Flouting The Law? Part 2: Immigration 101

The Vetting Process

Most U.S. citizens didn’t suspect immigration would be such a volatile topic at the beginning of the U.S. government’s Trump administration. Yet increases in global tariffs, combined with Narco politics and the ensuing economic destabilization of a few Central American countries, have caused one of the largest transmigrations in years. With many left wondering why this has happened, explanations to the national legalities and history of immigration policy and our duty to immigrants can be referenced in article one of this two-part series featured in Culturs’ Fall 2019 print edition.

In this second article, we will examine changing immigration policies and backlog, Narco politics, and the cartel.

Two Sisters

This is the story of two sisters we’ll call Elizabeth and Laura.

Originally from El Salvador, Elizabeth was abandoned by her husband shortly after they had children. Elizabeth’s sister, Laura, also found herself in a similar situation. To better support each other, the two decided to cohabitate in the same house. One day Elizabeth’s niece fell ill. Laura, a teacher, couldn’t take her daughter to the doctor that day, so Elizabeth filled in. While waiting at the doctor’s office for their appointment, a local gang member threw a grenade in from the street and blew up the office, killing the niece and seriously maiming Elizabeth.

The doctor had failed to pay extortion money to the local gang in time and this was the consequence. Elizabeth applied for asylum to the U.S. shortly after that, and Laura stayed behind. After Elizabeth settled in the U.S., she received word her sister had been shot down in the streets.

Laura had become a vocal activist and started a campaign to prevent school children from being recruited by these same gangs. Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, who was still living with her aunt Laura while finishing school, witnessed the murder. She left for the U.S. the very next day. Elizabeth now lives in Boulder, Colo., U.S.A., with her children. She works at a local deli, ineligible to access the social system for additional assistance or medical aid, as her asylum case processes.

Immigration lawyer Ian McKinley relayed this story of one of his clients to demonstrate the dire situation some refugees face.

“There is a complete breakdown in the rule of law. When they tried to report it to the police, there was never any arrest made, there was no justice done,” McKinley says. “Gang members just murdered with impunity, the police don’t care.” He punctuates this statement by saying the tactics used by the Trump administration to deter refugees from obtaining asylum is a “despicable and cynical move meant to scare families into not coming to the U.S.”

Faced with situations like Elizabeth’s, McKinley suggests many U.S. citizens would make the same decisions as the refugees: Make the trek; even if it is “illegal.” The risk of leaving their country to enter into the U.S. still offers a better prospect of life than what is currently at home.

Refugees Get To Stay

On April 8, 2019, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg blocked the Trump administration’s recent change to U.S. immigration policy. This new policy required asylum seekers to wait out their case hearing times in Mexico as their cases processed through the U.S. immigration court system. Under the old protocol, immigrants were paroled into the U.S. as per the United States Immigration Law, to await their hearings. Under this new policy, several hundred refugees have been sent back to Mexico after already claiming asylum on U.S. soil.

Seeborg’s injunction temporarily disabled the current administration’s policy, a deterrent aimed at Central Americans entering the U.S., adding to the list of recent tactics the government has employed to turn back refugees at the border. The U.S. border saw a jump of more than 103,000 migrants into the U.S. in March 2019. This is the highest one-month total in 12 years according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse center (TRAC), which compiles immigration court data.

Following this, the Trump administration sought to institute charging asylees fees for refuge, requiring asylum seekers to pay to enter the country along with filing their “credible fear” claims after escaping violence, lawlessness and abject poverty in their own countries.

“Genuine asylum seekers, by definition, leave in the most urgent of circumstances. As a group, they tend to be very short on resources,” says David A. Martin, former Homeland Security deputy general counsel. “If you’re going to leave the possibility of refuge for people who legally qualify truly open, you wouldn’t impose a barrier of a fee.”

Not only do these deterrents seek to block new asylum requests by imposing fees, it also restricts their ability to qualify for work permits or social assistance programs if refugees attempt to enter illegally, or while waiting for their claims to be heard. It seems the administration hopes this will stop immigrants from filing “fraudulent asylum claims,” and “gaming the system.”

According to Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), in Washington D.C., “further deterrents must be initiated such as detaining families, making the initial asylum screening stricter and fast-tracking court cases to be more effective.” If separating family and children isn’t enough, more significant sanctions will be imposed, she suggests.

Immigration Admission

The U.S. is the country that has historically refuged more immigrants than all other countries combined. Yet most recently, for the first time in 30 years, according to PEW Research Center, in 1999, the U.S. had taken the least amount of immigrants of any country. The Trump administration had less than quartered the allowed number of immigrants in the U.S. since the 2017 target of 110,000 immigrants, admitting 45,000 people fewer than the average allowed throughout the last decade and resettling only 21,292 refugees in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

In a FOX News interview with Maria Bartiromo and U.S. President Donald Trump, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief seemed to show increasing frustration with immigration, stating that immigration courts might not be “necessary.” Critics say this shows a lack of understanding between the difference between the judicial branch and the justice department.

