The United States Department of State reported on the visit to Costa Rica of the Undersecretary for the Office of Population, Refugees and Migration, Juliet Valls Noyes.
The US official will be in the Central American country between Wednesday, April 26, and Thursday, April 27, where she will hold a meeting with senior government and international officials to discuss refugee protection.
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The Joe Biden government also points out that the arrival of Noyes is for the purpose of “establishing joint efforts to address irregular migration, our continued support in terms of humanitarian assistance for vulnerable populations.”
In addition to the Costa Rican country, the undersecretary visited —between April 24 and 25— the country of Chile, to —according to the State Department— highlight the commitment of the United States to support refugees and vulnerable migrants and the affected host communities.
Another of the purposes of Noyes’s visit, for both countries, is to promote the candidacy of the US candidate Amy Pope for the post of Director General of the International Organization for Migration.
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After the visit, the official thanked, through her Twitter account, the Foreign Minister of Costa Rica, Arnoldo André Tinoco“for an excellent discussion with @AmyEPope and @USAmbassadorCR on migration in the Western Hemisphere.
He took the opportunity to highlight Amy Pope’s “innovative ideas” to meet the needs of migrants and host countries. “Well-managed migration can revitalize communities and contribute significantly to local economies,” she said.
Proliferation of migrants in Costa Rica
In mid-November 2022, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves announced that his country is “taking measures” to prevent economic migrants from continuing to use the political refugee regime to get to work and settle in the Central American nation.
The Costa Rican president assured that they sent a communication to the representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to “warn” her of the situation, of the lack of resources to deal with the migratory wave and that the entire burden has fallen on the Government and its institutions.
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«Costa Rica is a very noble country, a country that has opened its hearts, its society, and its institutions to political refugees from other countries because we believe in freedom and above all in democracy; However, the political refugee regime and our legislation, our openness, have been used by groups that are not political refugees but are economic migrants,” said the president.
The president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chaves, announced that his country is “taking measures” to prevent economic migrants from continuing to use the political refugee regime to get to work and settle in the Central American nation.
However, according to the Public Record, “on March 30, the Costa Rican president confirmed that his government received a fund equivalent to US$20 million from the World Bank to address the migration crisis in the Central American country, but he insisted that it is a issue of international responsibility.
Nicaragua is the country that sends the most migrants and refugees to the Central American country. Official data indicates that Costa Rica has received more than 200,000 refugee applications since 2018, when Nicaragua registered the worst human rights crisis in its modern history.
Most of these requests correspond to Nicaraguans who have fled the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, some for political reasons and others for the serious sociopolitical, economic and human rights crisis that Managua has been dragging for four years.
Between January and February 2023 alone, Costa Rica received 7,637 refugee applications from Nicaraguans. It is followed well below by Venezuela with 463, the Ivory Coast, 342 and Colombia with 195.
