LOS ANGELES (AP) – President Joe Biden and other Western Hemisphere leaders are due to announce on Friday what has been announced as a roadmap for countries to accept large numbers of migrants and refugees.
The Los Angeles Declaration was perhaps the greatest achievement of the North and South American Summit, which was undermined by differences over Biden’s list of invitations. Leaders of Mexico and several Central American countries have instead sent top diplomats after the United States excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
A set of principles to be announced on Friday, the last day of the summit, includes legal avenues for entry, assistance to communities most affected by migration, humane border management and coordinated emergency response, according to a senior US official. who informed reporters before the official announcement.
This is a plan that is already being largely followed by Colombia and Ecuador, whose right-wing leaders were warmly welcomed at the summit to welcome many of the 6 million people who have left Venezuela in recent years.
Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso last week announced a temporary status for Venezuelans in his country, estimated at about 500,000. He told a panel discussion Tuesday that his country was paying off for the generosity of Spain and the United States in welcoming large numbers of Ecuadorians who fled more than two decades ago.
Colombian President Ivan Duque received a standing ovation at a speech Thursday on how his government has granted temporary status to 1 million Venezuelans in the past 14 months and is processing another 800,000 applications.
“We did it out of conviction,” Duque told the Associated Press, saying he could not be indifferent to Venezuelans who had lost their homes and livelihoods and were willing to suffer from approval ratings.
“They were invisible (in Colombia),” he said. “They couldn’t open bank accounts, they couldn’t work, they couldn’t get health care. They were practically a community without a future. “
Although the measures are not universally popular, Venezuelans assimilate without much reaction.
“The two most dangerous phenomena are xenophobia and indifference, and I believe we managed to defeat both (in Colombia),” Duque said.
The United States has been the most popular destination for asylum seekers since 2017, a challenge that puzzled Biden and his immediate predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama.
But the United States is far from alone. Colombia and neighboring South American countries have hosted millions of people fleeing Venezuela. Mexico filed more than 130,000 asylum applications last year, many of them Haitians, three times as many as 2020. Many Nicaraguans are fleeing to Costa Rica, while displaced Venezuelans make up about one-sixth of the small population of Aruba.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on Thursday that the summit declaration recognized the regional dimension of migration.
“This is a hemisphere challenge,” he said in an interview, citing Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica for accepting large numbers of migrants.
Colombia’s and Ecuador’s responses cannot be repeated, said Jose Samaniego, regional director of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in North and South America. Each country is different and migration from Central America is more complex than Venezuela.
“You don’t want to copy and paste,” he said, “but there are good practices.”
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