The Daily Agenda: Ecuadorians head to Arizona border
Most Ecuadorian migrants cross here ... The situation is rough in their home country ... Vail incorporation efforts are moving ahead.
One of the great things about writing this newsletter is we don’t have to rewrite what’s already been done well.
As they do every month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection updated their border-crossing statistics on Friday. The Arizona Daily Star’s new border reporter, Emily Bregel, hit the important points and showed how the recent spike in border crossings is affecting Tucson’s migrant shelters, as well as how politicians are reacting.
Today, we’re homing in on one aspect of what’s happening at the border near Tucson: the sharp increase in migrants from Ecuador.
Arizona is now the busiest crossing point for Ecuadorian migrants. Along the entire border, U.S. officials encountered migrants from Ecuador roughly 10,000 times in July. Nearly 70 percent of those encounters were in Arizona, mostly in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, with a much smaller number crossing in the Yuma Sector.
These aren’t just young men looking for work. More than half, about 4,000, were traveling as families.
People don’t usually decide to pack up their families and leave their homes on a whim, so we read up on what’s happening in Ecuador.
We read a ton about Ecuador, but we kept hitting those darn paywalls on news sites. Upgrade to a paid subscription today so we can afford to pay for more subscriptions ourselves.
Here are the broad strokes: The pandemic slammed Ecuador’s economy, leading to high unemployment and a drop in business investment. In the face of government cutbacks last year, massive labor strikes led to food shortages and prompted the U.S. government to issue travel warnings.
Around the time the pandemic hit, the homicide rate was climbing after nearly a decade of relative calm. Cocaine traffickers started to spread their influence like never before and local crime became rampant, the Associated Press reported Aug. 13.
“Ecuador was one of the calmest countries in Latin America until about three years ago. Today, criminals prowl relatively wealthy and working-class neighborhoods alike: professional hitmen, kidnappers, extortionists and thousands of thieves and robbers,” the Associated Press reported. “Mexican and Colombian cartels have settled into coastal cities like Guayaquil and grabbed chunks of the trade shipping hundreds of millions of dollars of cocaine from neighboring Colombia and Peru to countries overseas.”
To make matters worse, a presidential candidate was assassinated earlier this month. Fernando Villavicencio had pledged to go after drug traffickers and corrupt officials before he was killed just days before last Sunday’s election. It was the first assassination of a presidential candidate in Ecuador’s history, the Washington Post reported.
The reasons for the spike in violence in Ecuador are complex and require much more space than we have to offer. If you’re interested in learning more, this interview (translated to English) with two Ecuadorian scholars is enlightening.
In the coming weeks, the political situation in Ecuador could take a dramatic turn. Sunday’s presidential election didn’t result in an outright winner. The runoff election in October will be a contest between Daniel Noboa, the heir to a banana fortune, and Luisa González, a leftist candidate.
Back in Tucson, the migration from Ecuador can be seen not only in CBP statistics, but also at Casa Alitas, the main landing spot in Tucson for people seeking asylum.
More Ecuadorians have arrived lately, and Teresa Cavendish, executive director of Casa Alitas, said she expects to see that trend continue.
Many left home fairly rapidly, often as a result of violence, including violence related to drug trafficking, Cavendish said.
“They found they were no longer able to sustain their lives” in Ecuador, she said.
Ecuadorians who come through Casa Alitas have fewer established family members or sponsors in the United States than people of other nationalities, but that is slowly starting to change, Cavendish said.
All of this is important to keep in mind as people from Ecuador show up at the border near Tucson.
Incorporation makes the ballot: Vail residents may get the chance to decide whether to form their own town government after Pima County supervisors agreed Monday to put the issue on the ballot, Arizona Public Media’s Steve Jess reports. If the effort survives potential court challenges, it will appear on the November 7 ballot for Vail voters.
Powering up Tucson’s workforce: Utah-based American Battery Factory Inc. is bringing upward of 1,000 jobs to its Tucson factory, which the company expects to break ground on in October, the Arizona Daily Star’s David Wichner writes. The factory will initially employ about 300 workers to make lithium-iron phosphate battery cells and has raised significant capital to build its first plant south of the airport.
Budget back-and-forth: Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the board of supervisors during Monday’s meeting that they underfunded his department by nearly $5 million for the fiscal year that just began, KOLD’s Bud Foster reports. Nanos’ comments come after months of budget talks between the sheriff and supervisors. Nanos said the shortfall comes as a result of the county refusing to approve $2.8 million in inflation costs for next year and reducing the budget by $2.1 million because of the department’s 180 vacancies.
We could cover a lot of news with $5 million, but we don’t want to be greedy. We’re just trying to get to $100,000 in our first year. Help us get there by clicking below.
Expanding its reach: The Pima County Attorney’s Office signed an agreement last week with the City of Tucson’s Regional Municipalities Veterans Treatment Court, allowing veterans with misdemeanor charges in county courts to benefit from the highly successful Tucson City Court program, the Green Valley News’ Kim Smith reports. The agreement will allow participants access to the services provided through the long-running city court program, including mental health, substance use, housing and employment assistance.
Welcoming new Wildcats: The University of Arizona welcomed its largest and most diverse incoming class to campus this week, with 9,300 first-year students who represent all 50 states and 45 countries, UA News’ Kyle Mittan writes. Students who self-identified as the first in their family to attend college make up about 30% of the incoming class. Nearly 50% of first-year students self-identified as ethnicities other than white, and enrollment by first-year Native American, Black and Hispanic students all increased from last year.
3.92: The number of inches of rain Tucson has seen this monsoon season, which puts this season’s rain above average for the first time this year.
