A small army of mobile diplomats plays a key role.
On a busy Sunday morning in Trenton’s sprawling Latino quarter, Guatemalan diplo- mat Hugo Hun Archila, a veteran foreign service officer, gazes out at a file of countrymen and women lining up for attention from his team. As their waiting time lengthens, the line of Guatemalan im- migrants stretches back towards the side- walk outside the elementary school where he and 12 other delegates from Guatemala’s Philadelphia consulate have set up shop.
In fact, the line of those seeking appoint- ments soon mingles with a festive crowd gathering nearby to loudly celebrate an Ec- uadorian wedding taking place next door at a church. Dancing animal toys and a raucous brass band add joy to the occasion for Mr. Archila and his co-workers, it’s business as usual: catering to paisanos too busy, or too distant, to come see him where he works during the week. So, along with a multinational army of hard-working diplomats from the Caribbean, South and Central America, he spends weekends serving his country’s citizens with a fleet of vehicles that carry his office to them. These “mobile consulates” are partly reminders to far-flung migrants that their govern- ments back home are intent on helping them in their efforts to thrive abroad. And they’re partly to help those governments extract millions in revenues fees each year by selling their Diaspora communities a variety of clerical services—notarizing of- ficial documents, for example, or issuing voting cards—that the paisanos can’t get from local authorities.
On any given weekend you can find mo- bile consulates serving migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and other important “sender” countries whose US residents now number in the tens of millions. Doz- ens of diplomats stage regular jaunts to places far from any major US city. A con- sul based in Los Angeles, for instance, may send a team to Maui each year to attend to pineapple plantation workers. That saves those workers the expense of flying to California for help, which means they can send more of their earnings home to their families. Other consuls practice a hy- per-local strategy: for example, diplomats in the Dominican Republic’s mid-town Manhattan consulate will send “mobile” teams to Harlem or The Bronx, saving their fellow citizens the expense of a sub- way ride downtown.
And, as the world’s labor force grows ever more fluid, Latin American diplomats have begun to carry the practice b beyond the US’ border—to Canada and Europe (especially to Spain and Ireland) and even to spots in East Asia.
Mr. Hun Archila, the Guatemalan consul in Philadelphia, did 10 mobile assign- ments, traveling to suburbs like Trenton, or further into rural zones where Gua- temalans work: the mushroom farms in southeastern Pennsylvania, or nearby dairies—all locations where acute labor shortages of native Americans spawn growing Guatemalan populations.
Sometimes his “consulados moviles” are deployed in the state where he’s been based since Guatemala inaugurated its first Penn- sylvania consulate three years ago. Some- times the work takes him to neighboring New Jersey or Delaware, where paisa- nos work in chicken processing plants or restaurants at seaside resort towns.
“We go where our people are,” says the tall diplomat, who did similar work in Chicago and McAllen, Texas, along the US-Mexico border before his Philadelphia assignment. On this weekend, his is one of ten Guatemalan mobile teams in the field, whose work Mr. Hun Archila tracks via a WhatsApp chat group.
“Apopka and Homestead, Florida; Clovis, New Mexico; Grand Rapids, Michigan;” he chants as he scrolls his WhatsApp screen, sounding much like a train con- ductor calling out stops on a cross-coun- try journey.
Some of these destinations are well- known—like San Diego, Trenton and Charlottesville, Virginia. Others are more obscure: Swansea, South Carolina, Clay City, New York. The diplomat looks per- plexed after spotting “Providence” on his screen, surprised to see Rhode Island’s capital city mentioned, since Guatemala already has a full-time “bricks and mor- tar” consulate there. Then he realizes his confusion: “Oh! That’s Providence, Utah,” being served this weekend out of Denver.
¡¡¡Atención,
paisano!!!
(CALLING ALL
COUNTRYMEN!)
Mobile Consulates are not new, nor are they particularly controversial despite the fact they cater overwhelmingly to an immigrant population that is itself over- whelmingly undocumented. Whether by design or by accident, they open pathways to regularize the American lives of coun- trymen whose arrival tends to be “irregu- lar,” that is, migrants who have not entered the US legally, but who are no less deter- mined to remain.
