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Over 300 migrants found in abandoned lorry in south-east Mexico

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Mexican authorities said they found 343 migrants, including over 100 unaccompanied minors, in an abandoned lorry in the south-eastern state of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico.

The country’s migration authority said in a statement on Monday that the lorry was found on Sunday night abandoned near the community of Acayucan on the road connecting the cities of La Tinaja and Cosamaloapan.

Among the migrants were 103 unaccompanied minors, mostly from Guatemala, authorities said.

The trailer also contained 212 adults from Honduras, El Salvador, and Ecuador.The trailer had been modified to allow ventilation.

According to authorities, the rescued individuals wore colourful bracelets, presumably to be identified by the smugglers.

Last year, more than 50 people believed to have been migrants were found dead in a parked lorry on the outskirts of San Antonio in the U.S. state of Texas.

They had been left locked in the lorry’s trailer in sweltering heat with no air conditioning.

Between October 2021 and October 2022, the U.S. Border Protection Agency registered more than 2 million attempts by migrants to enter the United States.

Most leave their homes because of poverty, political crises, and crime.

Many people from crisis-ridden Central and South American countries, such as Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, venture on the long, dangerous journey to the U.S. through Mexico.

Many migrants do not even reach the U.S. border but are stopped by Mexican soldiers and sent back.

World News

UK Govt in talks with Nigeria to receive migrants rejected for asylum in the UK

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Nigeria is among five more African countries reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ with the UK government over a Rwanda-style deal.

The UK-Rwanda deal seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the UK for processing their asylum claims out of Europe.Now, Morocco, Nigeria, Namibia, Niger, and Ghana are all in discussions with the UK government about receiving migrants rejected for asylum from the UK, The Times reports.

This comes after 25 boats were intercepted by Border Force and the Royal Navy on Monday and escorted into Dover and Dungeness in the morning, before hundreds more people were brought ashore into the evening amid a large number of migrants crossing the Channel to the UK.

According to reports, as many as 1,000 people may have arrived yesterday, after three days without crossings.

August is set to become a record month for the year with around 6,000 migrants having crossed the Channel so far, The Telegraph reports.

The highest ever total in a month is 6,878 in November. And yesterday the yearly total reached 21,000. The total did not pass 20,000 until November in 2021.

It was also revealed that the Foreign Office has been taking up the task of establishing a list of countries interested in agreeing on a Rwanda-style deal.

An initial list of 20 countries was quickly reduced when ambassadors warned that seeking such agreements would damage relations.

Albania, North Macedonia, and Moldova were on the initial list but were removed following the negative media coverage.

Lifestyle

Number Of Migrants Increasing Within Nigerian Borders — ILO

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The International Labour Organisation (ILO) says outgoing and incoming migrants are increasing within the Nigerian borders.

The ILO Senior Technical Specialist on Workers’ Activities, Abuja Office, Inviolata Chinyangarara, made this known at a two-day consultative workshop on Tuesday in Abuja.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was organised to define a roadmap for the development of a Trade Union Labour Migration Policy.

According to Chinyangarara, counting labour migration trends figures is a challenge because migration can be regular or irregular.

“Some coming in are counted because they come through the regular process, airports and other ports of entry but the majority that are vulnerable that in precarious situation are those that are coming through irregular means.

“But ILO statistics also show that they the trends are increasing, that is outgoing and income migrants, particularly within the Nigerian borders, ’’she said.

She said that labour migration was triggered by social, political and economic issues such as climate-induced on labour migration, disasters, pandemics and other crisis, trigger people to move.

According to her, our statistics also show that largely in Africa, people are moving for economic reasons, particularly the young men and women.

“When they find that there are no jobs, no prospects for livelihood, they are pushed to move to other countries where they can find greener pastures for employment or enterprise development,’’ she said.

She however noted that the sectors highly hit by migration include health and construction sectors, cross borders traders and domestic service sectors “are highly mobile’’.

She said that there was brain drain of highly skilled medical personnel, others, leaving the shores of African countries to get better jobs in neighbouring countries.

“That is why the ILO has come up with a global International Standards that is protecting and promoting the rights domestic workers, that is Convention 189,’’ she said.

Chinyangarara said that ILO was collaborating with the tripartite constituency in Nigeria on issues of decent work and particularly on labour migration governance, to ensure the promotion of rights of migrants, among others.

According to her, this is to brainstorm around a roadmap for the development of a Trade Union Labour Migration Policy, understanding that in 2014, the Ministry of Labour spearheaded the process to develop the policy.

“So, leveraging on that the trade unions are also going to brainstorm on this workshop some of these national frameworks including global frameworks such as the agenda 2030 for sustainable development.

“We are also going to look at the ECOWAS Protocol on Movement of Goods and Persons, we also going to look at relevant ILO International Labour Standards.

“It is some of these documents that would then inspire the content in the process of developing the Trade Union Labour Migration Policy.

“We are going to look at what is going to change in the process of the review and what are the new antics that COVID-19 pandemic, others have brought to bear,’’ she said.

World News

Deaths of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia

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More than three people died in detention centres housing thousands of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi Arabia,

Ethiopia
Saudi Arabia

The migrants, according to rights group Amnesty International, were facing “unimaginable cruelty” – including being chained together in pairs, and using their cells floors as toilets, the rights group said.

It also urged Saudi authorities to improve conditions of the centres.

The detainees were expelled from neighbouring Yemen.

The migrants from Ethiopia and other countries had been working in northern Yemen but were forced out by Houthi rebels, Amnesty said.

According to UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), some 2,000 Ethiopians remain stranded on the Yemeni side of the border, without food, water or healthcare.

Thousands of Ethiopians go to Saudi Arabia for work, making the kingdom nation a key investor and source of foreign remittances for Ethiopia.
Saudi Arabia has also been cracking down on illegal migrants.

There were up to 500,000 illegal migrants from Ethiopia in the country when Saudi authorities began the operation in 2017, according to the IOM.

At least 10,000 Ethiopians on average were being deported each month, but earlier this year Ethiopian officials requested a moratorium because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In recent months, Ethiopia has struggled to create enough space in quarantine to welcome the people back and make sure that they are not bringing coronavirus with them

Amnesty interviewed 12 detained Ethiopian migrants about conditions in the al-Dayer detention centre, Jizan central prison, and prisons in Jeddah and Mecca.

Conditions are especially dire in al-Dayer and Jizan, where detainees report sharing cells with 350 people, Amnesty says.
The organisation said two migrants reported personally seeing dead bodies of three men – from Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia – in al-Dayer.

“However, all those interviewed said they knew of people who had died in detention, and four people said they had seen bodies themselves,” the report said.

Amnesty said the allegations have been corroborated by videos, photos and satellite imagery.

The rights group urged the Ethiopian government to urgently facilitate the voluntary repatriation of its nationals, while asking the Saudi authorities to improve detention conditions in the meantime.

Ethiopia plans to repatriate 2,000 detained migrants by mid-October, Tsion Teklu, a state minister at Ethiopia’s foreign ministry, revealed last month.

She said the total number of Ethiopian migrants in Saudi detention facilities was 16,000 earlier this year but that it had since gone down.

Last month three migrants told AFP that visiting Ethiopian diplomats had warned migrants to stop speaking out about detention conditions.

More to come…

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