By: Staff Writer
October 5, 2021
Haitian migration to Central America has been in the mainstream media recently due to the crisis developing at the US and Mexico border with thousands of Haitians showing up trying to gain entry into the US from Mexico, however this Haitian migration to Central and South America has been growing since the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
These Haitians came to Central and South America shortly after the 2010 Haitian earthquake and have been silently waiting on their chance to gain entry into the US. However, people were shocked at how many all at one time were trying to do so.
Observers have called it a humanitarian violation on the part of US border guards on horseback seen rounding up Haitian migrants, reminiscent like a plantation slave driver ordering his slaves to work the plantation. But this time, the poor and unfortunate are unwanted, even for slavery.
The migration into Central and South America by Haitians is starker than it was ever realized.
The IDB in its “Migration Flows in Latin America and the Caribbean: Statistics on Permits for Migrants,” report noted that Brazil by far is seeing the largest number of residence permits for Haitians with 19,863 granted in 2019 compared to just 14,524 in 2015, showing a 37 percent increase in that five year period.
The report also said, “Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing significant changes in migration patterns. The crisis in Venezuela has generated the second largest displacement of people after the one in Syria and is receiving far less international attention and resources. At the same time, there is a large and growing population of Haitians that have migrated to South America, and large numbers are moving from the Northern Triangle of Central America into Mexico and towards the United States, and from Nicaragua into Costa Rica.
“There is also clear evidence of large numbers of Haitians granted permits in Chile and Brazil, and of Nicaraguans in Costa Rica.”
The prolonged effect of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 is being blamed for the dramatic spike in immigration to other countries and the report added, “hurricanes in Central America all prompt people to move abroad seeking work and opportunities, and this presents challenges for origin, transit, and destination countries. But it is also important to pick up on the more subtle changes in trends that can only be observed by careful analysis of regional data, so that policies and programs can be tailored to maximize the benefits of migration, both for the migrants themselves and for the societies that receive them,” leaving a larger policy problem for coutnries that don’t have the infrastructure to handle the massive influx of migrants.
Just last month over 900 Haitian migrants ended up in The Bahamas and are in the process of being repatriated back to Haiti. The Bahamas cannot handle 900 Haitian migrants every 6 months or so, with a population under 400k and a GDP at just $11.25bn, estimated by the World Bank.
The report added: “There are nearly 500k Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic in 2019 according to UNDESA (The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) estimates. However, permit data was not obtained for recent flows there, and so are not discussed in this report.
“Around 70 percent of Haitian migrants to mainland Latin America in the past five years have gone to Chile – almost three hundred thousand permits – along with nearly twenty thousand Dominicans. Over one hundred thousand Haitians obtained permits in Brazil in the period, representing another quarter of this population of migrants.”
Placing more pressure on South and Central American countries is the US policy on 20 November 2017, where the US State Department announced it would “terminate Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status established following the 2010 earthquake; that same year close to 8,000 Haitians lodged an application in Canada.
“The numbers went down in subsequent years. Italy saw a very rapid increase in the requests originating from LAC countries’ nationals in the last years. In that country, nationals of El Salvador and Peru filed more than half of the requests while in France Haitian nationals filed two thirds of the requests.”