 Our next speaker is Dr. Rene Zinteno. Dr. Rene Zinteno is a professor of demography here in the College of Public Policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. As the Undersecretary of Population, Migration and Religious Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior in Mexico where he served from 2010 to 2012, Zinteno was instrumental in writing, negotiating and enacting the 2011 Mexican immigration law. He's been the provost and professor at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and Executive Director of the Center for US Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He's published widely in the areas of social and demographic change, international migration and social inequality with a focus on Mexico, US Mexican migration and a Mexican migrant incorporation. Thank you very much to the Mexico Center and the College of Public Policy for the invitation. For those of us who have been working on migration, for many, many years and also in my case, living in the US Mexico border, you think that you have seen everything. We saw IRCA and the implementation of IRCA in the late 1980s. We saw the Mexican crisis of the 1990s. We saw the US economy booming and migration flows from Mexico I never seen before. We saw IRCA as a very important legal cornerstone for what we see now in terms of border security in the United States. We saw 9-11. We saw the changes in the law and the creation of the Homeland Security United States. We saw the economic recession of the US and a significant decline of migration flows in the last five years from Mexico to the US or at least trying to cross without documents to the United States. Well, we haven't seen everything and we still get surprised about how creative, especially when we're talking about policy, we can be creating unexpected consequences on migration because for many years, we haven't been able to really fix a broken immigration system in North America. And if we don't fix that system, we are going to keep facing again and again and again these kind of issues. I know there is a lot of complexity, especially today in the United States, about what is happening, but I believe and that's one of the messages I would like to convey today that Mexico can play a more important role, a leadership role today because it's in much better position than never before to play the leadership with or between the United States and Central American countries. I will get back to you. So before, because I usually take a lot more than the time I'm allowed to talk, I would like to convey four ideas mainly. What we have seen today, migration from Central America to the US, especially on a company minors, is a highly sophisticated process. It's not random, it's highly organized with the participation of families in the United States, families in Central America, but also the participation of smugglers, coyotes, costly process, yeah? Organized crime is more and more involved in this business and also it's easy, believe me, to cross to the US if you have enough resources to do it. It's highly organized and also many authorities, corrupted authorities in Guatemala, in El Salvador and in Mexico play a very important role on moving these migrants, especially through the most difficult part which is crossing to Mexico in order to come to the border. And also as we will see, all of these children and families with minors are crossing pretty much only one place, yeah? Which is the Rio Grande area. How can they cross to the most dangerous part of Mexico? Tells you a lot about who is organizing this amazing business. I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like that, but it's very good business organized crime today to move children and women to cross from Central America to the United States. Second, and I think Nestor made a very good presentation. It's very difficult to say one single reason why this is happening. I think violence, of course, is playing a very important role, but that's not new. Violence has been there, has been increasing over time, but you see the rates and you will see it again here. We have been having these high rates of homicides and crime in Central America for a long time. And for Mexico, it's more recent and as we would see, the number of minors has increased a little bit, but not as fast as the number of minors from Central America. Of course, we're talking about a lot of poverty and structural poverty in many, many years, a lot of inequality in these countries. We are talking about the lack of institution, the lack of justice in many of these countries. You cannot really go and present a case if something happened to you or try to protect for your life if you go to the authorities. And also, very important lately has been the misunderstanding of many legal processes in the United States that have been passing to Central America in a very twisted way. Bad to the advantage of smugglers and to the advantage of organized crimes that they really found a great business on moving children and women because they usually charge 30 or 40% more than moving another male adult migrant from Central America to the United States. And again, Mexico can play an important role and I would like to argue why? One, because Mexico at least now has corrected a very important contradiction that has in terms of law that when Mexico used to stand to discuss with the United States, hey, you need to protect the rights of Mexican-Mexican United States, they always pointed out that the legal framework in Mexico was worse, not only the US, it was worse than the state of Arizona today. Mexicans were criminalizing more and still today, more abuses of migrants happened in Mexico that happened in the United States. But Mexico changed its law, it's on their new revision of how to really change the view to protect migrants. We don't criminalize more in Mexico migrants that we used to be in the past. Second, migration flows from Mexico are very low today compared with what we saw in the past. So that's not going to be a point of the discussion where Mexico can stand to talk to the United States, okay, we will never have this opportunity again because if the economy of the US recover, migration flows can recover