Costa Rica Is the Second Country in the World with More Refuge Requests Pending to Resolve, Says Migration

Costa Rica is the second country in the world with the most pending refuge requests to be resolved, the director of the General Directorate of Migration and Foreigners, Marlen Luna Alfaro, warned on Wednesday.

The migration hierarchy said in the radio program our voice that the institution has pending 215,000 asylum applications, mainly from Nicaraguan citizens, and in less of Venezuelans and Colombians, the three nationalities with which they most demand this type of procedures.

Only in the last month, Migration has received 2,920 new asylum applications, which continues to raise a figure that has swells since 2018 and has been waiting for up to eight years for applicants to know the resolution.

This high demand for new refuge requests, added to the other thousands pending response, worries the country’s immigration authorities, who justify in the lack of personnel and resources that situation.

“We have overwhelmed the fact that Costa Rica at this time reports an exponential growth of refuge applications. We have more than 215,000 pending applications (resolution) due to lack of personnel”, Luna said in the morning program.

The official mentioned that the country experienced a growth in the number of asylum applicants since 2018, a figure that has accentuated over the years at a rate that, with the budget and current migration and foreign staff, cannot face more expedited.

“We are preparing a proposal to the president to get that 4-year prey that began to shoot in 2018 and that we see how every day grows and grows without the ability to diminish it. Costa Rica is the second country in the world with More requests pending to resolve in that area”, said the official.

The institutional budget is another of the migration and foreign pitfalls to expedite these processes. “We are worried about the little budget, it is a challenge, because this is a beautiful institution to work but that represents many challenges to work with little personal, without resources and full of needs and requests of foreign people”, said the also the Vice Minister of the Interior.

Luna stressed that before that panorama, the institution has had to develop skills, since it is the first in the world with the most refuge requests from Citizens of Nicaragua. The hierarchy the lack of personnel in migration illustrated with the 500 people who attend the 15 border posts of the country, 300 of which international airports are mobilized to attend the high arrival of tourists in high season times, such as the approaching, an attention that is “priority” and leads to migration to “neglect regional and care work, to meet these high season needs”.