livingston
20×102mm Vulcan
In Mexico’s Deep South, the United Nations Explains Handing Cash to U.S.-Bound Migrants
In Mexico’s Deep South, the United Nations Explains Handing Cash to U.S.-Bound Migrants
Every day, word of the UN’s cash assistance draws long lines of hopeful U.S.-bound migrants to a large, grey building in Tapachula staffed by application-takers and interviewers who determine who gets the money.
cis.org
TAPACHULA, Mexico — The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), which receives billions in U.S. taxpayer money, is handing out cash debit cards and other funds for lodging and prescription medicines to U.S.-bound migrants who spill out into this southern Mexican city by the hundreds of thousands.
Every day, word of the UN’s cash assistance draws long lines of hopeful U.S.-bound migrants to a large, grey building staffed by application-takers and interviewers who determine who gets the money.
Haitian Luis Ponce was in line one recent day, not to get his application going, but to complain to the officials inside that the UN is in arrears. The international agency had not recharged his debit card-linked local bank account, a yellow and gray plastic affair with a UNHCR/ACNUR insignia in the upper third left corner, with the 3,600 pesos owed (about $180).
And, as the Center for Immigration Studies has previously reported after first seeing the cash cards distributed at a Reynosa, Mexico, migrant camp, the United Nations is sharply escalating the amounts of cash and other direct financial assistance to immigrants all along the migrant trail from Panama to Texas, at an uncharted series of some 100 waystations like this one in Tapachula. It is part of a program the United Nations calls “cash-based interventions” (CBI). UN documents say the program is meant to “restore feelings of choice and empowerment to beneficiaries”, a part of which may well mean that migrants are able to keep moving north rather than returning home.
Not much has been publicly reported about CBI, such as the extent to which it is used. But I have reported that families can receive hundreds of dollars a month for “unrestricted ... unconditional” use in local country areas depending on where they are on the trail (in the northern Mexican town of Reynosa, families were getting $400 every 15 days). One UN document said the money can be handed out in envelopes and transferred to bank accounts for lodging assistance and even for transportation costs to move with migrant concentrations. The United Nations began ramping up CBI in 2019, spending $60 million on 29,000 migrants in Latin America, and then doubling the outlays in 2020, with plans to vastly increase its use in the Americas during 2022 and beyond.