again. I don't think it's going to be at the same level that we saw in the past but it will be very important to recognize that it may happen again and we need to fix the system before the economy of the US really recover. So I will talk to you about this very quickly. You can see how especially the economic recession in the US really hit apprehensions along the U.S. Mexican border, mainly because the Mexicans stopped coming to the US because the opportunities were not there and also because the security has been tightened and tightened over time to cross the US border. It's more difficult to cross today the border we don't need more walls, we don't need more border agents. It became very difficult because of many years of investment in border infrastructure in the United States. But you see that the decline pretty much stopped in 2011, the significant decline from 2006 and again recovered during the last two years. Why did it recover? Because of the Mexican migration? No, pretty much Mexican migration, if you talk about apprehensions here, it's pretty much a stagnant, it has stabilized, it's not experiencing more decline in the past, it would continue probably at these low levels for many years. We don't know how many, again depends on many factors that are coming in the US. But the parallel home last security, classified migrants other than Mexico, it has been experiencing a significant increase in the last two years and in the past, no more than 10% of migrants that were apprehended in the Southwest border were from other countries of Mexico and today's around 36%. And in the Rio Grande area, they are the majority of the migrants that are today apprehended by the US authorities. Here again, they are crossing many, this is, we are moving from total apprehensions to minors here that have been detained without the company of any of the parents. As you can see, the rise has been in only one border point, which is the border, the Texas border with Mexico, the Rio Grande area. While they are crossing there when Tamaritas is today, I'm not really sure that the most dangerous state in terms of violence, because two drug cartels set us and the both cartels are fighting every day, every single day to take control of the state of Tamaritas. Once you go and interview, which was my case, exactly a year ago, that they had the opportunity to go to Guatemala and talk to the ported migrants from the United States in the Guatemala city airport. It's like, whenever they come to Tamaritas, all of them are delivered to the set us or the drug cartels. And those are the ones that put in security housing in Reynosa or Matamoros and cross the border when they have the opportunity to do so. Hadn't successful to cross the border, but today, because of the number of border agents, most of them are really caught right away and they are deported. But the children, because of the change, which I'm not going to talk about that change in law, because we have a panel, we will discuss of that, they go through a different process. And that's why they even don't care if they are stopped or not, quickly or not by the US authority. But the same happened with family unit apprehensions. Most of them, almost all of them were increased between 2013 and 2014, has been in just one place. Region in the Texas border. This is Mexico. You can see Mexico's experience a small increase, but as you can see more from the percentage I showed you before, it has not been as fast as Central American migrants. But you have a small increase also in the detention of Pono Campanima children in the US-Mexico border. But different from children that comes from Central America, they are detained and deported by the way in any of the Mexican border crossings with the United States. As you can see here, this is an accompanying immigrant children apprehensions to, how Mexico disappeared pretty much as the dominant country of this type of migration in the United States, it could be only 22%. You can see the rapid increase of Honduras being very connected of course to the violence in Honduras. And when you see which one is the most vulnerable group of immigrants crossing to Mexico and detaining the United States, are people from Honduras. Why? Because some of the arguments of the migrants themselves use what the Madans and Salvadorans, they look more like Mexicans. They can't cross the border. They can't cross, I'm sorry. The Mexican territory with that. Much of a challenge, of course, they also suffer abuses, but the Honduras migrants which have darker skins are taller, are bigger, they're always wearing baseball hats. They are very easy to identify and they are more subject to abuses in Mexico than in migrants from Guatemala or from El Salvador. And here I'm not going to take that long time. This is what you saw more or less about what is happening in these countries is something that we thought that we would never see again. And of course we are seeing again, a lot of instability, a lot of violence, and especially a growing princess. The same don't make like it happened to Mexico of organized crime, taking care, controlling whole territories in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. So pretty much all the southern part of Mexico and Central America and countries are pretty much taken by organized crime today. And that, okay, this is the information that Néstor already presented about violence in Central America compared with Mexico. And this is part of the process. This is Mexico's other border which is totally different than what you see in the Guadalledo, in Ramosa, in Ciudad Juárez or El Paso, San Diego, Tijuana. There is like 16 formal crossings between Mexico and the U.S. And there are 56 informal border crossings between Mexico and the U.S. Everything can cross their people, trucks, cars, smuggling, everything. And both everybody in the government of Mexico and Guatemala, they know that, but they don't control those points. 