Who Counts as a Refugee in US Immigration Policy—and Who Doesn’t
Who Counts as a Refugee in US Immigration Policy—and Who Doesn’t
Asylum claims filed by Central Americans are on the rise, but our fickle immigration system leaves many families stuck between violence in their home countries and an aggressive enforcement regime across the border.
Spencer Amdur and Pablo Lastra August 11, 2014
Giovani is seventeen, from El Salvador, and came to the United States alone in December, making him one of tens of thousands of Central American minors who have crossed the Rio Grande unaccompanied this year. He is lanky and tall, with a hard stare but a fast smile. After a brief detention in Texas, he took his first plane ride to a cold city in the Midwest. When the plane landed, he broke from the pack of children on the runway to touch the fresh snow on the ground, the first he had ever seen.
Giovani’s journey started in 1998, when his mother, Maria, left El Salvador to escape her boyfriend, a violent man who regularly hit her and stopped her from working. Maria is a tired-looking woman in her early forties. A TK, she has spent hours on her feet in low-paying jobs.
After TKTK, Maria took Giovani, then 18 months, and his sister to their grandmother’s, mortgaged her home, and used the money to get to the United States. She describes the fifteen-hour walk through the desert as difficult but bearable, especially compared to where she ended up: Kansas City in the middle of winter. There was snow everywhere.
Maria’s trip came at the tail end of a wave of Central American migration to the United States, when civil wars had engulfed the region. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as right-wing governments battled leftist rebels in Guatemala and El Salvador, and a leftist government battled right-wing rebels in Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands were displaced. As many as one million Central Americans fled to the United States. Then, as now, some demonized the newcomers as invaders, while others urged that they be treated as refugees.
During the 1980s, asylum lawyers faced the challenge of convincing immigration judges that violence was actually taking place in Central America. The Reagan administration, fighting the last decade of the Cold War, was doing its best to keep the brutality of US-allied governments out of the news. The State Department, which weighed in on most asylum cases, would deny widely reported massacres. In El Mozote, El Salvador, where government death squads raped and slaughtered as many as 900 people, the State Department reported that nothing had happened. During the height of the genocide in Guatemala, President Reagan told reporters that the dictatorship had gotten a “bum rap” on human rights.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/180929/who-counts-refugee-us-immigration-policy-and-who-doesnt#