The migration corridor between Mexico and the United States continues to be the largest in the world, both in volume and complexity, in a context marked by the absence of effective regional governance and policies that generate large-scale humanitarian impacts. This was stated by Juan Carlos Barrón Pastor, director of the Center for Research on North America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, during his participation in the Tenth Regional Conference on Social Work and Human Mobility in the Americas, titled "Migrant Resonances, Regional Responses to the Impact of Migration Policies." The event, organized by the National School of Social Work and the Andrés Bello University, brought together academic authorities and specialists in human mobility. Barrón Pastor explained that, as the upcoming review of the free trade treaty between Mexico, the United States, and Canada approaches, one of the most notable gaps remains the lack of a chapter dedicated to the governance of the North American migration ecosystem, which he said is usually addressed from ideological rather than structural positions. The scholar argued that North America operates as an interconnected system, where the migration policies of one country directly affect the dynamics of the other two, generating chain effects on flows, detentions, and return processes. Based on global data, he recalled that by 2022, an estimated 281 million people were living outside their country of origin, equivalent to 3.6% of the world's population. Within that panorama, he emphasized that the Mexico–United States corridor remains the largest in magnitude internationally. Barrón Pastor spoke of "statistical holes," with differences of thousands of people among different records. He indicated that the existence of 65,000 deportations, 170,000 annual arrests, and 46,000 people in detention centers in the United States is estimated, figures that do not always coincide between official sources. "There are people who disappear at some point in these legally questionable processes, and we don't know where they are. We are facing a humanitarian emergency," he warned. The specialist also questioned the business models associated with massive detention and deportation, in collaboration with local prisons, emphasizing that their human impact is profoundly devastating. In the United States, he observed that these actions respond to political designs, particularly visible in the so-called sanctuary cities, many of them with a Democratic majority, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Another of the critical points highlighted was the lack of clarity in the official figures on people detained and deported.
World's Largest Migration Corridor: A North American Humanitarian Crisis
An expert from Mexico has warned of a large-scale humanitarian crisis in North America caused by the lack of regional migration management and hostile policies. According to his data, the corridor between Mexico and the US remains the largest and most complex in the world, with tens of thousands of detentions and deportations annually, creating a situation he described as a "humanitarian emergency."
