Latest news with #migración
Russia Today
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
Anti-migrant protests flare up in EU state (VIDEOS)
Anti-migrant protesters in Spain clashed with police after a man of Malian origin was detained on charges of raping a young local woman. The unrest broke out on Friday night outside a migrant center in Alcala de Henares, a suburb of Madrid. Police earlier arrested a 21-year-old man in connection with the brutal rape of a Spanish woman of the same age near the center last weekend. The suspect allegedly beat and sexually assaulted the victim before fleeing. However, he was subsequently identified based on surveillance footage as one of the asylum seekers living in the migrant center. He has been placed in provisional detention without bail. Around 300 people joined the protest to support the rape victim outside the migrant center late on Friday. Footage posted online showed demonstrators pushing against police lines near the facility, where some 2,000 migrants are reportedly housed, calling for its closure and for changes to migration laws. Protesters carried banners denouncing 'uncontrolled' immigration, including signs reading 'Intruders, get out!' They also chanted insults at Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, criticizing his pro-migration stance. The demonstration turned violent after right-wing groups, including Nucleo Nacional and Democracia Nacional, joined in. Videos showed police using batons and shooting rubber bullets to chase protesters away from the center. La policía pone más medios para proteger a un violador de Mali que a una chica violada de Alcalá de Henares. Los funcionarios que actúan al servicio de los políticos y no de los ciudadanos dan putísimo asco. A prior protest on Wednesday also ended in clashes, with at least four demonstrators detained, local media reported. Organizers have announced another rally for Saturday. Grandísimo ejemplo el de Alcalá de Henares en la manifestación en defensa de nuestra de pueblo, no vamos a tragar con violadores en nuestras calles. ¡LEGITIMA DEFENSA! 🥁🇪🇸 Earlier this week, Judith Piquet, the mayor of the municipality housing the facility, said she would formally request the closure of the migrant center. She claimed residents had been raising concerns about the facility for months and criticized the central government for opening it without consulting the city council or studying its local impact. Piquet said the center is overcrowded, lacks integration and security plans, and has created 'an environment of insecurity and disorder in the surrounding area.' She called on the government to improve security measures at all migrant centers nationwide. The EU has been grappling with a migration crisis since at least 2015, largely driven by conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and later Ukraine. While many member states initially welcomed asylum seekers, several have since introduced border controls and other legislation due to rising migrant-related crime. Spain has taken a different approach. Prime Minister Sanchez sees migration as key to addressing labor shortages and sustaining the welfare system, and has pushed for better migrant integration. Sanchez has, however, urged early adoption of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, a so-called solidarity mechanism adopted last year that requires fair distribution of asylum seekers across the EU and penalizes states that refuse to accept relocated migrants.
Yahoo
05-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'Always hiding': Haitian laborers fear Dominican deportation push
Agamise Cheranfant hides as soon as he finishes his work at a banana plantation in the Dominican Republic. Like many others, he is Haitian, undocumented, and lives in constant fear of deportation. Owners of farms, construction companies and tourism businesses are also nervous -- they rely on Haitian laborers to work long days under the scorching sun. On the banana plantations in Mao, in the country's northwest, most of the workers are from Haiti, which shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It is an arduous job that few Dominicans want to do. The daily wage of 800 pesos (less than $14) "is very low," said Cheranfant, 33. And with immigration authorities breathing down undocumented workers' necks, "we're always scared, we're always hiding," he said. Relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti are marked by resentment and mistrust. Dominican President Luis Abinader has toughened his policy on migration from the neighboring country, which is plagued by poverty and gang violence that has led thousands of Haitians to flee. Abinader ordered the construction of a wall on the border and increased raids and deportations of undocumented immigrants. