West-East Caribbean refugees a made-in-the-USA Brand

History, geography, policy, psychology, inhumanity of immigration “crisis” recounted by Princeton University Professor of Sociology Douglas Massey

Despite U.S. leadership’s walling off Mexico talk and loud mouthing about forcing Mexico to pay for the U.S. president’s wall, “The people now arriving at the border are not Mexican workers,” Massey writes, “but a much smaller number of families from Central America seeking to escape dire circumstances caused in part by U.S. military intervention in the region during the 1980s.”

The flow of Central American migrants to the United States before 1980 was small—in the 1970s legal migration from the region totaling “135,000.”  Then between “1980 and 2010” migration north “ballooned.” From El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, places from which the Reagan administration had launched its “Contra War against Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista regime” came an estimated 80% of the immigrants. 

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hey fled civil warfare that had been “unleashed by the U.S. intervention and they kept migrating through the 1990s because the wars had destroyed their economies and introduced endemic gang violence into the region.”

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hey fled gang violence stemming directly “from the U.S. intervention,” Massey writes. “The infamous MS-13 gang first formed in Los Angeles among young Salvadorans who were adrift and jobless without legal status.” Today, the “homicide rate in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is near 70 people per 100,000.”

GDP per capita had fallen from 80 percent at the end of the 1970s to today’s 46 percent. And from the turn of the 1980s the numbers of undocumented migrants rose from “tens of thousands” to “an estimated 1.5 million in 2015.”

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nited States leadership showed neither mercy nor regret for its actions. They welcomed some and barred others. Massey continues.

Nicaraguans were welcomed as refugees, but émigrés from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, politically, could not be admitted as refugees or granted asylum with legal status, because they were fleeing countries with right-wing regimes allied with the United States.

Massey concludes, “If there is a crisis, it is … a human rights crisis. Families and children seeking asylum from horrendous conditions in countries of origin are being unlawfully turned away at the border or being arrested as criminals instead of having their asylum claims adjudicated.”

Sources

“Today’s US-Mexico ‘border crisis’ in 6 charts” June 27, 2018: “Given President Trump’s demand for the construction of a border wall, many people may no doubt be surprised to learn that net undocumented migration to the U.S. has been zero or negative for a decade.”

https://theconversation.com/todays-us-mexico-border-crisis-in-6-charts-98922

“The Conversation” self describes as an “Independent,” “not-for-profit,” “part of a global network of newsrooms first launched in Australia in 2011”; launched in the United States in 2014; and now publishing in Canada, the UK, France, Indonesia, Africa, and Australia. The Conversation-US, its website says, “seeks to be part of the solution” concerning loss of trust in media, media credibility, and matters of truth. https://theconversation.com/us/who-we-are

“Trump’s ‘border crisis’ debunked, in 6 charts: The number of apprehended migrants is at its lowest since 1970.” Douglas Massey Analysis June 27, 2018 https://www.hcn.org/articles/us-mexican-border-trump-us-mexico-border-crisis-debunked-in-6-charts

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB