“Many Gang Members
and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading
to our Southern Border.
Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States
unless you go through
the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our
Military is waiting for
you!”
--Donald Trump
A so-called “caravan” set off from
a bus terminal in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula in the early
hours of October 13, 2018. The people in the caravan were hoping to
find work and a better life in Mexico or in the United States away
from the crime, corruption and poverty of their homeland, a place
notorious for its high murder rate.
The Honduran
caravan crossed into Guatemala and then then into Mexico, traveling
slowly north and attracting more people as it progressed. On October
22, as the caravan regrouped on the Mexican side of the
Mexico-Guatemala border, the United Nations estimated its size at
7,322 migrants. Since then, numbers have dwindled. The government of
Mexico issued a statement on Wednesday, October 24 estimating that
3,630 people were continuing to travel north.
The caravan from the Northern Triangle
of Central America is a godsend for President Trump. It provides him
with what he believes is evidence to stoke fears about illegal
immigration. The powerful images of the caravan validate conservative
base fears of “invasion” by “lawless foreigners.” Trump has
even alleged that “unknown Middle Easterners” may be in that
group. Trump himself has been using such imagery since he started his
presidential campaign in 2015, and he has talked repeatedly about
Mexico “sending” rapists and murderers over the U.S.-Mexico
border.
Who Is in the Caravan?
In truth, this group is not filled with
“bad people.” That is unless you consider desperate human beings
seeking safe refuge as lawless individuals. These people chose to
face the dangers of leaving their country over facing gang death
threats. Migrant advocate Miroslava Cerpas, from the Center for Human
Rights Research and Promotion in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital,
says many are driven by deep faith and religion and hopefully
“believe there will be a miracle, that some Moses will appear” to
guide them.
Annie Correal, a reporter from The
New York Times, met up with the convoy in Huixtla, Mexico, and
found that it is actually made up of people of all ages, including
the elderly and mothers with infants. The migrants are mostly
Hondurans (with some Guatemalans), half of whom are girls and women.
Andrew Buncombe of the Independent
characterized the group as consisting of “families pushing toddlers
in strollers. A group of skinny young men who say there are no jobs
in their country. A young woman from Guatemala being helped by medics
by the roadside, her ankle twisted and swollen after six days of
walking.”
One woman told the AP’s Sonia Perez
D. that “she’d been in hiding after a local gang threatened to
kill her because they’d mistaken a tattoo of her parents’ names
for a symbol of a rival gang.” Another, traveling with her husband
and two sons, told the Los Angeles Times’s Kate Linthicum
that after her 16-year-old son refused to sell drugs for a gang,
“they were going to kill him or kill us.”
Other refugees have cited their reasons for leaving Central America
as extreme poverty and the inability to support their families on $5
a day. A few are trying to get back to America after having been
deported, to return to their families (including US-born, US-citizen
kids) and the lives they had built.
Those in exile are putting themselves
at the mercy of the drug cartels, human traffickers and corrupt
officials en route. They are traveling en masse because they
understand there is safety in numbers. The group is making no attempt
to conceal their presence on the road. This hypervisibility helps
keep them from abuse and abduction. And, together, the trip is also
cheaper, said the Rev. Mauro Verzeletti, a Catholic priest who
directs Casa del Migrante, a shelter in Guatemala City. By traveling
in groups, he said, the migrants can shake off the “structure of
coyotes, of drug traffickers or organized crime” that has
controlled the trail for years, charging thousands of dollars.
To date, the caravan has been met with
an outpouring of support – food, clothing, shelter, medical care –
from governments and ordinary citizens along the way.
The current migration raises questions
about the distinction between economic and humanitarian migration,
the U.S.’s ability to process asylum seekers, and the role Mexico
plays in the region. Mexico has begun slowly admitting caravan
members to ask for asylum: as of October 24, the Mexican government
said it had processed 1,743 applications. “Undocumented migration
is not a criminal act in Mexico,” Interior Minister Alfonso
Navarrete Prida said. “This is a vulnerable population.”
Dara Lind of Vox reports …
“Asylum applications in Mexico
have gone up more than 1,000 percent since 2013, and most are from
citizens of Northern Triangle countries. Mexico has been accused of
indiscriminate long-term detention of asylum seekers (exacerbated by
a two-year backlog in processing applications), and some parts of
Mexico aren’t safe for people who are already fleeing violence.
“The U.S. has enlisted Mexico
to apprehend Central American migrants before they get to the US.
Some 950,000 Central Americans have been deported from Mexico over
the past several years, and human rights groups have reported torture
and disappearance by Mexican security forces.”
What does the U.S.
law say about immigration in such matters? There is a firm
distinction between “asylum seekers” (who are fleeing persecution
because of their identity, usually from their governments) and
“economic migrants” who are looking for a job. These immigrants
from the Northern Triangle don't fit neatly in one of those boxes.
Most fit in both categories.
Foremost, the people in the caravan are
seeking asylum from persecution – safety from gang violence and
fleeing desperate poverty. With Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) stepping up deportations of unauthorized immigrants since its
inception in 2003, especially of Mexican and Central American men,
many migrants who have been deported have every incentive to try
again.
Dara Ling
explains: “US law treats these groups of people very differently –
deportees who reenter illegally, for example, are permanently barred
from ever getting legal status in the US, while people who can claim
a 'credible fear' of persecution are allowed to stay and seek asylum.
But as far as the journey is concerned, that doesn’t matter.
They’re all facing the same dangers, so they’re all traveling
together.”
According to USA Today, the
number of family units – usually mothers or fathers with small
children – apprehended in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's
Rio Grande Valley sector jumped from 49,896 in fiscal year 2017 to
63,278 in fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30. That's a 27 percent
increase, according to recently released agency statistics.
Compassion Or Rejection?
It should be
noted that much of the killing and corruption in Honduras is linked
to a hugely lucrative trade in smuggling cocaine and other drugs into
the U.S. Also, the U.S. government has a history of standing on the
wrong side in conflicts in the region while consistently supporting
dictators over democratically elected officials. Too frequently,
America has intervened in favor of U.S. business interests to the
detriment of Central American civil society. Most Americans are
unaware of the failed foreign and economic policies that resulted in
much of the fear that Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans face
daily. The mistakes of the past are a sad reality.
So ...
Instead of
viewing the migrant caravan through biased and politically motivated
assessments, I believe we should apply a nondiscriminatory, up-close
and personal view. Then, we better understand the serious problem of
human rights in the Americas. Simply put, the people left their homes
because they had to. When we inspect the group with impartiality, we
discover these individuals are motivated by credible fear, and they
possess a sincere sense of desperation. It behooves us to better
understand the present situation.
Are there felons
embedded in the caravan, those who are attempting to use the group
for criminal gain? I can only say that I assume any attempt of mass
entry for asylum includes some “bad” people. However, I also
trust that our immigration officials have the ways and means to
prevent bad elements from residing in the country. I also believe it
is possible both to allow necessary asylum to refugees and to deny
entry to offenders. After all, droves of people seek freedom in
America every day. We deal with them as part of our promise to offer
refuge to the tempest-tost.
President Trump believes there is
something sinister about desperately poor families looking for a
better life. His xenophobic policies are based on fear and false
alarms. In response to the caravan, he is sending 15,000 troops to
the Mexican border – more troops than are presently in Afghanistan,
America's longest conflict.
Trump now claims he is a Nationalist,
and he vows to end birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th
Amendment. He has even threatened to do this with an executive order.
He and his supporters portray immigrants and refugees as a plague on
society. It is an old narrative without factual support. America
under this president is descending into isolation with a clear motive
of serving the biased, white population.
Imagine gathering your loved ones and
walking over 1,200 miles to a place you believe offers safety.
Imagine facing serious threats and dangers every step of the way.
Then, imagine the leader of the free world denigrating you and
stirring up hatred for your desperate efforts while promising to turn
you around.
Would it surprise you to know …
* For more than a century,
innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths
about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are
less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the
native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower
rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both
legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of
origin or level of education.
(Walter Ewing, Ph.D., Daniel E.
Martínez, Ph.D. and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Ph.D. “The Criminalization
of Immigration in the United States. 2015.)
* Immigration is actually
associated with a decline in terrorist acts. "When migrants move
from one country to another they take new skills, knowledge and
perspectives," the Vincenzo Bove, lead researcher writes. "If
we subscribe to the belief that economic development is linked to a
decrease in extremism then we should expect an increase in migration
to have a positive effect."
(Vincenzo Bove, Ph.D. “Does
Immigration Induce Terrorism?” Journal of Politics. University of
Warwick. 2016.)
The Center for Immigration Studies –
a think tank that opposes immigration – found that
immigration has virtually no effect on wages. Other research even
shows that new arrivals lead to an uptick in the earnings of the
domestic workforce. Hardworking immigrants boost productivity, which
brings paycheck payoffs to everybody.
(George J. Borjas, Ph.D.
“Immigration and the American Worker.” Professor of Economics and
Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. April 9, 2013.)
* A recent study by Citi Global
Perspectives and Solutions concluded that migrants are directly
responsible for two thirds of U.S. economic growth since 2011.
(Ian Goldin, Andrew Pitt, Benjamin
Nabarro, and Kathleen Boyle. “Migration and the Economy.” Citi
Research. 2018.)
No comments:
Post a Comment