THE IMMIGRATION BUCK STOPS HERE - PART ONE

Isn’t it high time the U.S. stopped blaming the migrants for its Central American immigration crisis?  While the reasons behind any individual migrant’s decision to leave his or her home country and seek asylum or just a better life in the U.S. are unique and deeply personal, I think the myriad causes can be loosely grouped into the big three:  drug cartel gang violence, political instability, and climate change.  And not a single migrant is blameable for any of those causes. 

Salvadoran Drug Cartel Insignia

Drug Cartel Gang Violence.  Sure the cartels are out to make a buck, like any other capitalist, but why drugs?  Simple answer:  voracious U.S. demand.  And what fuels that demand?  In my opinion, a search for meaning and an escape from a fundamentally unfulfilling life.  Put a bit simplistically, capitalism is an economic system; it’s not a philosophy or a religion.  It’s about making money, and money cannot buy happiness or provide meaning or purpose in life.  So for an upper middle class American cocaine user, drug use might be an escape from the stress and vacuity of work.  For a working class opioid user, drug use might be an escape from the disappearance of work.  None of these scenarios is of the migrant’s doing.  This is an American cultural failure.  

Political Instability.  The cartels operating in the Northern Triangle of Central America-- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras--are using profits from the U.S. drug trade to buy local law enforcement personnel and politicians in those countries, funding corruption and creating parallel states.  But it’s not just the U.S. dollar that has fueled political instability in the Northern Triangle.  The U.S. government has actively interfered in the political process in each of these three countries from which most of the recent migrants to the U.S. have been fleeing.  In some cases, the interference has gone on for a very long time and has served the interests of U.S., not local, corporations.

In the case of Guatemala, its long civil war can be traced back to a 1954 U.S.-backed coup by the Guatemalan military against a democratically elected president.  The coup resulted in the genocide of an estimated 200,000 indigenous people between 1960 and 1996.  U.S. involvement in right-wing Guatemalan politics continues today.  Per an article in the Guardian from December, 2018:  

Jimmy Morales, a former comedian and the country’s president since 2016, has announced he is going to close down the UN-backed International Committee against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig).  Cicig has investigated corruption cases against Morales, his family and his political patrons, and links between organized crime and politicians like himself.  In September Cicig headquarters were surrounded by US-donated military jeeps, but there was no complaint from the Trump White House.

Violence in El Salvador can also be traced to a U.S.-backed civil conflict.  In the name of fighting communism on its doorstep, the U.S. trained and funded right-wing death squads there, which militarized Salvadoran society and destroyed the economic base of the country and any semblance of a functioning democracy.  Per the same Guardian article quoted above:

Gangs have filled much of the space occupied by civil society in healthier societies, but they too are largely a US import. The MS-13 gang, frequently referred to by Donald Trump in justification of his hardline immigration policies, was formed in Los Angeles, and introduced into El Salvador when its members were deported – often to a country they barely knew: another instance of unintended consequences which have rubbed salt in the Central America’s wounds.

President Obama and President Zelaya

As for Honduras, the Obama Administration shares responsibility with the Trump Administration for upsetting the political balance.  When Honduras’ reformist president, Manuel Zelaya, was seized by the military in 2009, the Obama Administration refused to call it a military coup, arguing that to do so would have meant cutting off aid at the expense of the Honduran poor.  As Hobbesian as that choice was, the fact remains that after the coup, the conflict was militarized; organized crime spread through the country’s institutions; and within a year, Honduras became the most violent country in the world not actually at war.  Again, per the Guardian:

The current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, has further militarized the police force. When he looked in danger of losing his re-election bid [in 2017], he unleashed a wave of violence against the opposition and extinguished the challenge. The Trump administration congratulated him on his victory.

Coffee Rust Devastated Honduran Crops in 2012-13

Climate Change.  This is perhaps the single biggest driver of migration to the U.S. from the Northern Triangle.  Per the Washington Post:

According to the World Bank, climate change could lead to at least 1.4 million people leaving their homes in Mexico and Central America over the next three decades. In 2016, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that at least 1.6 million people in Central America faced constant food insecurity because of climate change. In 2017, a survey of Central American migrant families conducted by the World Food Program found that nearly half had left their country because of a lack of food.