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 200,000 Haitians were sent home, even as gang violence there soars. Such "disorderly" repatriations have reduced the availability of labor in tasks that "aren't of interest to Dominicans," according to the construction workers' association, Acoprovi. In some areas, the labor supply has fallen by between 40 and 80 percent. In tourism, the labor squeeze has affected areas such as cooking, said Henri Hebrard, an economist and consultant. "This could affect the quality of service," he said. - Companies demand change - Business leaders are calling for a regularization plan for undocumented laborers. Acoprovi proposes issuing 87,000 temporary work permits. But the government, so far, has shown no signs of flexibility regarding the requests. Antony Florestal has a passport, alien identification card and work card that have all expired. If he is caught in a raid, he faces deportation. "I'm scared," said the 32-year-old, who has been working in agriculture since 2009. "I live here (on the farm) so I don't have to go out on the street." The Dominican Republic exports bananas to the United States, Europe and other countries in the Caribbean, with agriculture representing 5.6 percent of the country's economic output. - 'Can't live in peace' - At the plantation where Cheranfant works, bunches of bananas are harvested with machetes, before being placed on a steel hook and moved along a cable to another area where they are sorted and packed for sale. The best bananas are exported, in this case to Germany. The rest are sold on the local market. The country's banana industry was already in crisis due to factors including the weather, pests and rising costs. Production fell 44 percent between 2021 and 2024, according to the Dominican Association of Banana Producers. The labor shortage is yet another blow. "Here, the workforce has decreased by more than 50 percent" due to the deportations, said producer Osvaldo Pineo. Some Haitians now work "nomadically," he said. "Today, they offer you the service, but tomorrow, you don't know if you'll get it." For employers, too, there is a risk. "If you put them in a vehicle and it's checked (by the authorities), you're accused of being a trafficker of undocumented migrants," Pineo said. Cheranfant has already been deported several times but always returns -- life is a constant game of cat and mouse with immigration authorities. His wife and three children live in a town near the plantation. "Almost every day we flee, in the morning, at night, at three in the morning, at one in the morning," Cheranfant said. "You're scared while you sleep and while you eat. We can't live in peace." str-jt/mbj/dga/nn/dr/des
CBS News
24-06-2025
- CBS News
Multiple bodies found with hands and feet tied in the Mediterranean Sea off Spain
How a border wall works in Melilla, Spain, a gateway between Europe and Africa Spanish authorities have launched an investigation after discovering multiple corpses in the Mediterranean Sea whose hands and feet had been tied, police said on Monday. According to regional daily Diario de Mallorca, since mid-May Civil Guard boats have spotted at least five bodies with their feet and hands bound. Police suspect that the victims may be migrants from North Africa, the Majorca Daily Bulletin reported. Diario de Mallorca quoted investigators as saying that the migrants may have been tied up and thrown into the sea during the crossing, potentially due to a dispute with their smugglers. The investigation into suspected homicide aims to identify the victims and work out the causes of their death, a Civil Guard spokeswoman told AFP. The discovery shows "the cruelest side" of the irregular migration route, regional president Marga Prohens told local media. Although most of the tens of thousands of Europe-bound migrants Spain receives arrive via the Canary Islands in the Atlantic, hundreds attempt the shorter crossing from north Africa to the Balearic archipelago in the Mediterranean. Authorities said 31 bodies had been found in the waters and beaches of the archipelago between January and June of this year, the Majorca Daily Bulletin reported earlier this month. A Guardia Civil boat, on July 11, 2024 in Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain. Isaac Buj/Europa Press via Getty Images In 2023, the United Nation's International Organization for Migration recorded 8,542 migrant deaths around the world – with 37% of these deaths occurring in the Mediterranean. There have also been dramatic rescues in the region. Earlier this month, a charity ship rescued more than 50 migrants from an abandoned oil platform in the Mediterranean, where one woman gave birth, according to the Spain-based NGO Open Arms. And in January, the Spanish coastguard rescued a baby that was born on an inflatable vessel carrying migrants to the Canary Islands.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Mayan languages spreading across the US
Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are taking their ancient languages to new territories. Three days had passed since Aroldo's father died. Aroldo was still mourning, and he couldn't even bring himself to tend the cornfields his father had left him in their community in San Juan Atitán, Guatemala. At dinner, as he stared into the flames of the wood stove, feeling the weight of loss on his chest, he told himself it was time to breathe fresher air. Turning to his mother, who was quietly eating beside him, he said in Mam, the Mayan language spoken in their town: "Nan, waji chix tuj Kytanum Meẍ," – "Mum, I want to go to the white men's nation," meaning, the United States. In Mam, his mother told him she would set things up, but first, he had to wait until the mourning period was over. A year later, with cousins in California willing to host him, Aroldo set out (the BBC has chosen not to name him in full to protect his identity). It took him more than four months to descend the slopes of the Sierra Madre, cross the deserts of Mexico and Arizona and reach the San Francisco Bay Area. "[My father's] death put life in front of me and made me realise it was time to face it by myself," says Aroldo, in Spanish, which he also speaks. Behind him, a photo of his father, wearing a traditional hat and hand-knitted magenta shirt under a black capixay of San Juan Atitán, guards him on a chilly December night in the Bay Area. One of the few things Aroldo took with him was his language, Mam, whose roots reach far back into the Mayan civilisations that ruled over Central America thousands of years ago. Today, Mam and other Mayan languages are expanding their reach, as indigenous people from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are spreading them in the US through immigration. In fact, in recent years, Mayan languages, originally spoken across the Yucatán Peninsula, have grown so common in the US that two of them, K'iche' (or Quiche) and Mam, now rank among the top languages used in US immigration courts. The rise of these indigenous languages in Latin American immigrant communities in the US is only beginning to be fully understood, experts say – and has important implications for the communities and their needs. The San Francisco metropolitan area is one of the top destinations for Latin American immigrants. One in four of the Bay Area's more than seven million residents are Latinos, most with roots in Mexico and Central America, according to calculations based on US Census Bureau data.* The US government counts them all as Hispanic upon entering the country, a term denoting people from Spanish-speaking countries, even though for some of these migrants – like Aroldo – Spanish is not their mother tongue, but what they use to talk to those outside of their home villages. Others don't even speak Spanish at all, and only speak their indigenous language, according to several Mayan immigrants and experts interviewed for this article. "Many Mam speakers come to the US and have a different set of needs, experiences and histories than monolingual Spanish speakers and those not from indigenous cultures," says Tessa Scott, a linguist specialising in the Mam language at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you call everyone from Guatemala 'Hispanic', you might assume everyone in that group speaks Spanish fluently, and they don't." In California, a new law passed in 2024 requires state agencies to collect more detailed data on Latin American immigrants' preferred languages, including indigenous languages such as K'iche' and Mam, in order to better understand and meet their needs. Besides needing different interpreters, Mayans and other indigenous immigrants face unique challenges that mestizo or white Latin Americans don't, and that often go unnoticed when all are covered under the blanket term "Hispanic", Scott says. "Indigenous Guatemalans, many from Mayan cultures like Mam, frequently face intense discrimination and violence by people in a different social category, and this is what often drives them to come to the US, where they may seek asylum," she says. Labelling all Latin Americans as Hispanic can hide these complex social, cultural and ethnic hierarchies, and prevent asylum seekers from receiving specialist services such as legal help and trauma support, she adds. The growth of Mayan communities in the US has also given their ancient languages new platforms, adding to a long and rich history. Though the ruins and carved hieroglyphs of ancient Mayan cities may seem like relics of a long-lost civilisation, many Mayan communities survived the Spanish conquest of the 16th Century and preserved their culture and languages. In places like the Bay Area, you can now find Mayan languages on the radio, in local news outlets or even in classrooms. "We are as involved with the world as any other society," says Genner Llanes-Ortiz, a Maya scholar at Bishop's University in Canada. "We continue to speak our languages and use them not just to write our history, but to write new ways to deal with what affects us." Mayan words have also long made their way into different languages, through loanwords tied