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This Quarterly Mixed Migration Update (QMMU) covers the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The core countries of focus for this region are the countries currently affected by the Venezuelan crisis, including Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador, in addition to the Caribbean islands. Concerning northern movements to the United Sates, this QMMU covers Mexico and Central American countries. Depending on the quarterly trends and migration-related updates, more attention may be given to some of the countries over the rest.

The QMMUs offer a quarterly update on new trends and dynamics related to mixed migration and relevant policy developments in the region. These updates are based on a compilation of a wide range of secondary (data) sources, brought together within a regional framework and applying a mixed migration analytical lens. Similar QMMUs are available for all MMC regions.

Key Updates

Number of displaced Venezuelans continues to increase: From January to March, an estimated 100,000 new refugees and migrants left Venezuela. The total number of Venezuelans who have fled their country since the beginning of the current crisis has now reached 4.9 million.

New migrant caravans from Central America face restrictive response: Two migrant caravans that departed from Honduras in January were largely stopped in Guatemala and Mexico, with allegations of excessive use of force by Mexican National Guard troops against the migrants and refugees. This stands in strong contrast to the reception that caravans received in 2018 and 2019.

Calls to guarantee minimum conditions in Mexican migration detention centres in light of COVID-19:Following the death of an asylum-seeker in March during a protest at a Mexican immigration detention centre, which denounced the prolonged detention, overcrowding, and lack of sanitary conditions of the premises, calls to guarantee sanitary conditions in the centres or to release migrants and refugees in detention in order to protect them from the spread of COVID-19 have grown.

COVID-19 and access to rights: In light of the preventive measures adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries and, in particular, mandatory nation-wide self-isolation access to food, clean water, shelter and work for migrants and refugees are currently key challenges. In particular, migrants and refugees working in the informal economy, who become unemployed, and who live on daily earnings or on remittances from family members abroad, are among the most affected.

Closure of international borders in response to COVID-19: By the end of March, all Latin American countries with the exception of Nicaragua, as well as the U.S. and Canada, had imposed measures to close borders or restrict international travel in order to contain the spread of COVID-19, with varied impacts on migrants and refugees seeking to enter or exit these countries.

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Quarterly Mixed Migration Update Latin America and the Caribbean, Quarter 1, 2020 - World - ReliefWeb

Sub-standard living conditions and poor hygiene expose these vulnerable workers to the risk of contracting the virus. These low-income migrant workers are largely excluded from social security and health insurance in Gulf countries, which would reduce their access to healthcare related benefits and treatment if they are infected. This would prove to be an additional source of distress on their already meagre savings and lack of income till the lockdown ends.

The aftermath of the pandemic may also have an adverse impact on the Indian workers who have obtained their work visas but are unable to enter the Gulf countries due to the lockdown. The instability of the Gulf economy has been further worsened by the pandemic. As a consequence, the employers may either cancel or postpone the recruitment of workers. This may further decline the already dipping rate of recruitment of migrant workers in the India-Gulf corridor. Since the spread of the virus is identified with people having a foreign travel history, this may lead to the stigmatization of the migrants returning from the Gulf and other countries.

Despite the measures undertaken by Gulf countries, the pandemic has already caused severe and unprecedented economic, social, health and psychological implications on the migrant workers. These migrant workers should be brought under the purview of national health services and support systems.

Amidst this health crisis, migrants are more concerned with their financial woes than with their health. To overcome this, the Gulf governments should come forward to provide incentives for the migrant workers to cover their rent, food and wages or offer them the same benefits extended to non-migrant households. As for those workers returning to India, the Indian government should provide and cover the costs of special repatriation flights.

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For Indian migrants in the Gulf it is a financial rather than a health crisis - Open Democracy

The attempt happened on October 8th, 2019, but first became known to the public today as the verdict from the Pechenga District Court was announced by the prosecutorsoffice of the Murmansk region.

It was three Syrian citizens that boarded a small motorboat in Devkina Zavod Bay in the Pechenga fjord and departed from the coast towards the maritime border with Norway.

