UNHCR: Pick Up The Pace: Respond to Anecdotal, Evidence-Lacking Emergency

"[The UNHCR wants to] take the pressure off Mexican authorities to take care of this kind of profile [women, girls, LGBTQ2 fleeing violence] and resettle them to Canada."
"Anyone who gets in the way [of rampaging gangs] is at severe risk, so entire families leave. That explains the demographic change."
"[Canada is already] doing a few things in terms of technical support for the Mexican asylum system, resettlement of people who face extreme protection risks in the region.Our pitch to Canada is to do more."
"These are countries that are close by; they are countries with which Canada has close ties, Mexico being the most important of them."
Mark Manly, Mexico representative, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

"It is estimated that six out of ten migrant women and girls are victims of sexual violence carried out by illicit actors, government authorities and intimate partners."
"However, most of what is known is anecdotal and there is an urgent need for a stronger evidence base in order to inform policy."
World Refugee Council, Ontario

"What it demonstrates is that as long as the conflicts take place and the violence going on, you're going to have people trying to escape [their situations]."
"And it's going to be in our region."
"We've been focusing ont he NAFTA issue; well maybe there's got to be some parallel discussion [on migration]."
Lloyd Axworthy, chair, World Refugee Council

Still from video: Asylum seekers reaching Mexico from Honduras, El Salvador and Venezuela caused a 103-per-cent spike in claims in 2018 over the previous year, from almost 15,000 to about 30,000, says the UNHCR.

It's really hard to see where free trade negotiations fit in to the social dysfunction of states incapable of maintaining security for their citizens. And where gender parity and workers' rights become part of such free trade agreements when one country respects and legalizes such rights and its trade partners may not, and actually resent another country interfering in internal systems of social integration and legal assurances for unions acting on behalf of workers.

If a country's human rights record is so abysmal that the most vulnerable of its citizens live degraded lives of poverty, persecution and subjugation why would a country like Canada want to sign a free trade agreement with such a country to begin with? Our former Conservative-led government with Prime Minister Stephen Harper expressing such doubts, specifically with respect to China sat very poorly with the Liberal opposition. Once in power, the current Liberal government under Justin Trudeau hastened to effect a free trade agreement with China.

Window dressing by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, burnishing his bona fides as a 'progressive' champion of women's and workers' rights imposed a chapter on labour rights calling on Mexico and the United States along with Canada to protect workers against discrimination in employment reflecting sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity. A chapter certain to annoy the United States with the unspoken but obvious message that Canada prides itself on the fiction it is more protective of human rights than they are.

American women might have something to say about that. Mexico, on the other hand, is plagued with the same kind of dysfunctional narco gangs disrupting civil life and persecuting ordinary people, as is Colombia and other countries in Central America. Women, youth and other haven seekers, some propelled in the case of young men to find economic opportunities elsewhere, flee threats, fear and misery. The U.S. has taken in its share and more of the world's unfortunates and lives with millions of undocumented, underground migrants.

Colombian President Iván Duque and U.S. President Donald Trump talked about the Venezuelan migration crisis and anti-drug strategies during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 2018 United Nations General Assembly in New York. Cesar Carrion Colombian Presidency

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article228591129.html#storylink=cpy

Canada has never been averse to absorbing its 'share' of the world's refugees as a wealthy nation which also takes in over a quarter million immigrants annually. But a clapped-out former Liberal politician-turned-human-rights advocate like Lloyd Axworth pursues his righteous advocacy. Mexico has expressed its willingness to absorb large numbers of the economic migrants that have flooded its border cities. Most of these migrants have no wish to remain in Mexico, despite the government's overtures and generosity of spirit; they plan to forge on to advantage themselves by entering the United States; legally or illegally.

Domestic and social violence suffered by women is not a monopoly held by Central American countries; that kind of violence occurs everywhere, including in Canada. Canada has problems with women brought in to the country under false pretenses who are then marketed as sex workers against their will. By accepting people from other countries and other cultures where women hold degraded positions in society and where the traditions and practices of victimizing women and girls continues while in Canada, it transforms society even further for ill.

Urging Canada to accept LGBTQ2 communities and women and children fleeing the threats that consume their lives in Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela will aid a limited number of members of those targeted communities but having done so, will not stem the flow of others like them desperate to escape the grinding poverty, violence and fear they live with within states whose failures present the world with these conundrums of rescue, choice and forging of economic ties.

The flow is endless.

Central American migrants, mostly from Honduras, wait on the sidewalk for their turn to eat breakfast in a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico. (©2019 World Vision/photo by Israel Carcamo)