to Mayan inventions. Cigars and chocolate When the Spanish landed on the coasts of the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th Century, they found around a dozen Mayan city-states tied to a shared past but also facing deep divisions. Some Mayan rulers saw the arrival of the Spanish as an opportunity to settle old tensions and allied with the Europeans to crush their rival cities. Learning the languages spoken in the area was crucial for the Spanish wishing to maintain these new alliances. And, once the Peninsula was conquered, they used the local languages to evangelise, administrate and create a new society. In his travels throughout the Americas, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish missionary, described a widespread local custom: "sipping" and "sucking" burning herbs. In Mayan culture, tobacco was smoked and drunk in rituals. The act of smoking those "dried herbs stuffed into a certain leaf", as de las Casas put it, was named siyar in ancient Mayan, which later evolved into the Spanish cigarro and, much later, into the English word cigar, to describe a roll of tobacco leaves. Another Mayan word that slipped into other languages is cacao, the beans that make up chocolate and that de las Casas himself introduced to Europe in 1544. Today, more than 30 Mayan languages exist and are spoken by at least six million people worldwide. Although some, like Chicomuseltec and Choltí, have disappeared or are close to extinction, others, like K'iche', Yucatec and Q'eqchi, have around a million speakers each. They all come from the same language, Proto-Mayan, spoken before about 2000 BCE. They are so different from one another, however, that speakers of Mam, which has around half a million speakers, can't understand K'iche', and Yucatecans can't understand Mam. Of Yucatec, Aroldo says, "it's like German to me" – a language he doesn't speak at all. For nearly 2,000 years, Mayan languages had their own writing system, known as Classic Maya. Composed of hieroglyphs, it was only used by those at the top of the social pyramid. "If we want to make a historical equivalency, we can compare Classic Maya to Latin," says Llanes-Ortiz. "It was a prestige language. It was spoken by the elites, while the rest of the population spoke their own language that, little by little, mixed with Latin." The Spanish missionaries deemed hieroglyphs pagan, and systematically purged them. The sons and daughters of the Mayan elites were forced to abandon hieroglyphic writing and learn to use the Latin alphabet, and most of the books written by that time, known as codices, were destroyed. But the oral languages were tolerated, and under a new robe – the Latin alphabet – have survived until the present day. "The use of Mayan languages was so common and widespread during colonial times that community acts, balance sheets, wills, political declarations, memorials were all written in them, but everything was in Latin characters that remain in the archives of the city of Seville," says Llanes-Ortiz. "Even after Mexico's independence from Spain, Mayan languages continued to be used as lingua franca throughout the Yucatán Peninsula." Western scholars began to study the Mayan hieroglyphs, long suppressed by the Spanish, in the 19th Century. While American and Russian linguists made significant progress in deciphering them throughout the 20th Century, Llanes-Ortiz says that huge breakthroughs were reached in the 2000s when Mayan scholars and speakers were included in the conversation. It was then that researchers understood that hieroglyphs represented not just complex concepts, but also syllables forming words. The involvement of native speakers has advanced the study of Mayan languages, while inspiring a new generation of Mayans to reclaim hieroglyphic writing. Groups like Ch'okwoj or Chíikulal Úuchben Ts'íib are hosting workshops, and making t-shirts and mugs using ancient Mayan glyphs to resuscitate them and transmit them to future generations. Mayan languages move north Aroldo was five when he watched his first cousins leave San Juan Atitán for the US. He wouldn't see them again for years, but he listened to their voices on the cassette tapes they sent every now and then telling stories of a foreign land. The first Mayans known to reach the US, Llanes-Ortiz says, came as part of the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican workers to replace Americans who left to fight in World War Two. But the largest waves came decades later, in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Latin American migration began to peak. Guatemalans living in the US went from 410,000 in 2000 to 1.8 million in 2021, all coming from a country of only 17 million. Among these migrants are many Mayans who have settled in states like Florida and California. "The first migrants went to the US, tested the waters and saw how you could earn real money. Then they told their Mam friends, who followed, and soon, they began pulling others," says