“We don’t need a court system,” President Trump told Bartiromo. “We have a court system that has 900,000 cases behind it. In other words, they have a court that needs to hear 900,000 cases. How ridiculous is this? What we need is new laws that don’t allow this, so when somebody comes in we say, ‘Sorry, you got to go out.’”

Critics warn these words and actions demonstrate the president’s lack of understanding of the fundamental rule of law that protects and governs U.S. immigration policy, as well as, a complete disregard for its necessity.

President Trump’s suggested protocol also demonstrates an indifference toward the international humanitarian standard code of ethics that the U.S. signed decades preceding this administration. This Illustrates a conflict toward U.S. ethical and democratic standards, which many would say is foundational to the country.

Backlogged

“Almost a decade ago, asylum cases started to pile up again, and the government failed to invest enough in the immigration courts to keep up,” says Martin. “Now the court backlog exceeds 850,000 cases, including asylum, with approximately 400 judges to handle them.”

With only 58 immigration courts available to handle all of the backlogged “pending” cases nationwide, it would take 5.1 years to work through these cases at the current pace, not including new cases. This leaves experts to claim the backlog number may more realistically be over one million cases pending, according to a Terrirism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC) analysis.

Further, the Trump administration’s request to build a wall for $5.7 billion, which was denied by Congress, lead to a 35-day government shutdown on Dec. 22 to Jan. 25, 2018. It’s estimated during this time over 42, 000 immigration court hearings were canceled.

At the time of this writing since the Trump administration has taken office, the backlog has grown an additional 200,000 cases, averaging immigration case hearing to 736 days, slightly over two years. As a result, Attorney General William P. Barr and the EOIR (Executive Office for Immigration Review), have decided to hire more immigration judges recently than it has in the last seven years combined.

“We now employ the largest number of immigration judges in history,” Barr says. “That is having an impact on immigration cases.” For asylees who wait in overcrowded detention centers, on or across the border, the adjudications can not come soon enough.

Multinationals

Watching Central Americans leave their countries in droves, to make a two-thousand-mile trek north, leaves many wondering, what could have caused this?

Citizens are fleeing crumbling economic infrastructure, due in part to historical U.S. political interests and economic interventions. They are also moving away because of the effects of multinational corporations, which bring in foreign business but lower livable wages and work standards. Add to this a drug cartel that is pushing further south, and countries are left with a recipe for disaster, according to David Brown, Ph.D., University of Colorado- Boulder, divisional dean of social sciences and professor of political science.

Multinational corporations provide consistent jobs for unskilled labor, while simultaneously bringing down wages and choke holding economic expansion. By extracting the most profit for their companies worldwide, they also help simultaneously creating cyclical debt and financial instability.

Overseas-based factories are given “extraterritoriality” rights, which exempts these operations from having to follow local or international laws, human rights, or labor standards, which creates a further degradation of civilization.

The poverty is further exacerbated by a corrupt government, military and police, and growing domestic, sexual and gang violence in these countries caused by the drug cartel. Honduras also has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and one of the lowest livable wages, making even the most basic costs of living, unsustainable.

“I think it’s fair to say, a number of countries in Latin America were in a period of a lot of turmoil,” Brown says.

The problems in Latin America stem back to the 1940s through the 1990s states Brown. Latin America (consisting of 33 countries from Mexico to Chile) has gone through many periods of turbulence, as it’s navigated its way through many authoritarian regimes and budding democracies. The U.S. government was tied, both economically and politically, to all of these.

“A lot of it had to do with the fear of not having complete control over the hemisphere,” Brown says.

The economic benefit of cheap labor, cheap agriculture, and ties with these countries’ elite spurred tensions. This, coupled with concerns of spreading socialist tendencies through a growing “Red Tide” push beyond Cuba. This gave several U.S. presidents the excuse of being able to put resources in the hands of people willing to crush any insurgency seen as a threat to the U.S. political agenda of “business as usual.” The U.S.’ long history of intervention made things much worse in these countries.

“A lot of the lack of development of institutions and many of the economic conditions that exist today have resulted from that political climate and the U.S.’ involvement,” Brown says. “The U.S. was involved in each of those countries in very different ways.”

Multinational corporations in the ’40s to the ’80s were seen by Latin Americans as working handin-glove with the U.S. government, controlling the country’s resources and the political arena. Brown cites an example from a book called “Bitter Fruit.” It shows how the American United Fruit Company, which owned a business monopoly in the region, tried to protect their land rights, in spite of growing demand by citizens for financial equity in their own country. This would later become interpreted as a communist threat by the U.S. The ensuing U.S./ Latin American interventions helped create the Guatemalan Coup of the 1950s. As a result of this conflict, 200,000 people died.