Essentially, mobile consulates do what all consular offices do: address the needs of citizens abroad. Generally, that amounts to providing documents: passports, iden- tity cards, and such. It also means register- ing the births of children born of parents living and working in the US, as well as certifying credentials for elections being held back home, or for coverage for family members with national health insurance.
For the undocumented, such paperwork provides a foundation that allows them to navigate American life with more certainty.
“Here you need proof of identity for any- thing you want to do: see a doctor, rent a home or apply for a job,” says one young man waiting in line for his appointment to see the consul. “Even to get cable TV you need something official that shows your name.”
You may need a passport, too, to regis- ter your children at an American school, or to board an airplane to visit relatives who may be living in another city. You also need identification cards to get other identification cards, like a driver’s license, which today 19 US states grant to mi- grants who do not have government per- mission to be here, but nonetheless drive themselves and others to jobs American employers want filled.
And that’s one more way mobile consul- ates act as a bridge: by helping migrants not recognized as legal residents in their communities accommodate local laws and regulations.
¡Estamos aquí
para servirles
y ayudarles!
(WE’RE HERE TO
SERVE AND HELP
YOU!)
Take the state of Minnesota, which in 2023 became the latest US state to allow undocumented foreign-born motorists to qualify for state drivers licenses. Support- ers of the Drivers License for All move- ment see this as a plus for highway safety, since access to legal documents from local authorities motivates migrants to attend driver education classes and secure insur- ance for their vehicles. Before such laws were passed, thousands of foreign-born Minnesotans risked arrest (and possible deportation) by driving without licenses, while those injured in vehicle accidents might go without compensation if an of- fending vehicle was uninsured.
This year (2024) Minnesota public safety began assisting mobile consulates in their rural outreach, often traveling to places where Latinos work to take advantage of opportunities to address large gatherings of immigrants. This past March, Minne- sota officials joined a mobile unit sent by El Salvador’s St Paul consulate to the town of Worthington, a meat packing center near the state’s southern border with Iowa.
There, consul Sandra Cruz says, Salvador- ans make up much of the workforce at the big JBS beef processing plant in town.
In June, Minnesota Department of Pub- lic Safety officers joined a Mexican team (Mexico calls its mobile units “Consulates on Wheels”) this time in Mankato, anoth- er meat-packing center. “We don’t issue licenses at these events, we do help people start the process to apply for a license,” ex- plains Mark Karstedt, a Minnesota public information officer. “If people are going to be here, they’re going to be driving. We want them to know the rules of the road.”
Karstedt notes that before Drivers License for All became law his department might issue 5,000 licenses a year to Spanish speakers. Since the law passed, Minnesota has licensed over 100,000 migrant drivers.
#TratoDignoAl
Migrante
(DIGNIFIED
TREATMENT OF THE
MIGRANT)
Such cooperation with local authorities demonstrates a larger point: that while rancor and hostility towards undocu- mented migrants has become more ex- treme in national politics, city and state politicians are seeking ways to make the undocumented here feel more secure in their daily lives. Having a passport issued by a home country does not prove one en- tered the US properly, but it may satisfy a landlord looking for “proof” that the fam- ily renting his or her apartment can satisfy a local regulation that all renters provide identification when they sign a lease.
Over the past two decades, no communi- ty of undocumented Latin Americans has grown faster than Guatemala’s who today number some three million persons from just 900,000 ten years ago. Guatemala now has 25 permanent “brick and mortar” consulates in US cities (By contrast El Salvador has 20 and Honduras has 11; the country with the most US consulates is Mexico, with 52. https://unitedwedream.org/re- sources/list-of-mexican-consulates-in- the-u-s/) Many of the newest “permanent” consulates had been served for years by mobile teams. That enabled governments back home to monitor the growth of pai- sanos’ presence in places like Minneapolis, Omaha, Nashville and Raleigh, NC.