In court, all three pleaded guilty as charged on conspiracy to get to Norway without proper permission anddocuments.

Liinakhamari (Devkina Zavod Bay) in the Pechenga fjord is the westernmost fjord on Russias Kola Peninsula and the only place between Murmansk and the state border were civilians can reach the coast without entering military restricted areas.

Liinakhamari is a restricted border area, but not under military naval authority.

While out at sea, the motorboat was stopped by Russias FSB coastal border guards, and the three were arrested.

At sea, the distance from Liinakhamari to the Russian-Norwegian border in Grense Jakobselv is some 35 kilometers (19 Nautical Miles).

It has never happened that any illegal migrants have succeeded in entering Norway in the north from the seaside.

Two of the Syrian citizens were sentenced to 10 months imprisonment in a penal colony, while the third has to spend eight months.

In Norway, it is the Police that is in charge of migration and external border control, but the Coast Guard can assist if getting authorization from the police.

Following the migrant crisis in autumn 2015, when some 5,500 people entered Norway from Russia in the north, there havebeen several attempts by third-country residents to make it over the 200 km long land border.

Especially during autumn 2017, many were arrested on the Russian side.

In September 2017, three Afghans were arrested. In August 2017, aSyrian citizen was arrestedafter he climbed through the barbed wire fence. In July,two other Syrians made it through the fencebut were detained before they reached the borderline. In June,four Moroccans were arrestedand in March,two Iranians were halted.

In these unsettling times, the Barents Observer needs your support more than ever. If you like what were doing, please considermaking a donation.Your financial contributions, however big or small, will help keep our independent news coming from the north, about thenorth.

From Norway you canVIPPS:105792

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FSB stopped first boat refugees en route to Norway in the north - The Independent Barents Observer

