Brazil plans to start imposing restrictions on entry for certain foreign nationals from Asia who plan to seek refuge there in order to get to the U.S. and Canada, Brazil’s justice ministry’s office said on Wednesday.
The move will begin on Monday of next week.
An investigation by Federal Police showed that, often, these foreign nationals will use the international airport in Sao Paulo as a layover, where they will then head north, according to official documents provided to The Associated Press.
The move will affect foreign nationals from Asian countries who require visas to remain in Brazil. Over 70% of the requests for refuge come from people with Indian, Nepalese, or Vietnamese nationalities. These travelers, beginning next week, if they don’t have visas, will have to continue their journey by plane or return to their countries of origin.
"Evidence suggests that those migrants, in their majority, are making use of the known — and extremely dangerous — route that goes from Sao Paulo to the western state of Acre, so they can access Peru and go toward Central America and then, finally, reach the U.S. from its southern border," according to one of the documents.
The new rules will not apply to the foreign nationals currently at Sao Paulo’s airport.
Brazil’s federal prosecutors’ office said in a statement earlier Wednesday that Sao Paulo’s international airport "is once again counting a high number of foreigners who arrive on flights of the airline LATAM and do not exit quickly due to the overload on the Brazilian migration system."
"It is important that we quickly decide on these refuge requests so that the growing arrival of foreigners does not impact the operation of the airport itself," federal prosecutor Guilherme Rocha Göpfert said.
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