SAN JOSÉ : A smartphone app designed to assist migrants safely transfer via nations is being examined in Central America and Mexico from this week, forward of a wider roll-out elsewhere on this planet, the UN Migration Company mentioned Friday.
“MigrantApp” affords data in English, Spanish and French on security, well being, lodging and organizations providing help.
Its launch comes at a time when the US is making undocumented immigration far harder, whereas ending packages that had eased the entry and residence of sure migrants.
A lot of the US consideration is directed at Mexicans and Central Individuals who make up the biggest variety of undocumented migrants who’ve entered America.
Central America can also be a significant hall for different migrants from Latin America – notably Venezuelans proper now – and from nations on different continents looking for to get to the US.
The UN Migration Company, additionally referred to as the Worldwide Group for Migration (IOM), careworn that its new app was not a software to assist migrants attempt to circumvent authorities controls on immigration.
As an alternative it supplies “clear and dependable data on their authorized choices” so they’re much less prone to go for riskier, irregular crossings that usually expose them to exploitation and fraud, mentioned Roeland de Wilde, nation chief of IOM in Costa Rica.
His workplace developed the app with funding from the US State Division.
The trail via Central America and Mexico “is the largest migration hall on this planet,” he famous, including it made sense to offer migrants with data on a cellular platform given that almost all of them relied on telephones all through their journeys.
Knowledge from migrants utilizing the app will likely be stored confidential. Initially out there solely on Android telephones, it will likely be launched for Apple’s iOS gadgets later.
The pilot app is being launched two weeks after the IOM’s deputy director common, Laura Thompson, instructed a convention in Costa Rica that migration flows within the Americas had been overwhelmingly from south to north – with 94 % of migrants aiming for the US and Canada.