The invasion of African populations towards the Western world is not a bad mess only for Europe, and for Italy in particular. Some of those desperate people jump from one coast of the Atlantic to the other and – surviving a journey of hope through Latin America – reach the border between Mexico and the United States. Year after year, more and more people succeed. According to the numbers provided by the US Customs and Border Protection data, if in 2022 there were around 13 thousand African migrants waiting to cross, in 2023 this figure had already risen to 58 thousand units. A residual figure compared to those who hid themselves to escape any control. In fact, it is estimated that 520 thousand migrants arrived on the continent last year, of which 120 thousand were minors. How does someone from Mauritania, Cameroon, Guinea, Rwanda, Ghana, Senegal or Nigeria, just to name a few of the countries of origin, get there? No mysteries, in times of smartphones and TikTok. It is the migrants themselves who post the adventure – which can last up to five years – on the Chinese platform. Hundreds of “influencers” and “instructors” describe vicissitudes and obstacles, give advice on the “channels” to follow, tell meter by meter what happens along the route towards the “Mexico-US border”, the last stop before building the American dream. They leave from their villages, then cross the ocean in some way or in the luckiest cases fly towards the intermediate stages: Cuba often acts as a “bridge”. From there they are moved to the mainland by ship or by air. The real trouble begins when they have to march for weeks or even months in a multitude of unknowns, and the biggest ones reveal themselves in the equatorial forests. The almost obligatory passage is through the so-called “Darién Hole”, on the border between Colombia and Panama, one of the most inaccessible places on Earth: jungle, poisonous snakes, lack of roads, GPS and signals can be fatal. The videos show these long marches in the jungle, sometimes traveled together with other South American migrants, dodging the skeletons of those who were overcome by fatigue before them, while the corpses of men, women and children float along the rivers with difficult fording.
Not only that. According to the most recent estimates from US Homeland Securityof the approximately 11 million people illegally present in the United States, there are at least double that who had to face prison and enslavement long before seeing the great Wall along the US border. America is a luxury that can be paid for with one’s life, but it is also very expensive in terms of money: the tariffs of traffickers who theoretically allow immigrants to cross numerous borders without controls range from 8 to 20 thousand dollars. . A heritage, for many.
Getting to the famous border is therefore already an Odyssey. And once there? «Although the United States has increased deportation flights» writes the New York Times in this regard, «the government has had to continue to release many people because immigration detention centers are full and families cannot be locked up for prolonged periods. It is also extremely difficult to deport people to countries in Asia and Africa, due to the long distance and lack of consensus among many nations.” The trick to deceive the US databases is to submit an asylum request, knowing that on average two or three years will pass before the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – the agency responsible for immigration control – adopts a final decision, depending on due to the enormous backlog in American courts. One piece of data above all, to put the situation into context, is provided by Senegal, a country that shares with Mauritania the record of Africans arrested at the southern border of the United States, followed by Angola and Guinea. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports a sharp increase in asylum applications which, for Senegalese alone, rose from 773 in 2022 to 13,224 in the first nine months of 2024. Well, of these, last year just 140 were repatriated.
But as we know, something should change. Although he has not yet returned to the White House, in fact, the president-in-chief of the United States Donald Trump has already promised to “complete the work” started almost ten years ago (and partly continued under the Biden presidency), to ” guarantee the security of our borders and the expulsions of illegal immigrants to their countries of origin.” In the 2024 Republican program there was no mention (or at least not only) of completing the great Wall on the border with Mexico. Now an “incisive policy of rejections” is being promoted, starting with the construction of “new detention centers in American metropolises”, where irregulars stopped by the authorities and waiting to be expelled will be housed. To ensure the effectiveness of the project, the new president announced the appointment of Tom Homan, already known as “border czar”, as head of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ready for the largest operation to expel illegal immigrants in the history of United States. But it won’t be easy at all, considering that alongside the 11 million people to be expelled, many, many more are arriving at the border. And this is mainly due to a problem called Nicaragua.
For Africans the most popular route (well sponsored on TikTok) passes through this Central American country considered “safe and practicable” because it is President Daniel Ortega himself who exploits the phenomenon. The purpose? Possessing a migratory lever, which strengthens his personal power, and at the same time damages the United States. Ortega, 78 years old, returned to government in Nicaragua after having personally animated the Marxist-inspired Sandinista revolutionary guerrilla war in the 1980s, which he aimed to make the Latin American country a second Cuba and its president a new Castro. An unacceptable fact for Washington, which at the time responded by arming the Contras (counter-revolutionary armed groups) through the CIA to remove the communist threat. Since 2007, Daniel Ortega has once again been the president of Nicaragua, albeit reconfirmed in elections not recognized either by the United States, the EU or international organisations. His presidency has transformed into a personalist dictatorship which, for one thing, in August this year led to the closure of 1,500 NGOs (mostly religious) considered a danger to Nicaraguan stability because they were «infiltrated by foreign agents financed by United States”. After the pandemic, it began an aggressive policy of welcoming all those immigrants who intend to reach the United States: first it removed restrictions for Cubans and, in 2023, it eliminated visa requirements for other nationalities, including Haitians. So that today around 90 percent of all irregular migration heading towards the Mexican border is concentrated here. The Ortega system is well explained by the exiled Nicaraguan political scientist Manuel Orozco: «Ortega commissioned a private company based in Dubai to train Nicaraguan civil aviation personnel to handle immigration procedures on chartered planes. As a result, between June and November 2023, the number of flights increased from 45 to 93, with a flow of more than 100 thousand passengers from Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Havana (Cuba) and Turks and Caicos ( from which mostly Haitians come, ed.)”. Migrants’ road to the United States is impervious, but defending themselves against those who foment them and use them as a weapon is also difficult.