Guatemala’s newest “permanent” consul- ate opened in 2023 at Riverhead, NY, at the eastern tip of Long Island, where some 8,000 Guatemalans are based, most work- ing in landscaping and construction. The next one may be in tiny Georgetown, Del- aware, which has fewer than 8,000 resi- dents of all nationalities—yet claims near- ly half of all households are newly arrived migrants from Guatemala. Georgetown is known for chicken processing, an indus- try that relies heavily on immigrants. Phil- adelphia’s Hugo Hun Archila sent three mobile teams to Georgetown in 2024, serving around 500 clients each visit.
On an overcast August afternoon I visited the Old Path Church of Christ, the sanctu- ary outside Georgetown where the mobile team had assembled a large workspace in- side the church’s social hall. Outside, it was hard to find a parking space or a dry spot where paisanos stood in line to enter the building. Enterprising families were doing a brisk business selling traditional foods like tamales and tamarindo drinks. Inside, the consulate was doing a brisk business in $65 passport renewals to at least two- thirds of those in line.
Three sisters from tiny Ixchiguán, a town in Guatemala’s San Marcos district, were typical of the customers. They each had arrived, separately, over the past three years. At least one was a mother with a child enrolled in Georgetown’s public schools. She explained she paid smugglers nearly $12,000 to bring her to George- town (money she borrowed from relatives already working in the US) and then purchased, on the local black-market, docu- ments identifying her as US-born Puerto Rican citizen to use as “proof” of legal residency. That paperwork, which cost her $1000, enabled her to land a job on the 5-PM to midnight shift in the “killing” room of a Georgetown chicken processor, a position paying around $450 per week.
Nearby a trio of cousins from Chiquimu- la, Guatemala, explained they were mak- ing as much as $1200 per week during the summer, thanks to soaring demand for landscapers to service the many re- tirement communities along Delaware’s seashore. They said that windfall would drop to $450 per week once autumn ar- rived, yet even that was three times what they could earn back home. The $65 pass- port renewal seemed to each man a small tax to pay to help earn salaries that would allow them to build new homes for their wives and children. All three insisted they would return to Guatemala once they had accumulated sufficient savings.
Neither Consul Archila nor his supervisors in Washington or Guatemala City responded to my request for precise sta- tistics on the total number of documents prepared that weekend, but it’s clear the amounts are impressive. Certainly over 200
passports were issued, raising at least $13,000 and perhaps twice that once other services are factored in. It’s likely Georgetown’s three mobile consulate visits generated close to $100,000 in document fees -which would be merely a fraction of the total revenue derived in 2024 from hundreds more Guatemalan teams’ visits. Adding the efforts of other diplomatic corps from Latin America, could well make mobile consulates an enterprise producing tens of millions of dollars annually.
¡Gracias a
todos por
hacer esto
posible! (THANKS
TO EVERYONE WHO
MADE THIS POSSIBLE)
It’s no small irony, of course, that practical- ly every Guatemalan who desires a pass- port once they’ve arrived in the US depart- ed Guatemala without one when leaving home. Mayan speaking peasants from Guatemala’s highlands—historically a majority of all Guatemala’s US-bound mi- grants—find passports difficult to acquire back home. Besides which, the smugglers who take them to the US border don’t re- quire them. Another irony: the US born children of undocumented Guatemalans, who are themselves dual citizens of the two countries, seek Guatemalan papers to outreach of its more prosperous neigh- bors, Guatemala and El Salvador. The initial outlay was for just under $2 million designed to finance the efforts of six new mobile consular teams serving Hondu- rans in eight US cities, including Jackson- ville, Raleigh, Richmond (Virginia) and Philadelphia.
A UNDP spokeswoman in Honduras declined to offer details of the “technical support” involved. But the wording of its press announcement was revealing, beginning with “What Do We Wish to Accomplish?” The answer: “To support in the provision of consular and identi- fication services for Honduran citizens resident in the USA, the UNDP is assist- ing national entities responsible for gen- erating legal documents to fully iden- tify Honduran citizens residing in the United States. In this way, UNDP aims to contribute to the interoperability of data and mechanisms between institu- tions to share and manage citizen data, as part of Honduras’ national security efforts, based on high standards of data protection and security.”
The UNDP added “It is expected that in two months (November and December 2023) more than 50,000 consular services will be provided including the issuance of identification documents and passports, birth certificates and others.”
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