This is the first column in The Politics of a Pandemic, a series that aims to examine and critique some of the political and governmental reverberations of COVID-19.The Indian population is 1.3 billion, according to the government census, which I believe I need not explicitly mention is a gross undercount. Those left out include, but are not limited to, the 2 million declared illegal by a piece of legislation in the state of Assam in 2019, the greatest mass disenfranchisement in human history.Often when we speak of events and injustices in India, people dont realise just how many people are being affected. Now, COVID-19 has changed the world to say the least, and it is no secret that lower income countries are disproportionately struck.When COVID-19 hit, India managed, at first, to keep its reported cases in double digits. Of course, we cannot forget that this is primarily because of its woefully low testing rates. Nevertheless, for a second, the public could wrap themselves in a false sense of security and relish the calm before the storm. Which is not to say that there was much to enjoy before.Ever since Narendra Modis ruling party, the BJP, secured a second mandate from the people in the 2019 General Elections, India has suffered. Come December it saw huge protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, strategic instruments of furthering communal divide and partisan politics, and in January, it saw riots that put it back on Genocide Watch.The CAA and NRC elicited country-wide resistance, the symbol of which was Shaheen Bagh, a road in the capital where a 24-hour, 100-day long peaceful sit-in took place by thousands of courageous protestors led by inspiring Muslim women. But COVID-19 gave the government a clean chit to dispel the protestors, even though many other mass gatherings continued across the country. The women of Shaheen Bagh left their slippers and shoes at the site as a symbol of solidarity. This is one of the political costs of COVID-19 people having to cave in to their fascist governments who shall happily use any excuse to claim victory and paint over dissent.And speaking of COVID-19-sanctioned draconian measures, immigration law and borders come next. Often in the cacophony of the wall, people forget that the US isnt the only country with a serious case of xenophobia. India is one of the rich, forgotten examples of this global trend. The anti-globalization that the pandemic has triggered, counterintuitive as it sounds, has crystallized boundaries around the world. The Indian government has seized this opportunity and strengthened control between India and Bangladesh and India and Myanmar. And for those who had nearly forgotten about the Rohingya refugees, that tragedy is still going strong.But a bigger (only numerically; there is no hierarchy of suffering) problem looming on the Indian horizon right now is the internal migrant crisis. Millions of Indians from rural regions travel hundreds of miles to make their livelihoods on the threshold of urbanity. And they are all out of work.COVID-19 necessitates everything go remote and online. And despite all the racist American jokes about tech support, India sorely lacks the digital infrastructure for such a shift. And so unemployment, already at a decade-high before the virus, has now skyrocketed to 23.4 percent. Many people will be jobless, and the government shall be able to conveniently pin its failures on the global recession. How many people? 23.4 percent rounds to about 400 million people, which for the record is the entire US population and then some. One in five people in a country responsible for one in seven people in the world. This is 1 in 35 human beings on Earth.I will not hesitate to say that this is a humanitarian crisis.If this isnt an alarming enough development, allow me to shed some light on the communalizing of COVID-19. For a constitutional democracy, India is very good at being a practicing authoritarian state. Freedom of press sounds like a Stone Age advertisement, and very few trustworthy sources of information remain, theWire and the Indian Express being two of them. Many even refuse to publish op-eds or consider the idea that the BJP-led government might be flawed, either because they are terrified, or because they share its views. Foreign media is hailed as inaccurate and funded by Islamic nations.There isnt much to explain but that the inherent Islamophobia of the administration and its staunch devotees is revealing itself quite unabashedly. There was a 8,000-strong meeting of an Islamic missionary group the Tablighi Jamaat against lockdown orders and nearly a third of cases have been linked to it. What people ignore is that this happened between March 1 and 15, and the government said on March 13 the coronavirus is not a health emergency.On March 19, a Hindu temple hosting 40,000 visitors per day finally closed. The lockdown was announced on March 24. However, only the Jamaat incident has been weaponized to make it appear that Muslims are deliberately attempting to spread the virus. And because the claim couldnt hold itself, old videos from 2017 of a man spitting on food are being circulated as false evidence.Further, the medical superintendent of an Ahmedabad hospital is said to have segregated patients on the basis of faith on government-orders, which the ministers have subsequently denied. And so in 2020, the largest democracy in the world is perfecting the South Asian version of the structural racism model that the oldest democracy is desperately trying to claw its way out of.Already, the separation of Hindus and Muslims and the upper and lower caste Hindus in most cities has laid the ground for this the renewed reports of lynching adding to the pile of things we inherited from our ancestors. Last week, three men suspected of being child kidnappers and organ harvesters were lynched by a senseless mob in Palghar and not a day after, false reports of how sadhus (Hindu ascetics) were killed by a mob of Muslims made their regular rounds.

Protest, one might suggest, in the fraught times? The lockdown has made it impossible to risk even voicing concern or criticism without repercussions. Under the veil of paranoia-induced distraction, multiple journalists and critics of the government have been arrested for conspiring against the State.I want to end this with two more snippets of the pandemic narrative: widespread discrimination against Indians with stereotypically South East Asian features and the spineless government allowing private hospitals to charge citizens for COVID-19 treatment.And did I mention the prime ministers response has been to ask us to light candles and bang kitchen pots on our balconies? Too bad for those who dont have any.

Tanisha Tekriwal is a Weinberg freshman. She can be contacted at tanishatekriwal2023@u.northwestern.edu. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to opinion@dailynorthwestern.com. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.

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Opinion | Pay Attention to India - Daily Northwestern

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The selected cartoons appeared first in other publications, either in print or online, or on social media, and are credited appropriately.

In todaysfeatured cartoon, PM Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee seem to have reached an impasse as illustrated by Manjul.

R. Prasad illustrates how Prime Minister Narendra Modis infamous comment that those who are violent, can be identified by their clothes last year, has not aged well in light of the criticism by the Arab world.

EP Unny points fingers at the government, alleging theyre not doing enough even when they can.

A moving cartoon by Satish Acharya about a 12-year-old girl who passed away due to exhaustion after walking for three days to go back home amid the lockdown.

Alok Nirantars take on the changing face of the earth, this Earth Day.

Kirtish Bhatt draws parallels between the oil prices that plunged to negative with the migrant crisis of India, where people are losing lives due to starvation.

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The Centre-state face-off on Covid-19 and Earths changing face - ThePrint