Silvia Lucrecia Carrillo Godínez, a Mam teacher living in San Juan Atitán, speaking in Spanish. Migration has transformed San Juan from a corn- and bean-growing economy to one reliant on remittances, much like the rest of Guatemala. Today, nearly one in five Sanjuaneros moves to Mexico or the United States for better-paying jobs. "Migration is what sustains our village," says Carrillo Godínez. "The advice of the Mam people in the US to those here is learn to add, subtract, a little Spanish and go to the United States. It's the only way to progress." For decades, Mayan immigrants in San Francisco settled in the Mission District. But, as housing costs soared in the 2000s and 2010s, many moved to the East Bay, particularly the cities of Oakland and Richmond. "There is a direct line to Oakland," says Scott, the linguist. "When I go to San Juan Atitán, and people ask me where I'm from, I don't say the US or California; but I say Oakland, and they know exactly where I'm from." Aroldo has found a local community tied together by Mam and Mayan traditions. They celebrate traditional events and festivals, and help each other through neighbourhood committees. Occasionally, he receives a WhatsApp message in Mam: At jun xjal yab' – someone is sick; or At jun xjal ma kyim – someone has passed. Like many migrants, Aroldo sees his time in California as temporary – it's a place to work until he can return to San Juan Atitán to build a home for his family. Although he still mourns his father and misses his family back home and the fog-shrouded mountains of his childhood, he finds solace in Mam. "There are so many paisanos (countrymen) here that I rarely feel nostalgic. Language makes it harder to miss your land," he says. That's why he always reminds his nephew, who attends an English-speaking school in the East Bay, to speak Mam at home. "First comes Mam, then Spanish, then English," he tells him. * The calculation for the Bay Area was made based on data from the US Census Bureau on the Hispanic population in the nine counties of the Bay Area and their country of origin. --
Irish Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Javier Milei tightens Argentina's immigration rules in nod to Donald Trump
Argentina has said it will tighten its historically loose migration rules, as libertarian president Javier Milei cuts costs and deepens his political alignment with hard-right leaders in the United States and Europe. Argentina will ban people convicted of crimes from entering, rapidly deport those who commit crimes inside the country, set financial requirements for residency and charge migrants to access public healthcare and education, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni told reporters. 'We have for a while had an immigration regime that invites chaos and abuse,' Adorni said on Wednesday, citing heavy spending on public services for foreigners. 'It's time to honour our history and make Argentina great again.' The reforms, while less extreme than hardline migration policies implemented by Milei's ally US president Donald Trump , are a departure for Argentina. The nation is largely descended from immigrants and migration has rarely been a big political issue, with many paths to legal residency and relatively lax migration enforcement. READ MORE It reflects Milei's blending of his economic mandate to end Argentina's chronic overspending with a rightwing social agenda. The president has previously closed government departments tasked with tackling gender and racial discrimination, which he said had spent large budgets with limited results. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, the libertarian economist said 'woke ideology' was a 'cancer that must be removed'. Juan Cruz Díaz, managing director of Latin America advisory Cefeidas Group, said Adorni's announcement aimed to appeal to conservative voters in Buenos Aires in advance of Sunday's local elections, in which Adorni is the main candidate for Milei's La Libertad Avanza party. 'La Libertad Avanza is trying to beat centre-right parties for dominance of the rightwing vote,' Cruz Díaz said. 'The city is probably where concern about migrants flooding public services is most pronounced in Argentina. 'The government's angle is more economic than xenophobic ... the latter is not a dominant part of the national debate in Argentina.' Adorni said that eight public hospitals nationwide had jointly spent 114 billion pesos (€90 million) on treating foreigners in 2024. He said that the new healthcare charges would put an end to 'health tourism', in which foreigners enter Argentina to receive free healthcare before returning home, a big complaint of rightwing leaders in the country's northern provinces bordering Bolivia and Paraguay. The reforms, set to be implemented through a presidential decree in the coming days, include new requirements for receiving Argentinian citizenship, including spending two years inside the country uninterrupted. − The Financial Times
