For Donald Trump and many of his supporters, the issue of illegal immigration is black and white. With just over 11 million unauthorized people living in the United States, Trump’s plan is to deport them all and build a wall to keep them out. It’s simple, they’re unauthorized so they have to go. For Trump they’re illegal immigrants, but a closer look hints otherwise.
In 2014 tens of thousands of Central American women and children fled their homes and made the horrendous journey north through Mexico to the United States. Two years later we are seeing a similar surge in migration from the south that has the potential to mirror the numbers from 2014. However this complex issue is all too often oversimplified.
An undocumented immigrant is “a foreign person who is living in a country without having official permission to live there, while a refugee is “someone who has been forced to leave a country because of war or for religious or political reasons.” Refugees have the ability to apply for asylum, an often lengthy and uncertain process, if they can prove that if they return to their home country they will face serious harm. In any case, the threat of deportation is imminent and real.
The short answer for why so many people are fleeing Central America, particularly the Northern Triangle region that includes El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, is violence. These countries consistently rank as some of the most violent countries in the world. In 2014 the homicide rate in Honduras stood at 66 per 100,000 people, 31 per 100,000 in Guatemala and between 60 and 70 per 100,000 in El Salvador. A 2013 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime put the global homicide average at 6.2 per 100,000 people.
With these numbers in mind, the tens of thousands of people fleeing these countries would appear to fall under the definition of refugees, not illegal immigrants.
Gangs and gang violence have plagued the Northern Triangle for decades, and with little action from the United States to meaningfully enact change, the violence has persisted. In particular, children are targeted and recruited by these gangs, which leads to large waves of unaccompanied migration north. Instead of addressing the issue, the U.S. has shifted the weight to their neighbors in Mexico.
The Mérida Initiative was originally a three-year agreement between the United States and Mexico to combat violence and organized crime, and establish secure borders, but the program continues to this day with the U.S. Congress having appropriated more than $2 billion since 2008, according to the U.S. Department of State.
With this agreement, the U.S. would help Mexico thwart the flow of Central American migrants entering through the southern state of Chiapas that borders Guatemala. The ultimate goal being to stop the migration at the source, preventing people from ever making it to the U.S. border.
By law, Mexico offers protection to refugees and other people who would face extreme risks to their safety if they returned to their country of origin. However a March 2016 report from Human Rights Watch concluded that “less than 1 percent of children who are apprehended by Mexican immigration authorities are recognized as refugees or receive other formal protection in Mexico.” On paper Mexico has protections in place for those fleeing, but rarely are they enforced.
According to the report, through the end of 2014 and much of 2015, “U.S. apprehensions of unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle fell during this period while Mexican apprehensions rose, suggesting that the United States had effectively persuaded Mexico to take a greater role in immigration enforcement along its border with Guatemala.”
Despite the joint crackdown from U.S. and Mexican officials, people continue to flee.
A report last month from Fusion’s Tim Rogers outlined a new surge of migrants fleeing from El Salvador, but this time whole families were making the journey. Though the numbers haven’t reached what they were in 2014, according to Rogers, “the number of Salvadoran family units apprehended on the southern border has increased by a whopping 96 percent over the past year… There are now more Salvadorans in U.S. immigration deportation proceedings than any other nationality.”
While El Salvador recorded more than 700 murders in January of this year, less than 400 have been recorded for April, May, June and July, respectively. What appears to be good news is hinting at something more violent, possibly a civil war.
According to Roger’s analysis of local news headlines, “The attorney general’s office last week announced that state security forces recently foiled a dangerous terrorist plot by the MS-13 (Salvatrucha) that could have escalated the country’s gang war into something more akin to a guerrilla insurrection.”
It is irresponsible and inhumane for Donald Trump and his supporters to look at the complex issue of immigration as black and white. By now it’s widely evident that those fleeing the Northern Triangle region of Central America are doing so because they fear for their lives, not to drain the U.S. of all its resources.
In 2012 President Barack Obama and the White House released 10 ways that immigrants help to build and strengthen the U.S. economy. Immigrants start businesses, they develop cutting-edge technologies and companies and the businesses they start create jobs for American workers.
Comprehensive immigration reform would create more jobs and increase the United States’ gross domestic product. More important than that, though, it would keep those fearing for their lives and well-being in Central America’s Northern Triangle from returning to their potential death.
Trump’s black and white view on immigrants and immigration reform is archaic, it’s outdated and it cannot work within a progressive society. If he truly values the work of all the immigrants he employs in the United States like he said in Mexico City this week, he’ll start to see the true possibilities of comprehensive immigration reform.
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Parker Asmann is an Editorial Board Member for the Chicago-based publication El BeiSMan as well as a regular contributor to The Yucatan Times located in Merida, Mexico. He graduated from DePaul University in 2015 with degrees in journalism and Spanish, as well as a minor in Latin American Studies.
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