HUMANGLE
Lost on a jungle trail, all on her own, Aliah Atebo had been left behind by her travelling companions, a group of migrants driven forward by their desire to get to the United States.
All around her were dead bodies; people who had set out on the journey, just like her, but had failed.
Would pursuing her desire to live in the US mean she would become one of them? Would her unidentified body remain forever missing on a remote Central American Jungle path? Her thoughts went to her three children she had left behind in Cameroon.
She sat down and began to weep.
The desire to seek greener pastures has pushed many Africans to take huge risks to leave their countries.
Africans, especially those from Cameroon, are increasingly showing up on the southern border of the US.
Japa
There were approximately 2.1 million Sub-Saharan African immigrants living in the United States in 2019, according to the US census. That’s about five per cent of the total foreign-born population of 44.9 million.
The US Census Bureau says the total foreign-born Black population is forecast to more than double by 2060, to 9.5 million.
A common route for Africans to japa or “run” to the US, is to get a place at a university, study there and then remain in the country, either by legally extending their visa or illegally, by disappearing into the grey economy.
Anyone trying to fly directly into most countries without a proper visa will likely be turned away before they get on the plane.
That leaves only one real route for many African migrants trying to come to the US; fly into South America and make the arduous journey north through Central America to the United States’ southern border with Mexico.
‘Encounters’
The true figure of how many migrants attempt to cross the border can only be estimated, but an idea of how many try can be gained by looking at the number of people apprehended by Mexican authorities and the US Border Control.
These are called “encounters” in the statistics. The US Customs and Border Protection agency records an encounter when a migrant is taken into custody in the US, either to await adjudication, or is apprehended at the border and immediately expelled.
The number of people discovered trying to cross the border fluctuates through the year, and the total increases or decreases depending on world events, or new developments in US immigration policy.
In 2022, as many as 2.4 million people were “encountered” by border control agents.
Compared to the number of people trying to get into the US from countries like Venezuela, Honduras, and Guatemala, the number of African migrants is small.
In 2019, the number of Africans apprehended across all the US’s border crossings peaked at a little over 5,000, according to figures collected by the Migration Policy Institute. For perspective, 977,500 encounters were recorded at the southern border alone in that financial year.
In 2020 the number of Africans encountered crossing the southern border had dropped to 1,000, the Migration Policy Institute says. This was probably due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Cameroonian contribution
But migrants from Africa are increasingly part of the illegal immigration picture, the Customs and Border Protection says.
The Mexican authorities registered somewhere between 1,600 and 1,700 more African migrants encountered in 2019 than did the US border control. This suggests of the many hundreds who were discovered in Mexico, but who did not show up in the US figures, at least some could have been smuggled by “coyotes” over the dangerous final border crossing undetected.
