UN concerned about 'xenophobia' against migrants in Chile

France24 ^ | September 27, 2021

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Santiago (AFP) - The United Nations expressed concern Monday at "violence and xenophobia" meted out to undocumented migrants in Chile over the weekend by locals fed up with their presence in the country.

Some 3,000 protesters took to the streets of the northern port city of Iquique on Saturday, some burning the belongings of rough-sleeping migrants who had been occupying a public square for months.

The Iquique protesters waved Chilean flags and chanted slogans against the migrants, mainly Venezuelans fleeing dire economic conditions in their country by crossing the Andes mountains and Atacama desert.

Eduardo Stein, the UN Refugee Agency and UN Migration Agency's representative for Venezuelan migrants, expressed his "sadness and dismay" at what he described as acts of "hate, intolerance and xenophobia."

Chile's Interior Minister Rodrigo Delgado also denounced the protest but insisted "we will continue with evictions of all public spaces" as well as "the plan of expulsion" of undocumented migrants.

The demonstration took place a day after police evacuated a migrant camp that had existed for a year on the town square. Most of the migrants, poor and undocumented, are surviving on odd jobs and sleeping in tents.

Chile is Latin America's wealthiest country per capita.

Venezuela, meanwhile, is in an unprecedented economic and political crisis that has led millions of people to leave their country, rich in oil resources but mismanaged and rife with dysfunction.

According to the Jesuit Migrant Service, 23,673 undocumented people entered Chile, a country of 19 million, from January to July -- almost 7,000 more than in the whole of 2020.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Protesters in Iquique waved Chilean flags and chanted slogans against the migrants MARTIN BERNETTI AFP

[Whatever Works]

Here’s a thought....Stay in your own country and FIX IT.

[Red Badger]

Don’t mess with Chileans...................

[caww]

The UN and Biden push invasions of other cultures over borders, who are diametrically different in most every way, and then expects the citizens of those countries to comply......not.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Sure wish Pinochet were still around. He'd roust the bums back to Venezuela in a helicopter.

[DIRTYSECRET]

Leftism has been coming back. Might be better to start a war and overthrow the government of Venezuela. We stay out of it.

[monkeyshine]

It’s not very hospitable of them. LOL. But was this really about “xenophobia” or were the residents of the town just sick of people camping out in the town square?

Immigrants to the USA over the ages (Irish, Italian, Jews, Hispanics) tended to live in self-segregated neighborhoods and often densely populated. Sure some people were and are outright racists but some of it had to be just ‘relative style’. The earlier immigrants rose up economically and moved to more plush environs and it was easy to just say “those dirty people” about the newer arrivals who were forced to - for practical reasons (language, economics) - live differently until they too could move up the socioeconomic ladder.

[Red Badger]

Atlas Shrugged is a User’s Manual..................

[DIRTYSECRET]

There are big areas in South America that are ripe for development and mass immigration. It would be nice to establish a new country there based on real freedoms that can’t be taken away. Make it a spanish-speaking Hong Kong. Investors galore. Run totally by ‘Chicago Boys’.

Who’s gonna give up the land? Gotta be something in it for the existing locals. A south American EU? A place to dump OUR illegals? Just keep out the Chicoms.

[Richard Axtell]

I guess the real problem is that some idiot literally called worldwide for an illegal alien “surge”, during the presidential debates. And the illegal aliens heard his call. Now, they have arrived. Time to expel Joe Biden from the U.S.

[SaxxonWoods]

USA, where we worry most about what’s least important.

[Eagles6]

Good idea!