Immigration: Washington’s Closed

Through its Speaker John Boehner, the United States House of Representatives delivered a blow to Barack Obama yesterday by warning him there will not be any immigration reform for the rest of this year. It is understood that the refusal includes the leader’s request to Congress to approve additional funds in order to repatriate the thousands of Central American minors who have been detained for entering U.S. territory without documents.

In order to put the phenomenon into context, it is worth remembering that since last October, our neighboring country’s authorities have arrested over 52,000 children, who attempted to cross the border on their own. For its part, the Mexican National Institute of Migration affirms having rescued over 10,000 who were passing through national territory. Such figures may represent only the tip of the iceberg in a much larger flow, whose current increase lacked an accurate explanation, until now.

It has been said that the growing number of those underage migrants originated from a misunderstanding of U.S. government regulations in Central America; it has also been confirmed that organized crime groups spread the false rumor that Washington would grant entry to children whose parents reside in the United States. Even further, Republican factions in the Capitol have accused the White House of having instigated the wave as a way of pressuring Congress to approve a legal framework oriented toward the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants and toward legalizing new ingresses of foreigners to the country.

Independently of the circumstantial causes that favored the increase in the migration of minors, the structural roots of migratory flow from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras toward the U.S. are misery, violence and a general lack of prospects for life, work and safety, which affect a good part of the population of these fellow countries. In the gestation of those conditions, Washington has an enormous historical responsibility for its policies of intervention, boosting oligarchic dictatorships, armed conflicts and economic depredation.

Following the signing of the peace agreements in El Salvador and Guatemala, the respective American embassies imposed ironclad, neoliberal policies on docile rulers that caused the same social and institutional disasters they have caused in other nations, plus another—criminal violence, which is explained not only by poverty, inequality and the traditional causes that are unresolved and aggravated by war, but also by the proliferation of weapons and unemployment, without more workforce preparation than military training. The finishing touch was the counterproductive war on drugs, another directive imposed by the United States on various Latin American nations, and the indiscriminate approval of free trade agreements, which inaugurated the unrestricted movement of capital and merchandise, but vetoed that of people.

In short, the so-called human crisis of migration springs from social hells designed in Washington. With this fact in mind, the least that could be asked of the U.S. executive and legislative branches is that they receive the disaster refugees. However, following his reelection the year before last, Obama let the opportunity pass by to consistently push for immigration reform, such that the Capitol has definitively closed the door, at least for this year.

From what can be seen, under such circumstances, the White House will not be able to send the detained minors back to their countries of origin, nor will it have any other option than to toughen its border surveillance and intensify police persecution of immigrants, both adults and minors. As a consequence, an unknown number of minors will remain trapped in the warehouses set up as jails in the south of U.S. territory, and dangers will multiply for those exposed when attempting to cross the border between our country and the northern power. The times demand that the Mexican government act with a humanitarian and fraternal understanding. It is expected to do so.