For outsiders, Panama may be best known purely as a place in between. Comprising the world’s largest land bridge, for years the country’s international acclaim was based on the Panama Canal, a 50 mile-long (82 km) slice through the earth that represents one of the 20th century’s greatest engineering marvels. More recently, Panama has garnered international headlines because of the Darien Gap, a once-impassable 60-mile (97 km) stretch of jungle that since 2021 has been a major migration passageway. Fewer than 6,500 people crossed the Darien in 2020, a number that exploded to more than 520,000 last year and may near 1 million in 2024. Most people are coming from Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti, and other places beset by escalating political and security crises, in search of better futures in the United States. So it should come as little surprise that José Raúl Mulino, the former security minister elected as Panama’s new president last week, has promised to slam the doors shut. “With international aid, we will begin a process of repatriation, in full compliance with the human rights of all the people there,” he said last week. “Whoever arrives here is going to be sent back to their country of origin… Our Darien is not a transit route, no sir. It is our border." Similar promises have been made before, and are much easier said than done. A joint Colombia-Panama-U.S. effort to halt migration through the Darien Gap last year yielded minimal results. Still, Mulino’s comments point to the awkward position of small transit countries such as Panama, which have found themselves squeezed on both sides. In recent years, the Panamanian government’s response has largely been to usher migrants along as quickly as possible, believing that offering a bus ride through the country was not only more practical than trying to halt all arrivals, but would also avoid public frustration that would be prompted by growing migrant encampments in city streets. Panamanian and Colombian authorities have also been accused of neglecting migrants in need and ignoring alleged abuses against them. A counterexample may be Tunisia, which has participated in EU efforts to halt cross-Mediterranean migration by bottling up movements, preventing would-be asylum seekers and others from setting off for Europe. The Tunisian Coast Guard says it has prevented more than 21,000 people from reaching Italy so far this year. As a result, thousands of people now live in flimsy makeshift camps that inspire the ire of local Tunisians and are regularly targeted by authorities. President Kaïs Saïed has spoken in derogatory terms about the migrants, who largely come from sub-Saharan Africa, at times parroting the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that foreign nationals are coming in as part of intentional efforts to remake countries’ demographics. In recent weeks, authorities have razed tent encampments and reportedly bused hundreds of migrants to the desert near the border with Algeria, where they have been abandoned. Are events in Tunisia a preview of what might occur in Panama? Realistically, Panama City will need a lot more money, manpower, and other resources to pull off the strict enforcement that the president-elect has promised. Those seem quite unlikely to materialize at the necessary scale. Still, leaders have few attractive options. As more countries find themselves in the middle of historic levels of movement around the globe (with asylum seeking and other forms of migration becoming longer distance, as my colleagues reported recently in their latest mapping of changing global mobility trends), dilemmas like Panama’s will likely become much more common. Best regards, Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
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