The U.S. in Crisis Strikes Out against Latin Americans

Panama City — Thousands of poor immigrants who came to the United States in search of dreams and opportunities are now living in fear and the nightmare of being detained and deported after having actively participated in the country’s economic life.

This has been confirmed by DPA analysts and consultants in Panama during the United Nations forum on the links between poverty and hunger and the immigration of Central Americans, who end up being “criminalized” due to their origin, the DPA reports.

Professor and writer Emma Sepúlveda, former senatorial candidate and current director of the Latino Research Center at the University of Nevada, says that “the United States is in the midst of a huge crisis,”* with immigration restrictions inherited from the administration of former president George W. Bush.

Sepúlveda, a member of the group of 23 Latin Americans chosen by current president Barack Obama to create a national Latin American museum in Washington, says that the chief of the White House is the “hostage” of an agenda that he does not support.

“Latin Americans in the United States are living in major poverty, like the poverty found in the Third World,” said the activist defender of immigrants.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, out of the 11,200 people living illegally in the United States, 9,100 come from Latin America. In the eastern United States, Cubans and Puerto Ricans are most numerous; in the western United States, Mexicans and Central Americans dominate immigrant populations.

Sepúlveda added that, for the first time, the children of Latin American immigrants make up the largest population of those living under the poverty line, and the danger and exclusion in which they live exceeds that of white and African-American children. Humanitarian organizations in the United States estimate that the number of deported immigrants is practically one million, even though 70 percent of them have no police casework. Nevertheless, official spokespersons refer to some 400,000 deported immigrants as being in accordance with immigration law.

Sepúlveda believes that this is due in part to the changing dialogue about immigration since the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. Since then, the word “immigrant” became associated with the idea of terrorism, which provoked collective fear.

She emphasized that in the past two years the salary of Latin Americans performing manual labor has dropped sharply, with longer hours and less income, and with the additional stress of being deported due to pressure from the extreme right wing of the U.S.

Sepúlveda specified that a slaughterhouse worker earns nine dollars an hour, 50 percent less than years ago. She added that the discrimination even extends to private prisons, which have benefited from lucrative contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For her part, Araceli Azuara Ferreiro, coordinator of the Immigration and Development program of the Organization of the American States (OAS) maintains that the causes of the immigration flow from Central American to the United States are varied, but they have been aggravated.

She warns that there is now a “very complex” situation, due to the economic recession which limits access to work and raises sentiments of xenophobia, which are incorporated into the Arizona law and the Alabama immigration law of September 29.

In accordance with the Alabama law, an illegal immigrant’s attempt to acquire a driver’s license or buy a house could turn into a “crime,” and the education rights of undocumented children may be taken away.

Azuara Ferreiro describes this exclusion as “an atrocious thing that perpetuates poverty,”* and raises the concern of the general secretary of the OAS, José Miguel Insulza, who is alarmed because Latin Americans are living in fear in the United States.

*Editor’s Note: These quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified.