BOULEVARD, California — Julia Paredes believed her move to the United States would be now or never. It took several days for Mexico to require visas for Peruvian visitors. If she didn’t act quickly, she would have to make a much more dangerous, stealthy overland journey to settle with her sister in Dallas.
Mexico began requiring visas for Peruvians on Monday in response to a large influx of migrants from the South American country, following identical steps for Venezuelans, Ecuadorians and Brazilians. It effectively eliminated the option of flying to a Mexican city near the U.S. border, as Paredes, 45, did just before it was too late.
“I had to treat it as an emergency,” said Paredes, who served lunch to miners in Arequipa, Peru, and borrowed money to fly to Tijuana, Mexico, across from San Diego. Last month, smugglers led her through a remote opening in the border wall to a California landfill, where she and about a hundred migrants from around the world shivered over campfires after a morning drizzle and waited for overwhelmed Border Patrol agents to take them to a station. in order to process.
Senior U.S. officials, speaking to reporters ahead of a meeting of top diplomats from about 20 Western Hemisphere countries in Guatemala this week, applauded Mexico’s crackdown on air travel from Peru and called visa requirements an important tool to jointly combat illegal migration. to take.
According to critics, stopping air traffic only encourages more dangerous choices. Illegal migration of Venezuelans plummeted after Mexico imposed visa requirements in January 2022, but the lull was short-lived. Last year, Venezuelans made up nearly two-thirds of the record-high 520,000 migrants who passed through the Darien Gap, the infamous jungle that covers parts of Panama and Colombia.
Last year, more than 25,000 Chinese crossed the Darien. They typically fly to Ecuador, a country known for having few travel restrictions, and illegally cross the U.S. border in San Diego to seek asylum. With a backlog of more than 3 million cases in immigration court, such claims take years to be decided, during which time people can obtain work permits and settle.
“People will come anyway,” said Miguel Yaranga, 22, who flew from Lima, Peru’s capital, to Tijuana and was released by border police at a bus stop in San Diego on Sunday. He was ordered to appear in immigration court in New York in February 2025, which surprised him because he said he told agents he would settle with his sister on the other side of the country in Bakersfield, California.
Jeremy MacGillivray, deputy chief of the UN International Organization for Migration’s Mexico Mission, predicts that Peruvian migration will decline “at least initially” and rebound as people switch to walking through the Darien Gap and to Central America and Mexico.
Mexico said last month it would require visas for Peruvians for the first time since 2012 in response to a “substantial increase” in illegal migration. Large-scale Peruvian migration to Mexico began in 2022; Peruvians were stopped an average of 2,160 times per month in the country from January to March this year, compared to a monthly average of 544 times in all of 2023.
In 2022, Peruvians also began appearing at the US border. U.S. Border Patrol apprehended Peruvians an average of about 5,300 times a month last year, before dropping to a monthly average of 3,400 from January through March amid a broad immigration crackdown by Mexico.
Peru immediately responded to Mexico’s visa requirement, but changed course after a backlash from the country’s tourism industry. Peru noted in its reversal that it is part of a regional economic bloc that includes Mexico, Chile and Colombia.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office for Latin America, said Peru’s membership with Mexico in the Pacific Alliance allowed its citizens to travel visa-free for longer than other countries.
It is unclear whether Colombia, also a major source of migration, will be next, but Isacson said Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is having a “love fest” with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, while his relations with the Peruvian government are more be tense.
Colombians consistently rank among the top nationalities of migrants arriving at Tijuana airport. Many find hotels before a guide takes them to boulder-strewn mountains east of the city, where they pass through gaps in the border wall and then walk to dirt plots that the Border Patrol has identified as holding stations.
Bryan Ramírez, 25, from Colombia, reached U.S. territory with his girlfriend last month, just two days after leaving Bogota for Cancun, Mexico, and continuing on another flight to Tijuana. He waited overnight with others for Border Patrol agents to pick him up as cold rain and high winds blew over the crackling of power lines.
Among the group waiting near Boulevard, a small, loosely defined rural town, were several Peruvians who said they came for economic opportunity and to escape violence and political crises.
Peruvians can still avoid the Darien jungle by flying to El Salvador, which introduced visa-free travel for them in December in return for a similar move by the Peruvian government. But they would still have to travel overland through Mexico, where many are robbed or kidnapped.
Ecuadorians, who have required a visa to enter Mexico since September 2021, can also fly to El Salvador, but not all. Oscar Palacios, 42, said he walked through Darien because he couldn’t afford to fly.
Palacios, who left his wife and one-year-old child in Ecuador with plans to support them financially from the US, said it took him two weeks to travel from his home near the violent city of Esmeralda to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. It then took him two months to cross into Mexico as immigration authorities turned him around three times and took him back by bus to the southern part of the country. He said he had been robbed repeatedly.
Palacios eventually reached Tijuana and, after three nights in a hotel, crossed into the US. A Border Patrol agent spotted him with migrants from Turkey and Brazil and drove them to the dump to wait for a van or bus to take them to a station. process. Looking back on the trip, Palacios said he would rather cross Darien Gap a hundred times than even cross Mexico once.
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Associated Press writer Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed.