrants but to the American asylum and refugee system in general – including to the more than 30,000 asylum seekers and migrants now trapped in Tijuana, Mexico, just a few miles from San Diego, California.

A Human tragedy in The Making

While public attention is distracted with the travel ban’s current legal struggles and the US president’s bombastic anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric, refugees have been building up at border crossing points between the US and Mexico, trapped in a legal limbo.

Why roll out the welcome mat for immigrants, legalise them, and pay them a living wage – in either Mexico or the US – when you’ve got a ready-made workforce willing to work for poverty wages in the border-area factories and population centres that NAFTA helped build?

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Written By Ganya Dua