Estas en Tu Casa ("This is Your Home")

"Today, Mexico extends you its hand."
"This plan is only for those who comply with Mexican laws, and it's a first step towards a permanent solution for those who are granted refugee status in Mexico."Mexican President Peña Nieto

"The majority plan to cross the border. And that's my intention, too."
"Because, yes, while life here is calmer than at home, it's still not like the U.S. where it would get better. That's the goal: to have a better life."
Jose Santos, from Honduras
 

"It's a kind offer - but it's not the plan that we have, to stay here halfway up."
Anna Lisset Velazquez, from Honduras

"To those in the Caravan, turn around, we are not letting people into the United States illegally."
"I am bringing out the military for this National Emergency."
"They [migrants] will be stopped!"
U.S. President Donald Trump

Central American migrants rest on the steps of a Catholic church in Pijijiapan, in southern Mexico, as a thousands-strong caravan that is slowly making its way toward the U.S. border stops for the night Thursday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
 
Mexico, which has a problem with its own poverty-stricken, violence-averse population seeping over the border into the U.S. has made a generous offer to the estimated seven thousand marchers intent on crossing the Mexican border into the United States to find new homes for themselves in the land of plenty. Mind, there's plenty of poverty and violence in the United States too. But wherever people live in penury, lacking government support and security, their minds swivel to one place and one place only; the United States of America.

Offering to the law-abiding citizens who are wearily making their way on a long journey of hope to a destination where they will be refused entry, a humanitarian gesture of compassion for people who have opted to make themselves homeless. To those people there will be extended temporary ID cards and work permits, medical care, schooling for their children, and housing in local hostels until such time as those who accept and whom Mexico will accept establish themselves and become independent.

Sounds like a solution, and it would be one, if Mexico was the destination that all those people stream toward, but it is not. For the marchers, it is a border they must cross, a country they must traverse to arrive at the point where another border beckons. But beckon it does not. There are lawful means of entry, to make application, to await consent to enter, and these marchers are deliberately bypassing all of that. The U.S. has a monumental problem as it is, of tens of millions of illegals living there.

And should it decide that the plight of all those seven thousand marchers must be resolved, and they will take a deep breath and permit them entry and begin processing them, it would send a signal to all the other disaffected people in Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. border is easily breached, and the kindhearted people of America will welcome them. The size of the current march will seem minuscule in comparison to the unbridled hordes that will assemble to achieve the goal of living where opportunity beckons.

The Economist

Only it doesn't, not for them. For the last hundred years people everywhere, from Europe to Africa, Asia to the Middle East, have yearned to go to America. A hundred years ago the persecuted minorities of Europe spoke of a country where the streets were paved with gold, an allegory that owed its persistence to the knowledge that those who did make it to America wrote home about how successful they had become, how wealthy, how happy with life they were. Everyone wanted to share that. And for a while many did.

Is there any other country in the world where people everywhere else aspire to join? China? Brazil? Egypt? Russia? India? South Africa? France? There are no long marches of desperate people willing to undertake dangerous, long journeys in an effort to find haven and leave the miserable past behind, streaming toward a country promising a future that their current locations do not and cannot and would not offer them. But one country cannot absorb them all, not even a small proportion of those anxious to join it.

And so, for the United States, what the aspiration of so many represents is a "national emergency"; the very notion of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of economic migrants joining the already-established illegal migrants now ensconced in the United States represents a nightmare of administrative and accommodation proportions. Those failed nations governed by despots, by autocrats, by inept and inadequate rulers who despise those living under their heel need the rescue of revolution.

And to inspire them there is always the example of Somalia and Syria.

Families with small children get truck rides in Tonala to meet up with the thousands more Honduran migrants and refugees 25km further along up the highway [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]