How have both economic and political factors influenced the flow of immigrants both in and out of Belize, especially since President Donald Trump took office in the US one year ago? Locke says they haven't gotten any numbers as yet but they do see a trend.
Diana Locke, Head of Office, IOM Belize
"I can tell you in the region, the numbers have dropped drastically. When I say drastically, I mean we were, we were at about over 150,000 per month. In the time when people were moving. Now you're seeing far less than a thousand persons we recorded as moving. People are now moving south as opposed to moving north. In the Belize context, we don't get a lot of information from the immigration Department in terms of people movement flows through Belize. I do believe that they do continue to do operations. So we would have to get it as we're coming to the end of the year. It's something that we would be reaching out to them to ask them: What was your numbers of persons that you intercepted during the course of the year to, to release that data so that we could have an idea. We certainly have been encouraging them to share that information, because in Central America, our organization collects that data and they publish it for the rest of, the region. So we would want Belize to be included too. But our numbers are very small, but it would still be nice to see Belize however small those numbers reflected in the data."