Woman and Her Daughter From the Western Highlands of Guatemala

This is climate migration, pure and simple, and it is causing upheavals not only in the Central American climate migrants’ home countries, but also in Mexico, their transit country, and in the U.S., their destination country.  More on that in a future post.

Honduran and Salvadoran Migrants Detained at Texas Border

A  recent report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on extreme poverty and human rights claims that developing countries bear an estimated 75% of the costs of the climate crisis, despite the fact that the poorest half of the world’s population has caused just 10% of carbon dioxide emissions.  I would hazard a guess that a subsistence farmer in Guatemala who plants coffee or potatoes contributes very little to that 10% of carbon dioxide emissions, and that his or her contribution pales in comparison to the emissions contributions of the U.S.  And although that farmer did not create this climate crisis, he or she has to deal with its consequences with little or no governmental or NGO help.  This often means moving internally within his or her country, seeking arable land, and when that fails, moving to an urban area in search of work, only to fall prey to criminal gangs.  Ultimately, many are forced by economic and political circumstances related to climate change to leave home and make the dangerous--and expensive--trek north.

Guatemalan Potato Farmer

As a three-part report on Central American migration in The New Yorker noted, 

“There are always a lot of reasons why people migrate.  Maybe a family member is sick. Maybe they are trying to make up for losses from the previous year. But in every situation, it has something to do with climate change.” 

Here is the link to the first article in this excellent series: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-climate-change-is-fuelling-the-us-border-crisis

The author describes an expanding area of Central America known as the "dry corridor," which begins in Panama and continues north through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and parts of southern Mexico.  About 10 million people, more than half of them subsistence farmers, live in this area prone to droughts, tropical storms, landslides, and flash floods.  At least 2,000,000 of them have gone hungry in the last ten years because of extreme weather.  

Cemetery for Migrants Who Died in the U.S., in Gratitude for the Remittances They Sent Home

In the case of Guatemala, as a direct result of climate pressures, migration to the U.S. has increased dramatically.  In 2018, 50,000 families were apprehended at the border—double the figures in 2017.  The number of unaccompanied minors has also increased:  22,000 children from Guatemala entered the U.S. last year, more than those from El Salvador and Honduras combined.  Guatemalan farmers who experience wide fluctuations in temperature and unpredictable rainfall, who see half a year’s worth of precipitation in a single week, who can no longer grow potatoes or coffee at the altitudes where they used to plant them, and whose grain and vegetable harvests that once produced enough food to feed a family for close to a year now last less than five months are not going to stay put and watch their families starve.  

Home Used as Trafficking Debt Collateral

These are the people who, if they can borrow enough money to pay a trafficker, are migrating north to the U.S., where they hope to find work so they can send remittances back home to pay off their trafficking debts (a huge problem in and of itself) and keep their families alive.  Fear of drowning in the Rio Grande isn’t going to stop them.  Neither is a wall or a failed (and possibly illegal) immigration policy.  Per The New Yorker:

In recent years, U.S. immigration policy in Central America has largely relied on the idea that, in order to control the flow of immigrants heading north, the government should make it as painful as possible to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s always been about deterrence,” a former official at the Department of Homeland Security [said.]  “Unless you send a message, people will keep coming.” The Trump Administration began separating families at the border, in 2017, with the expectation that tougher enforcement would scare off other families from making the trip. When it didn’t, and the numbers continued to rise, the President attempted to ban asylum altogether and has since forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases languish in American immigration courts….Trump [recently] announced that he was cutting all aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, because the three countries “haven’t done a thing for us.”

Jeans Jettisoned on the Banks of the Rio Grande

While it's debatable whether the Northern Triangle countries "haven't done a thing for" the U.S., it's beyond debate that the U.S. has done a lot of things against the Northern Triangle.  And now these victims of gang violence, corruption, and barren farmlands are coming north.  Unless the U.S. can acknowledge that it is complicit in this tragedy and find the sword to cut the Gordian knot it helped to tie around the throat of the Northern Triangle, migrants from these countries will continue to be driven out of their homes and into the arms of human traffickers, marched through punishing deserts, and lured into the treacherous waters of the Rio Grande because of an unconscionable slow-walk of U.S. immigration and asylum procedures.   It is in the swirling waters of the river that marks the boundary between abject poverty and a better life where some of them, like Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria, below, will die.     

I don’t know about you, but my heart is broken, and I’m--quite frankly--pissed.

Keep it real!

Marilyn