Luis Guillermo Solis, the President of Costa Rica, revealed on Monday that nearly $1 million has been given to his country by the US to deal with an influx of immigrants. He added that the Central American immigration crisis now seems likely to be a permanent state of affairs.
A majority of the undocumented immigrants streaming into Costa Rica come from other countries in Central America, including Haiti and Cuba. In a speech at Washington DC’s Wilson Center, Solis noted that Costa Rica is also starting to receive many immigrants from outside the region. Most of these come from African regions, although there is a number from Pakistan as well.
The money that the US has given to Costa Rica will be used to create detention camps in the north of Costa Rica. President Solis also revealed that at one point in La Cruz, a town in the country’s north, there were more undocumented Cuban immigrants than there were residents of Costa Rica.
The immigrationlaws of the US enable Cuban immigrants to be granted almost immediate asylum in the country from practically the moment they arrive. In July, the Obama administration announced a partnership with Costa Rica that would see them house refugees from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, with refugees being ‘pre-screened’ in their home nations before being sent there. Eventually, the immigrants will either be resettled in the US or elsewhere.