Thursday, November 1, 2018

The Caravan -- Seeking Truth About Central American Refugees



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.)



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