Biden, Latin America Leaders Reach Agreement on Migration Pact in Attempt To Unify Americas

United States President Joe Biden and several Latin American leaders have signed on to the Los Angeles Declaration of Migration and Protection on the final day of the Summit of the Americas on Friday.

The agreement on the migration pact comes despite the fact that many other Latin American leaders were not present at the summit. Twenty different countries signed on to the declaration, each committing to tackling different components of migration.

New Migration Pact

The Democratic leader credited the pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change as contributing factors to migration throughout the Western Hemisphere. Biden said that right now, migrants made up as much as 10% of the population of Costa Rica. He added that no nation should bear the responsibility alone.

Many of the commitments under the declaration deal specifically with boosting temporary workers programs to support migrants. Furthermore, Canada has agreed to welcome more than 50,000 agricultural workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean this year. The former two are also agreeing to expand migrant labor programs to address labor shortages in their regions, as per ABC News.

Ecuador has issued a decree to create a pathway to regular migration status for Venezuelans who legally entered through port of entry but are currently unlawfully in the country. In the United States, Biden's administration has offered its own commitments, including $300 million in funding for humanitarian assistance for countries.

The money would be used "so when migrants arrive on their doorstep, they can provide a place to stay, make sure migrants can see a doctor, find opportunities to work, so they don't have to undertake the dangerous journey north."

According to the Associated Press, while standing on a podium with flags for the 20 countries that joined the accord extending from Chile in the south to Canada in the north, Biden said that each nation was signing up to commitments that "recognize the challenges that we all share."

Unification of the Americas

The Democratic leader said that the declaration is only just the start, expressing his hopes that more countries will join such efforts. The White House highlighted measures that were recently announced and some new commitments.

Costa Rica will extend protections for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who arrived before March 2020. Furthermore, Mexico will add temporary worker visas for up to 20,000 Guatemalans per year.

The blueprint that the United States is following is already something others, to a large extent, have already been treading on, including Colombia and Ecuador. The two nations' right-leaning leaders were saluted at the summit for giving temporary legal status to many of the six million people who left Venezuela in recent years.

The acting director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, Tamara Taraciuk Broner, said that the Los Angeles declaration is possibly the best outcome of a convening of heads of state that seemed destined to be inconsequential at best.

She added that the agreement laid out concrete commitments but cautioned that "its impact will depend on whether governments move beyond words on paper to concrete actions." Broner noted that this was particularly true for the Biden administration, which continued to implement abusive migration policies even while drafting this agreement, the New York Times reported.