Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered details on the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, a new migrant program adopted so far by 20 countries in this hemisphere.
At the recent Summit of Americas, he spoke about the program which specifically seeks to create safety and promote legal channels for immigration throughout the region and to address the growing number of refugees at the nation's southern border, according to a June 10 release by the State Department.
“The basic principles that we agreed to are the absolute need to make sure that migration is safe, it’s orderly, it’s humane and we want to make sure that we’re putting human dignity at the heart of everything that we do,” Blinken said, according to the release.
To do this, migrants must be treated in a humane and dignified way. The U.S. needs to build in safety in the migration process. The country must “uphold and respect our individual laws” and those laws must be enforced, he said, according to his remarks.
The countries involved in the program pledged to uphold commitments to improve immigration in Central and South America, he said in his remarks. The declaration calls for countries to work towards the expansion of temporary worker programs to address labor shortages. This helps to promote stability in the region through social programs developed by those countries.
Emphasis has been placed on each country to further open, expand upon or reinforce legal migration channels within their government programs. Blinken said in his remarks that this includes the establishment of refugee resettlement and family unification programs. Countries adopting the agreement are to unify in the effort to combat human trafficking in the region by sharing information and improving their justice systems, which could include the prosecution of known human traffickers.
The program puts forth the point that a single nation should not have to address a region’s migration surge alone. It promotes a unified, multinational approach. The United States faced criticism from Belize and Argentina for leaving some regional leaders out, including Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“In the case of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, they were here at the summit. I met with them. I met with human rights defenders. I met with civil society from those countries,” Blinken said in his remarks. “And I would argue that they are more representative of the people in those respective countries than their current governments or regimes.”
U.S. border officials encountered more than 1.7 million migrants along the southern border from October 2020 to September 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported. Another 1.3 million were seen from October 2021 to April 2022.
