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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 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). "We don’t have money now," Ponce complained, flashing the empty card. 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 Posted by: Besoeker 2024-01-23 |
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