Debunking Myths About Why Central American Children Are Migrating

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Debunking 8 Myths About Why Central American Children Are Migrating

‘Lax enforcement’ is not the culprit—U.S. trade and immigration policies are.
BY David Bacon ~ July 8, 2014

The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm over the past few weeks. The mainstream media has run dozens of stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north. The president himself has lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents. “Do not send your children to the borders,” he said in a June 27 interview with George Stephanopoulos. “If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.”

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In truth, the United States’ meddling foreign policy and a history of the U.S.’s own harsh immigration measures are responsible for much of the pressure causing this flow of people from Central America. These eight facts, ignored by the mainstream press and the president, document that culpability and point out the need for change:

1. There is no “lax enforcement” on the U.S./Mexico border. There are over 20,000 Border Patrol Agents; that number was as low as 9,800 in 2001. We have walls and a system of large, centralized detention centers that didn't exist just 15 years ago. Now more than 350,000 people spend some time in an immigrant detention center every year. The U.S. spends more on immigration enforcement than all other enforcement activities of the federal government combined, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The growing numbers of people in detention—young people as well as families and adults— is being used as a pretext by the anti-immigrant lobby in Washington, including the Tea Party and the Border Patrol itself, for demanding increases in the budget for enforcement. The Obama administration has given way before this pressure.

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3. The recent increase in the numbers of child migrants is not just a response to gang violence, although this is the most-cited cause in U.S. media coverage. Migration is as much or more a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico, as well as the failure of those economies to produce jobs. People are leaving because they can't survive where they are ...

Much more here: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16919/8_reasons_u.s._trade_and_immigration_policies_have_caused_migration_from_ce

[Starry Messenger]

1. More:

"5. When governments or people have resisted NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has threatened reprisal. Right-wing Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) put forward a measure to cut off the flow of remittances (money sent back to Salvadoran families from family members working in the U.S.) if the leftwing party, the FMLN, won the 2004 presidential election. His bill did not pass, but the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador admitted that it had intervened. In 2009, the Honduran army overthrew President Manuel Zelaya after he raised the minimum wage, gave subsidies to small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. The Obama administration gave a de facto approval to the coup regime that followed. If social and political change had taken place in Honduras, we would see far fewer Hondurans trying to come to the U.S.

6. Gang violence in Central America has a U.S. origin. Over the past two decades, young people from Central America have arrived in L.A. and big U.S. cities, where many were recruited into gangs, a story eloquently told by photographer Donna DeCesare in the recent book Unsettled/Desasociego: Children in the World of Gangs. The Maratrucha Salvadoreña gang, which today's newspaper stories hold responsible for the violence driving people from El Salvador, was organized in Los Angeles, not in Central America. U.S. law enforcement and immigration authorities responded to the rise of gang activity here with a huge program of deportations. The U.S. has been deporting approximately 400,000 people per year since 2009.

7. Moreover, U.S. foreign policy in Central America has actively led to the growth of gang violence there. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, U.S. law enforcement assistance pressured local law enforcement to adopt a mano dura, or hardline, approach to gang members, leading to the incarceration of many young people deported from the U.S. almost as soon as they arrived. Prisons became schools for gang recruitment. Even in El Salvador—where the leftwing FMLN government at least has a commitment to a policy of jobs and economic development to take young people off the street and to provide an alternative to migration—conservative police and military forces continue to support heavy enforcement. In Guatemala and Honduras, the U.S. is supporting very rightwing governments that only use a harsh enforcement approach. Hypocritically, while punishing deportees and condemning migration, these two governments actually use the migration of people to the U.S. as a source of remittances to keep their economies afloat.

8. Kids looking for families here are looking for those who were already displaced by war and economic crisis. The separation of families is a cause of much of the current migration of young people. Young people fleeing the violence are reacting to the consequences of policies for which the U.S. government is largely responsible, in the only way open to them."

The violence we have caused to our neighbors just sickens me. When people act like this circumstance on the border is a surprise, it amazes me. Our policies created this crisis. You can't just keep beating someone and then ask what is wrong with *them*.

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2. There was a sidebar title to the story

that blamed some of this violence squarely on trade policies like NAFTA. The drug violence is a piece, but not nearly the whole story.