Members of the migrant caravan seeking to enter the United States admit that they do not qualify for asylum–the alleged reason for their coming. In interviews with The New York Times and the Guardian, migrants have revealed that their real reason is to improve their economic circumstances.

Read more at breitbart.com

After more than a month on the road, traveling by foot, bus, car, truck, and every other means of conveyance, the  5000-odd mostly Honduran caravan has reached  its destination. Eight hundred migrants arrived at dawn yesterday, joining more than 750 already in place, and the remainder are expected today.

Residents of the city in which they encamped came out in the hundreds to protest their arrival. Singing their own national anthem and shouting anti-immigrant slogans, the protesters threw stones at the migrants. One woman shouted, “We don’t want you. Would you want us to go to your house and make a huge mess?” On Wednesday night, a fight broke out between the migrants and locals, angry at their arrival.

No, the migrants have yet not made it to America. This “welcome” occurred in  the Mexican city of Tijuana, and it helps explain the eagerness exhibited by most Mexican authorities to hurry the caravan along and out of their jurisdiction. Now, of course, slammed up against the border, the seemingly irresistible force has (perhaps) met its immovable object. With more than 700,000 asylum cases already pending, the U.S. system could not accommodate the migrants, even if it wanted to. And President Trump has called the caravan an invasion and has beefed up the Border Patrol contingent on the U.S. side to prevent their entry.

Invasion too strong a word? Check out this video of the caravan breaking into Mexico last month, waving the Honduran flag and tearing down the fence between the two countries.

South of Tijuana, other migrants were strung out over hundreds of miles. Several hundred were stranded at a gas station in Navojoa, about 750 miles from Tijuana. Others were straggling in and more than 5,000 were expected to be in the city by today. Estimates vary, but as many as 7,000 more migrants were elsewhere in Mexico, making their way to Tijuana and the border. The city says it can accommodate only a fraction of them and the U.S. has a months-long waiting list for asylum seekers, but they keep coming.

While  the largest portion of the now more than 12,000 Central American migrants in Mexico are still much further south., the news media is filled this morning with announcements that many of the caravan have already arrived in Tijuana.  Fox News is reporting that “nine buses trucked 357 travelers” on Tuesday.  U.S. News and World Report  is reporting that migrants arrived “by the hundreds” through Wednesday. They quote one Honduran as saying that he “intended to wait for thousands more in the caravan to arrive and that he hoped to jump the fence in a large group at the same time, overwhelming Border Patrol agents.” An Associated Press story states that some of the early arrivals immediately climbed the steel border fence after arriving, chanting ” Yes, we could!” One even dropped to the U.S. side briefly before being chased back by the Border Patrol.

Meanwhile, to the south, the remainder of the caravan was strung out over more than a thousand miles back to Guadalajara, with members of other caravans even further back.  One large group of 2,000 had arrived in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa, 786 miles from Tijuana. They were being aided by the Roman Catholic church, which had acquired 24 buses to transport them northward.

Democrats and cheap labor Republicans may push an amnesty for illegal aliens in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. One possible strategy may be to offer President Trump funding for a border wall in exchange for signing an amnesty bill for 3.5 million illegal aliens in the DACA category. Immigration reform advocates say this would be a bad deal because a wall alone would do little to stop illegal immigration, while amnesty would be a strong encouragement for more foreigners to come to this country illegally.

Outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) may lead this effort. The billionaire Koch brothers are spending millions of dollars to support a DACA amnesty during the lame-duck session.

Read more at thenationalsentinel,com and breitbart.com

Some hundreds of migrants have already reached Tijuana, but the bulk remain far to the south. After spending Monday night in Guadalajara, about 5000 migrants in the caravan left that Pacific coast city on buses provided by the Jalisco state government.  However, instead of transporting them all the way to the next Mexican state, Nayarit, as promised, the buses dropped them off 55 miles short of that destination. We’ll place their current location somewhere along the Pacific coast road, about 1300 miles from the U.S. border.

Gallup’s most recent global estimate found that “Three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S. This includes 16 percent of adults from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica, which translates into nearly 5 million people.”

Read more at news.gallup.com

It’s becoming more difficult to fix the location of the (original) caravan. An article in the Wall Street Journal explains why: “Largest of Migrant Caravans Splits Into Smaller Groups.” In a process that had begun even before the group landed in Mexico City several days ago, the caravan had started to split as migrants, many of whom were footsore and otherwise weary of road walking, began to catch rides in cars, trucks, and buses, often many of them climbing on board any vehicle whose driver was willing or could be convinced.  While many of the disparate subgroups that resulted were able to regroup and coalesce in Mexico City, now that they are back on the road, the overall group has split again. WSJ states:

One smaller group of nearly a hundred migrants arrived in Tijuana on buses on Sunday. Two groups of about 800 people in total are advancing across the Pacific states of Sinaloa and Nayarit, while some 1,000 migrants arrived in Guadalajara, in western Jalisco state some 1,400 miles south of Tijuana. A larger group of some 3,500 people is also heading to Guadalajara.

The article also updates the location of some of the other migrant caravans now in Mexico. One group of 1,500  is in the city of Puebla, 95 miles south of Mexico City, and another with about  1,000 people is in Veracruz. If, as some suggest, all the different caravans and scattered individual migrants meet in Tijuana in the next two weeks, they will severely test the resources of that city well before they approach a port of entry in the U.S.  As many as 8,000 people may be attempting to apply at once for refugee status in the United States, a chance that many U.S. authorities consider very unlikely.

Although pinpointing the exact location of the entire caravan is impossible, the majority are at or close by Guadalajara, which is about 1400 miles from the U.S. border at San Diego.

President Trump issued a temporary order requiring asylum applicants to apply for asylum at U.S. ports of entry. Under the order they will not be able to apply after illegally crossing the border outside the ports. The purpose of the order is to asylum requests in an orderly fashion and discourage bogus applications. One likely outcome will be slowing the migrant caravan in Mexico now moving toward the U.S. border.

Read more at reuters.com

The majority of the original caravan spent the night in the city of Irapuato, in a camp set up around a family center and small sports complex.  They had earlier made the 62-mile trip to Irapuato from Queretaro, which reported that 6,531 migrants had passed through between Friday and Saturday. This number suggests the caravan had grown while waiting in Mexico City, possibly by add-ons from other caravans to the south.

An isolated report from one Mexican journalist states that a small (85-member) contingent of “people of the LGBTQ+ community” has already arrived in Tijuana. Allegedly fearful of discrimination from others in the caravan, they had split off from the main group and found transportation to the border well ahead of the majority.  According to the report, the migrants were being housed in a local Airbnb paid for by U.S. lawyers traveling with them. The report indicates that their new neighbors there were not happy to see them, yelling at them, “Go away go to a shelter, this is not your place. . . .This is a safe area and we are afraid of you.”