In Mexico, a twist on illegal immigration
By
San Juan del Rio, a town in the central Mexican state of Queretaro, has an unusual problem: Too many Mexicans pretending to be illegal immigrants.
You will find this nugget in La Prensa, one of 70 Mexican newspapers owned by Organizacion Editorial Mexicana, a media company whose empire also includes 24 radio stations, a television channel and “43 Internet sites.” The best feature, for an outsider, is a page dedicated exclusively to Migration, a subject that is as closely followed there as it is here.
In a story published today, a local official in San Juan del Rio (population 128,000) attributes the increase in the number of beggars to Mexicans who are pretending to be Central Americans. To grasp what this means you have to know that Mexico has its own population of illegal immigrants from somewhere else, mainly from Guatemala and other neighboring countries.
Many of these people, in Mexico by choice or because they are stranded en route to the U.S., are often scrapping for a living on the streets. There have been some highly publicized atrocities committed against these immigrants, so much so that Amnesty International has weighed in. Given all this, you can’t blame a Guatemalan illegal immigrant in Mexico for using his desperate situation to solicit alms by reminding his unwilling host country of its repeated cruelties.
It must be pretty successful, otherwise you wouldn’t have impostors. The local official in San Juan del Rio said 70 percent of those on the streets are not Central American illegal immigrants but Mexicans from elsewhere taking advantage of Mexican generosity. He said he knows this because when police detain them they immediately produce their Mexican identification card, which is not something Guatemalan illegal immigrants have.
The local official, Belem Junco, is also president of a legislative commission on the migrant, so it sounds as if he knows of what he speaks. He said he will introduce a law to punish “people who abuse the good intentions of our citizens by begging for money and pretending they are Central Americans. This is robbery, and we cannot permit it.”
If it passes, will it be illegal in Mexico to pretend you are an illegal immigrant?
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