The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition). David Wilson
The war halted economic progress. Eleven years and some 30,000 deaths later, the United States won its war of attrition when Nicaraguans, tired of fighting, voted the FSLN out of office in February 1990.
For all their struggles and sacrifice, Nicaraguans were cheated out of the chance to fix their country. The new U.S.-backed government quickly imposed IMF-sponsored “structural adjustment” programs that brought a sharp rise in unemployment and triggered a recession, plunging the already impoverished population into desperate misery. Many Nicaraguans fled to neighboring Costa Rica, whose 1984 census counted 45,918 Nicaraguans; by 2000 the country had 226,374 Nicaraguan residents, two-thirds of whom said they had arrived during the 1990s.27
In El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. government backed right-wing regimes as they tried to crush revolutionary leftist movements similar to Nicaragua’s. These wars ended with peace accords—in 1992 in El Salvador and in 1996 in Guatemala—that allowed the leftist forces to regroup as political parties. But 70,000 Salvadorans and 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed, the vast majority of them by the U.S.-backed regimes, which remained in power and began imposing neoliberal economic programs. The wars left deep wounds in the countries’ social and economic fabric. By 2005, El Salvador’s homicide rate of fifty-four murders per 100,000 people was the highest in Latin America;28 nearly half of the country’s rural population lived below the poverty line, and 61 percent had no access to water piped into the home.29
The U.S. Census reported that 44,166 Nicaraguans were living in the United States in 1980, shortly after the overthrow of the Somoza regime; the number jumped to 168,659 over the next decade. The number of Salvadorans living in the United States rose from 94,447 in 1980 to 465,433 in 1990, and the number of Guatemalans went from 63,073 to 225,739 during the same period, when the wars in those countries were at their worst. The numbers rose almost as much again during the 1990s, as neoliberal economic programs were imposed: by 2000 there were 220,335 Nicaraguans, 817,336 Salvadorans, and 480,665 Guatemalans in the United States.30
Haitians suffered a similar fate. In December 1990, Haitians seized an opportunity for change, overwhelmingly electing popular priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Turnout was about 63 percent of eligible voters, according to official figures, with 67.5 percent voting for Aristide, compared to 14.2 percent for his closest competitor. Haitians hoped Aristide would carry out his promises to oppose IMF programs and raise the standard of living in the hemisphere’s poorest country.
But less than a year later, in September 1991, Aristide was overthrown in a military coup. Army officers and right-wing paramilitaries unleashed massive repression against grassroots and leftist activists. According to reports judged credible by Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded the main paramilitary leader, Emmanuel Constant. The military regime and its supporters killed an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people before being forced to give up power in September 1994.31 Their hopes for change crushed, Haitians fled. U.S. Coast Guard data showed a notable drop of migrants fleeing Haiti by boat after the December 1990 elections, followed by a dramatic upturn after the 1991 coup.32
Aristide was returned to office in October 1994 after then-president Bill Clinton ordered a U.S. military intervention—once Aristide had agreed to a U.S.-inspired neoliberal economic program, including a “drastic reduction” of the tariffs that protected Haitian food producers from foreign competition. Many Haitian farmers, especially rice producers, were forced out of business, and Haitians became largely dependent on imported rice. Clinton later apologized for the tariff reduction policy. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did,” he told the U.S. Senate in March 2010.33
Haitian migration to the United States swelled after the 1991 coup, and continued as the 1994 neoliberal program took effect. About 200,000 people born in Haiti lived in the United States in 1990. By 2009, that number had reached nearly half a million.34
Why are children coming here from Central America?
Although the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States fell by nearly one million after 2008, in the middle of 2014 there was a sharp rise in unauthorized border crossing by children. Most came from Mexico and three Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency detained 57,525 unaccompanied children—those traveling without a parent or guardian—at the Mexico-U.S. border from October 2013 through June 2014, more than twice as many as for the same period the year before. The number of children apprehended with a parent or guardian also jumped dramatically: 22,069 accompanied children were detained from October 2013 to June 2014, almost three times the number for the year before. About 16 percent of the unaccompanied children were under the age of thirteen, as were a full 81 percent of the children who were accompanied by a parent or a legal guardian. The upsurge in child migration started tapering off in the second half of 2014.35
Poverty and fear of violence seemed to be the main reasons for this sudden increase in child migrants. In March 2014 the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, reported the results of a survey it had made of underage immigrants from Mexico and the three Central American countries. The researchers found that “no less than 58 percent of the 404 children interviewed were forcibly displaced because they suffered or feared harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.” A survey of 322 underage migrants from El Salvador published by the Immigration Policy Center in June 2014 found that “59 percent of Salvadoran boys and 61 percent of Salvadoran girls list[ed] crime, gang threats, or violence as a reason for their emigration.”
The UNHCR report noted that the increase in migration from the three Central American countries wasn’t just affecting the United States. Asylum requests by people from these countries to Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama jumped by 435 percent from 2009 to 2012.36
Experts on Central American history noted that continuing effects of the wars of the 1980s and the neoliberal policies of the 1990s had contributed to high poverty and crime rates in Central America.37 Political repression added to the new level of violence in the area, especially in Mexico and Honduras, and so did a militarized approach to fighting the trafficking of drugs through the region to the United States. More than 60,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico from 2007 to 2014, but instead of stopping the drug cartels, the fighting in Mexico just seemed to encourage the spread of narco-trafficking into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. government had helped fund this militarized approach since 2007 through a $2.5 billion program, the Mérida Initiative.38
In Honduras another factor was government corruption following a 2009 military coup. Despite evidence of links between security forces and drug gangs, the Honduran military continues to get millions in U.S. aid. As of 2014, Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. A Human Rights Watch report noted “rampant crime and impunity for human rights abuses,” including violent attacks on journalists and peasant organizers.39
How can we address the root causes of immigration?
Many people around the world are trying, often at great personal risk, to build a better future for themselves, their families and their communities, and a more equitable society for everyone. Those of us who live in the United States can join them in these efforts, generally without risking our lives.
During the 1980s, many thousands of people in the United States spoke out against their government’s intervention in Central America. Activists protested and lobbied Congress; many traveled to Central America to provide assistance and bring back information on conditions in the region, seriously undercutting the Reagan administration’s public relations campaign to depict Central American leftists as a threat to the United States. This activism seems to have had an impact on public opinion: a New York Times/CBS poll in April 1986 showed some 62 percent of U.S. respondents opposed financial aid to the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua, while just 25 percent supported it.40
In the early 1990s, labor unions and activists led a campaign against NAFTA, and in late 1999, giant protests erupted in Seattle