56 informal points. So this is how they cross in just a very important Ciudad de Rago, this is the Xochate River, and this is how they cross every day to do groceries shopping, to do shopping, but at the end, mine goes also cross, right? So they can cross, there is no checkpoint where they have to present any passport. This is the river, one side Guatemala, the other side Mexico. The U.S. country, the other side just walk into the city of Ciudad de Rago in the south part of Chiapas. This is how the poorest migrants that can afford, they can afford a yacht. Those are the ones that take the famous train, the beast, or the bestia, because they don't have resources to really afford $10,000 to come to the United States. But those who can afford it, they don't travel on the train. They travel usually in buses or in trucks like this. This truck was by chance stopped by the Chiapas police because probably there was some misunderstanding about the time that the border crossing was going to have this race, especially a brain there, and we were able to cut all these migrants that the police in Tabasula once said, tomatoes travel better than migrants in these trucks with air conditioner. No air conditioner, they were migrants from India, China, all over the world, mainly from El Salvador and Guatemala. That's how they were crossing. Some were Syrians, some were standard women, men, children, all kinds of migrants. This is how human trafficking is pretty much organized. There is no problem crossing the border. Mexico is trying to now do more work stopping here. Yeah, migrants, because it's impossible for Mexico to really try to do something along the Guatemala-Mexico border. What is happening in Mexico has a lot to do with what we've seen with children too. Why? Because violence had grown in the last six, seven years. It has been very, we have some statistics that show you that the violence is declining in Mexico, but still are very high levels of what we've seen in the last 20, 25 years. And this is usually the way migrants come, because it's the shortest way from Guatemala to the U.S. is to go through Veracruz and go to the Marlipas. It is much longer trip to go to some more and try to go to the desert, and that's a more dangerous part to cross to the United States. This is highly organized. All this is controlled in the South by the centers and in the North by the Gulf Cartel and the Settles Cartel. What you see here is how they travel in the beast. Mexico already stopped migrants boarding to take this train. There are major concerns, and I have experienced that when the train is stopped, migrants, they won't stop coming. They will take more dangerous routes. And then they are more exposed. They are more vulnerable and probably they will more likely suffer some abuses And this is the Tamorlipas killing of 72 migrants that happened in San Fernando in 2010. There was a crisis in Mexico that really prompted to review all the legal framework that we have in Mexico to try to protect that. We know that in countries like Mexico and the same in Central America, and that's, I guess, part of my learning, also given to the coalition around, laws don't fix everything. It's how you really implement those laws, but cares the regulation, the details of how to get really into the people and into the regulations what happened. This is Mexico, it's a stopping virus. Many adolescents, it's very hard to stop in Mexico kids because you won't see very clearly where the kids from and you don't bother kids. Most of the minors in Mexico stop at the train and report to Central American countries are between 15 and 17 years of age. So there are very few minors, really children, that are detained by U.S. authority. But even if the new immigration law in Mexico allows for humanitarian causes to stay in Mexico, the immigration authorities don't need the opportunity and 93% of those who are detained are reported to their own country. So it's a very different process than in the U.S. What Mexico is doing is stopping them and pretty much returning all of them without giving them much of a chance to stay, even if they can argue the same reasons that they are arguing now when they cross to the United States. Against a lot of organization and what will happen and this is probably like three minutes now, it's becoming more dangerous to cross the border. If Mexico, and I'm going to probably stop here because I can keep going with these actions about how they are trying to have campaigns now to detain or to stop children coming from Mexico. As you know, the number of children, as some of you would talk about that, has been detained along the U.S. Mexico border from America had been declined in the last few months. But Mexico has two options and this is what I would like to stop. Mexico, who has been always a leader in international forums for the professional human rights, needs to really stand out, say, look, we cannot keep going like this. Building more walls, putting more agents on the field is not going to stop. People coming, because the families are separated, that has been discussed here, because people is looking for better opportunities. And in the case of Central American migrants, because they are really afraid of being back in San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, because they have been really threatened by organized crime. So what Mexico can do is pretty much observe what the law in Mexico says. Finally, learn that we cannot be reacting, Mexican government cannot be reacting to everything that happened, is need to stand more with a clear policy of human rights, to have a conversation with Central American migrants because Mexico can be more committed to help the development of Central America and the United States now, with many, many international struggles, will be paying attention to Central American now. And finally, Mexico has a long history of giving refugee and asylum to population from Latin America and from Spain. We did it with, when the intelligents in Chile and Argentina, we did it with the civil war in Spain in the 1930s. We did it with the Guatemala migrants in the 1980s, and that started to shape Mexican view of human rights too, in a very kind of early democracy in Mexico. Mexico has the instruments to really operate a very good policy of friendship and development towards Central America. And I hope that we adopt at some point this kind of policies instead of trying to repeat what the US is doing wrong for many, many years. Thank you very much.