“Basically, authoritarian governments were there to help protect the profits of multinational corporations,” Brown says, quoting the book’s theory. Although things are still bad in these countries, Brown believes that these corporations have improved over the last 50 years.

“[It’s] not to the degree where the corporations are in league with the most powerful people in the country, to subjugate their populations systematically, quite like they were in the ’60s and ’70s,” Brown says. “The corporations needed cheap labor.”

The best way to keep labor cheap was not to allow unions to flourish, and the way to not allow unions to thrive is to “crack people’s heads,” Brown says.

“So, there’s a lot of evidence that what was going on. The Multinationals in the ’60s and ’70s (eventually) were sent packing, but what you find now is that a lot of countries actively engaged in trying to get multinational companies to invest.”

Multinationals, Corruption And Drugs… Oh My

Currently, “Maquiladoras” (mak-E-la-doras) are the latest multinational. Typically textile factories, these companies provide the “better-paying jobs” in Latin America. Still, critics state these jobs ultimately bring down wages and the economy. Worker rights are again being disregarded, and labor standards are trampled, in spite of anti-corruption laws. “There is still a lot of exploitation that goes on. But it’s not an extension of the U.S.’ national interest or the national interests of a group of countries, trying to subjugate the developing south,” Brown says.

Brown goes on to state how many necessary things have not been done, to provide public goods, helping governments become more transparent. These things that ultimately help stave off a crisis so that people don’t feel they have to leave their country to survive.

Critics of multinationals argue that governments receive kickbacks directly for these contracts, and these funds never get re-integrated into an economic benefit for their people. These corporations find ways to skirt anti-corruption laws, exploiting government incentives, for themselves, and the individuals who help them.

According to Brown, when extremely corrupt administrations, are coupled with the transshipment of drugs and increased gang activity by the Mexican cartels, it degrades the social construct. Brown lands part of the blame in U.S. hands for allowing these countries to flounder from the U.S.’ vested interest, interventions and neglect.

This then raises the question as to whether the U.S. does own these countries a debt of responsibility? Or could this dilemma then move into the territory of “moral hazard” in that the U.S.’ support and interventions could ultimately be used against us?

During his studies, Brown created a historical study that looked at what happened when the U.S. tried to “correct” volatile foreign political situation on its own, by placing sanctions and interventions on authoritarian regimes.

What he found was that in most cases, it only prolonged the shelf life of those dictators to stay in office, making things worse for their own people. These forceful attempts gave the leaders the ability to say, “Hey look, we’re being attacked by the U.S., and we’re here to protect you from them.” Brown found ultimately, Latin American countries do better when they collectively say “NO” to coups of their neighboring countries and fight oppressive regimes amongst themselves.

This was made evident through the collective efforts of the “Cartagena Declaration,” which created a multilateral agreement amongst mostly Central American countries. This agreement set out to take in asylum-seekers and fleeing refugees from political persecution and oppressive regimes, as was seen in the exodus of Colombians in the early ’80s into Venezuela.

Another way some countries have been able to stave off economic instability, mass exodus and debilitating corruption in countries like Brazil or Chile, Brown states, is size, diversified economies, and distance from the U.S.

Smaller countries are more dependent on their proximity to the U.S. and the business of international investors. Poverty makes them more willing to forego standard contracts prerequisites, making them more easily manipulated in negotiations with multinationals. Whereas larger countries with more substantial economic clout do not have to jump at the first offer given. They are then able to negotiate better deals, to help build supportive infrastructures, to move their populations to work.

“In some respects, it’s creating the whole debt cycle all over again,” Brown says. “These are not self-sustaining. They are not creating a flourishing economy around them. As a result, the countries are not developing the rest of the economy as much as it could, and therefore are not able to pay back the big loans. I think it’s paying the price now.”

In the end, Brown likens Latin America to a neighborhood that, while once a beautiful place to live, hasn’t received the necessary care and support by its inhabitants and has slowly turned to pot.

“It’s never too late to start caring about the neighborhood, but a lot of these things you’ve just let fester for far too long.”

Drugs And The Cartel

According to Peter Smith, Ph.D., Political Science Professor at the University of Colorado -Boulder, Author of “Democracy in Latin America,” “Talons of the Eagle: Latin America and The United States,” and former Staff Director of a U.S./Mexico commission with Robert S. McNamara (ref. Vietnam & Bay of Pigs), the U.S.’ interest in Latin American politics was best illustrated in two different historical periods. One during the Cold War and the second post Cold War. During the cold war, U.S. overt interventions in Latin American politics sought to displace or overthrow leftist or center-leftist governments, even if they were not in any serious way, a threat to U.S. sovereignty.

Smith claims the Cold War “madness” showed itself in U.S. policy, especially in the number of interventions placed in Latin America. This was widespread during the cold war because of what was misperceived as a threat.

“They claimed there were communist threats, where really there were not,” Smith says. “To say that Fidel’s government in and of itself, by itself, was a threat to the U.S., and its sovereignty is nonsense,” although Cuba sought to meddle in the politics of other countries, especially Venezuela. Venezuela provided a stark contrast and bitter medicine to Cuba at the time. Venezuela was an internationally respected democracy, had a strong economy and was Pro-U.S. If it had been a democracy and left-wing, it would have been an easier pill for Cuba to swallow.

After the Cold War era, the whole rationale for the anticommunist policy disappeared, according to Smith. Raising the question of what should the new U.S. policy towards Latin America be?

During the Clinton and Bush administrations, policy fell silent. Obama, on the other hand, made diplomatic and sympathetic gestures to governments that had strenuous relations with the U.S. in the past, especially in Colombia, Chile, Brazil and even Mexico. The U.S. also managed to reach a “Cuban Thaw” agreement for the first time in 50 years. Obama reasonably dealt with these changing realities, then Donald Trump was elected, and everything changed.

“I mean, he uses the worst kind of denunciation to characterize Mexico. Which of course, says in some ways the United States is the most important country in the region,” Smith says. “[Mexico] had just elected a social justice President who is willing to try to work with the United States. It couldn’t be better for the U.S. if the U.S. were only reasonable, which of course we’re not.”

According to Smith, Trump is not a scholar of international relations. Trump is answering to his base, continuing anti-Cuba, and anti-immigrant sentiment from his mostly conservative political stronghold states like Florida and Texas.

“So yes, there is a policy towards Mexico that is incredibly stupid. There is a negative policy toward Cuba that is relatively harmless at the moment and there is a zero policy for the rest of Latin America from Venezuela to Chile,” Smith said. “Now Venezuela is beginning to come on the agenda, and whether there is something to be done about Maduro. I don’t like Nicolas Maduro, I like U.S. interventions less.”

Smith suggested that the increasing political upheaval coming from Venezuela could fix itself if the region would come together to solve their own problems through diplomatic relations, which Brazil, Chile and Peru have already begun with Venezuela.

Yet according to Smith, the most significant threat facing Central Americans today isn’t political relations or upheaval, its drug trafficking.

“There are gangs that make deals with the government. But they are gangs from below and outside [their host country], and they’re wreaking havoc and threatening citizens with all kinds of mayhem,” Smith says.

Citizens are heavily pressured to join the cartel or face execution. The Honduran government isn’t equipped to deal with this situation that is close to being out of control. When asked about the multinationals’ role in Central America, Smith says these companies are choosing to pick safer locales to do business. “They themselves are prime targets for any self-respecting gang. Indirectly, yes, they perpetuate the social injustice, economic unfairness and lack of opportunity that most young citizens have,” Smith says. “The economic strategies they follow contribute to the frustration and poverty that assails the isthmus, particularly countries south of Mexico, North of Panama and North of Costa Rica.”

Yet the growing problem of drug trafficking, mass violence, and chaos it spawns in Central and South America can be attributed to the north and not the south, according to Smith. Drug traffickers in the southern hemisphere only supply the problem; they don’t create it. This growing need for an everincreasing narcotic supply has jumped in the last few decades.

“Drug Trafficking a few decades ago was a relatively modest and joint operation,” Smith says. “As the market continued to grow, Mexico became a less ‘safe haven’ for drug traffickers. The traffickers tend to stay more in Central America, where they are safe.”

As a result, the main reason for the immigrant caravan and tensions in Central America is a problem of consumption, not of supply. Smith states, if the U.S. really wanted to fix the issue directly, it must address the origin of the drug problem, addiction in the U.S. and the rules that make it illegal to consume.

“You could either legalize it, or you could become so effective with public health programs, that you cut down consumption by a substantial margin,” Smith says. “The latter course seems more sympathetic. In this indirect sense, the United States is a major participant in the drug trafficking chain. If you made it legal for all drugs, the problem in Central America would just go away.”

Considering the domino effect this could have in the region, Smith says countries could easily topple and become victims of drug violence and gang mayhem. El Salvador and Honduras are especially prone to falling because of their weak government policies, and it’s close proximity to the U.S., which enables traffickers to ship drugs.

Away from gangs and the drug cartel, Elizabeth lives in Colorado with her children in peace. All she wants is to live a happy, safe life in the U.S.