Cristián Doña-Reveco | Beyond the Responsibility to Protect: The US and Central American Immigration
photo: University of Nebraska-Omaha
Cristián Doña-Reveco is the Director of the Office of Latino and Latin American Studies (OLLAS) and Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is also faculty affiliate with UNO's Goldstein Center for Human Rights. Originally from Chile, he earned a Bachelor's and professional degree in Sociology from Universidad de Chile, an MA in Political Sciences with a concentration in International Relations from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an MA in Sociology and a PhD in Sociology and History both from Michigan State University (2012). Before coming to UNO in 2015, Dr. Doña-Reveco spent two years in Santiago, Chile doing field research on North-South Migration and teaching at Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad Alberto Hurtado. He has also worked as a consultant for the International Organization for Migration and for the Population Division of United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Beyond the Responsibility to Protect: The US and Central American Immigration
November 2020
As I write this in mid-November 2020, Hurricane Iota is making landfall in Central America, not 20 miles away from where Hurricane Eta hit about a week ago, and I can’t help but think of all the possible social and economic impacts it will have in the region and how it will increase the current pressure on emigration. Climate-induced emigration is nothing new: there are several instances when the effects of weather pattern changes have produced massive population movements. As an example, the 1930s Dust Bowl produced one of the largest migrations within the United States. More recently, the effects of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 led the US to designate Nicaraguan immigrants as eligible for Temporary Protective Status. Climate-related crises and other natural disasters are just two of the macro conditions that are making people leave their homes in Central America to emigrate to the US. Political instability, violence, and structural economic crises are other conditions that influence migration decisions (O’Connor, Jeanne Batalova, and Jessica Bolter 2019).
For many years, migration scholars thought of migration decisions mostly as a dichotomous issue: it was either voluntarily, most likely connected to labor opportunities, or was forced due to military or political conflict. In this context, Mexican migration during the Bracero era was always considered voluntary, while Central Americans in the 1980s was forced migration due to regional civil wars that led to asylum or refugee requests. As with many concepts and ideas within the social sciences, the end of the Cold War complicated this dichotomy. Migration scholars began acknowledging that there were other issues that influenced emigration decisions, such as crime, access to health and education, and environmental degradation. All of these can be summarized under the concept of “human security”.
This concept attempts to extend the meaning of ‘security’ as more than the simple protection that a government (through its armies or police) can provide for a specific population. Maintaining human security requires nation-states to protect people within its borders from threats, including hunger, disease, repression, but also other issues such as violent crime that ruin the possibility of leading a good life. Thus, human insecurity would consist of the lack of access to basic needs for survival as well as the psychological and social components associated with community life. Regardless of the specific reason, objective or subjective feelings of insecurity that are not possible to resolve within a country would push some people to emigrate abroad, as a way to ensure their survival, as well as that of their family (Betts 2013).
In a globally interconnected world, what would the other countries’ responsibilities entail? Betts (2013) argues that the international community is meant to offer free passage and sanctuary. However, this is not the only responsibility. We recognize that global problems, such as environmental degradation, are not equally distributed in terms of its origins or effects. While higher income nations are responsible for the largest proportion of induced climate change, poorer countries suffer the largest negative effects from it. Thus, countries’ responsibilities not only include aiding these emigrants’ survival but also to prevent the crises that might force them to emigrate in the first place, for which they are also responsible.
Within the Americas, there is no better example of such issues than in Central America’s Dry Corridor, particularly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s Population Division (ECLAC-CELADE 2018), these three countries are among the poorest in the region: their GDPs are just one-third of the average GDP throughout Latin America. At the same time, in each of these countries about one-third of the population works in agriculture, a sector highly vulnerable to economic, political, and climate crises. Current climate crisis in the region has resulted in over 3.5 million people needing humanitarian assistance. Close to half of the rural population in El Salvador, three-quarters in Guatemala, and two-fifths in Honduras were living in poverty in 2018. Overall, poverty rates are not that far from those in rural areas, as the map below shows. Concurrently, these countries also have the highest homicide rates in Central America, including 87% of all femicides in the region, and have been going through several social and political crises since the end of the civil war in the early 1990s (ECLAC-CELADE 2018).
These two factors—the environmental climate crisis coupled with violence and insecurity—largely explain emigration from this region to the United States. As of 2017, 3.5 million people born in Central American countries were residing in the US. Close to 86% of the overall group had been born in El Salvador (46%), Guatemala (32%), or Honduras (22%). Half of the recent migrants from the three countries were 24 years old or younger and 25% were under 20 years old. Many of them are rural migrants who depend on agriculture to make a living. It is an occupation that is constantly being threatened: in 2015, close to 1.6 million people from these countries were affected by food insecurity.
The United States is one of the countries responsible for the negative effects climate change is producing in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other nations. The US has been directly or indirectly involved in the political and economic life of these countries for more than 100 years, including invasions, coups, and supporting bloody military regimes (Menjivar 2009). Thus, its responsibility toward this particular group of emigrants is not only due to an ethereal support of protecting human rights. It is also responsible to having created some of the conditions that influence these emigration flows. Thus, it should welcome and protect these emigrants instead of creating policies such as “Prevention Through Deterrence” (1994) or more recently the “Remain in Mexico” (2018) policies and the expulsion of non-Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala via the US-Guatemala Asylum Cooperative Agreement (2019). These policies have significantly increased the dangers of immigrating into the US—as the Hostile Terrain 94 project and the exhibition at Amplify Arts has shown—but have also significantly increased the dangers migrants experience during transit to the United States: Central American migrants are 8 times more likely of being kidnapped in Mexican than Mexicans (ECLAC-CELADE 2018).
A few years ago, I read Warsan Shire’ poem “Home” for the first time.[1] For me, it presents the best description of the decision to emigrate in a context of crisis. In the poem, Shire, a child of refugees, writes:
“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark…
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay…
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere is safer than here.”
Survival migrants are leaving their countries and families not because they want, but because it is the only way to have a chance for a safe life. They send their children to family members in the United States, not because they want to see them suffer during their trip but, as Shire writes in the same poem:
“you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land…”
[1] The entire version of the poem is available on the websites Facing History and Ourselves and Poetry And/As Translation. A version read by Warsan Shire herself is available on YouTube at “Home” by Warsan Shire.
ABOUT HOSTILE TERRAIN 94 NEBRASKA
In November of 2020, Amplify Arts is joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Hostile Terrain 94 organizing committee and the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS) at the University of Nebraska-Omaha to co-host Hostile Terrain 94 Nebraska, an exhibit about the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border and how it connects with Nebraska stories and communities, at Amplify’s Generator Space.
Directed by UCLA anthropologist Jason De León, Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education- media collective. The exhibition is composed of ~3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.
During a series of Witnessing and Remembrance Workshops, volunteers inscribed the names of those who lost their lives on toe-tags that collectively bear witness to the humanitarian crisis at our border. This process infuses each hand-written tag with an embodied physical connection that moves beyond data on a sheet of paper or dots on a map to memorialize migrants who have died. In the exhibition space, these tags are geolocated on a quilted wall "map" of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found, in a gesture of solidarity and solace.
Hostile Terrain 94 Nebraska’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts provide additional information and access related programming.
HOSTILE TERRAIN 94 NEBRASKA INSTALLATION IMAGES
AMPLIFY ARTS GENERATOR SPACE; 1804 VINTON ST OMAHA
Video produced by Hostile Terrain 94 Nebraska