A recent email response by our U.S. Representative to a letter I wrote him in March about U.S. immigration policy occasioned these thoughts.
Unfortunately, while his letter describes ongoing legislative efforts, the representative addresses neither a recognition of U.S. involvement in, nor a solution to, the causes for the numbers of people coming to our border from the Northern Triangle--exported militarism coupled with increased militarization of the U.S. border.
The representative's letter describes his efforts for immigration reform. Yet no matter how comprehensive, such reform will continue to be an on-going necessity as long as U.S. foreign policy considers immigration an enforcement problem rather than an economic-disparity problem.
Policing the border is not the way to solve the human rights issues faced by people. If you are suffering the politico-socio-economic situations in your native land, you will do anything--even walking 3000 miles in caravan--to find whatever way you can to escape the intolerable conditions you and your children face from propped-up governments to extortion from gangs created in no small way by U.S.-funded interference in their lands.
Some may remember the refugee resettlement policies of the 1980's when it was recognized that the the U.S. had "resettled more than one-half million Indochinese, as well as thousands of other nationalities. at a cost in FY 1981 of approximately $1.2 billion" [Hearings: Foreign Policy Implications of U.S. Refugee Resettlement Policies and Programs, pg (1)]. When the U.S. gets involved in war, there always seems to be fallout in terms both of costs to finance the fallout and of people seeking refuge from the results of those wars. "Historically, the United States has been a haven for the world's refugees," Rep. Clement Zablocki, chairman of the committee, declared at the start of hearings. And the refugees of today result from the U.S. efforts under the Reagan administration to address the infiltration of leftist influences in Latin American--from financing the civil war in El Salvador to the "Guns for Hostages" fiasco that ally illegally financed the "Contras" in Honduras against the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua. Militarism promotes situations from which people flee to the U.S.
A short bit of history described in an article "Central America's Violent Northern Triangle" from the website of The Council on Foreign Relations may be enlightening:
El Salvador: 1980 - 1992 - The CIA played a fundamental role in the development security agencies from which paramilitary groups in El Salvador emerged. During the Salvadoran Civil War, the U.S. gave financial aid of more than 1 million dollars a day to successive military governments. The war caused 75,000 deaths and 8000 disappeared people. At war’s end, a large pool of demobilized and unemployed men with easy access to weapons morphed into organized criminal groups and gangs.
Honduras: 2009 - Honduras did not have a civil war of its own, but nonetheless felt the effects of nearby conflicts; it served as a staging ground for the U.S.-backed Contras, a right-wing rebel group fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s. Soldiers trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas overthrew the democratically-elected government of Manuel Zelaya. While a repressive campaign against the ensuing resistance was unleashed, the U.S. refused to call this overthrow a military coup and undermined efforts to restore democracy.
Guatemala: 1954 - Coup d’etat organized by the CIA against the democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz, which leads to more than 30 year of dictatorship, violence era repression. Guatemala’s civil war (1960–96) killed as many as two hundred thousand civilians. In Guatemala, groups known as illegal clandestine security apparatuses and clandestine security apparatuses grew out of state intelligence and military forces. In addition, as the post-civil-war El Salvador began, a large pool of demobilized and unemployed men with easy access to weapons morphed into organized criminal groups.
Criminal groups in the Northern Triangle include transnational criminal organizations, many of which are associated with Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs); domestic organized-crime groups; transnational gangs, or maras, such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Eighteenth Street Gang (M-18); and pandillas, or street gangs. MS-13 and M-18, the region’s largest gangs, are estimated to have as many as eighty-five thousand members [PDF] in total. Both were formed in Los Angeles: M-18 in the 1960s by Mexican youth, and MS-13 in the 1980s by Salvadorans who had fled the civil war.
Even more elucidating is the two-part review in The Atlantic Monthly of United States of Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America: 1977-1992Though it's a bit lengthy and somewhat dated (published in 1998), Benjamin Schwarz's review summarizes William LeoGrande thesis comprehensively.
And, in a kind of Latin American version of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
offers the view from the perspective of a Latin American historian. In this reversal of the Churchill quote,
As we witness the caravan of thousands heading from the Northern Triangle to our border, we do well to resist the rhetoric of fear and prejudice by recognizing there is more to the story than we hear and red in the mainstream media.
5200 TROOPS SENT TO BORDER and CUTS OF U.S. AID
Witness to the militarization of the border is the president's ordering troops to the border because the caravan--still 1000 miles away and diminishing in numbers by the da--is a threatening "invasion of our country." Added to that is the threat to cut off U.S. aid to those countries which are not doing enough to stem the flow of migrants from their countries to the U.S. Even the most novice of political science students recognize such steps as counter productive, as most commentators are indicating, to halting migration from those countries. Such cuts in aid to the countries of the Northern Triangle, with economies already shaky at best, will only make them less likely to keep their citizens at home. Loss of capital would be all the more burdensome and likely to create more imbalance inspiring their populations to leave to survive.
Desperate people longing for safety and hungry for sustenance will not be influenced by threats of troops; they have already faced the U.S.-trained military in their own countries. And countries already suffering the fallout from failed U.S. foreign policy in their lands will find preventing emigration from their countries even more difficult.
SOAW BORDER ENCUENTRO
As I write this, a Border Encuentro is about to take place at the border in Nogales (Mexico and U.S.) organized by the School of the Americas Watch from November 16 to 18. Perhaps thousands will gather there from all over the country to demonstrate against the U.S. militarization both at the border and in the countries of Latin America, especially the Northern Triangle. A delegation from Connecticut will take part in that event from November 16-18, gathering for presentations on both sides of the border and at conference centers on the U.S. and Mexico sides. Most will take part in protesting the gun supplier Milkor USA, Inc. Reviewing that website tells the story.
Suppliers like Milkor "further militarize Mexico and the northern region of Central America respectively, to purportedly confront the so-called Drug War, and contain mass displacement from the region, but instead have led to more human rights violations. The legal and illegal U.S. gun trade is devastating migrants in Mexico who are fleeing U.S.-supported drug wars in Central American and Mexican communities, who are experiencing more gun homicides this year than ever. SOA Watch has partnered with the 'Stop US Arms to Mexico' project of Global Exchange to build a movement to end the US-Mexico Merida Initiative and weapons trade."
In addition, participants will travel to an immigration detention center for a rally against the U.S. immigration policy of detention. Hundreds of activists will gather in that desert rally at Eloy, AZ, about 50 mile north of Tucson—one of the hundreds of such large immigration detention centers in the country operated by CoreCivic--a for-profit corporation. This facility has a capacity of 1596 people housed there for months at a time with no trial. And this only one of dozens of such facilities spread across the U.S. whose corporate entities are contracted by the federal government to hold refugees claiming political asylum and awaiting, most times for months, their hearings. Some of the tendencies to abuse from for-profit correctional institutions are outlined in an article in Mother Jones.
This background may be helpful in formulating a clearer understanding of some of the issues of immigration reform demanding the attention of lawmakers. To that end, these are the thoughts I'd commend to our representatives in Congress.
