DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/AP PHOTO
A smuggler ferries migrants across the Rio Grande.
This article appears in the June 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
“We saw a lot of human desperation and hardship,” Maureen Meyer, vice president for programs of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organization, told me over the phone. Meyer had arrived back in the United States after a trip to Honduras just days before. She described encountering 1,300 migrants at a camp who were awaiting proper documentation from the Honduran government, namely an “exit visa” that would allow them to legally leave the country and continue their journey northward.
To even reach Honduras, a migrant must first cross the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous migration routes on the planet. It’s a roadless 60-mile-long jungle that connects South America to Central America—Colombia to Panama. Migrants can either pay syndicate networks that offer a loosely guided passage through the dangerous, bandit-infested jungle, or they can pay to be smuggled via boat, which is somewhat safer, but also much more expensive and has a higher chance of being detected by law enforcement. After the Darién Gap, they must move through Costa Rica and Nicaragua before entering Honduras.
Across presidencies, despite tweaks in immigration policy, the general thrust of U.S. immigration priorities has been to opt for punitive deterrence measures. President Biden has been no exception in this matter. Looking weak on the border is seen as an electoral liability. In Biden’s case, three decades of incongruous policy have come to roost as migration patterns continue unabated.
According to Meyer, Honduras is a relative reprieve from the rest of the journey. “They’ve been through hell. You talk to enough [migrants] and they would say I would never do that again.” And that’s not just in reference to the violence and dangerous conditions of the migration. Meyer added that many migrants described a persistent dehumanization and exploitation. “They feel taken advantage of and mistreated by authorities throughout the region. Everything has a price. Everybody charges. And it’s extra because they’re migrants,” referring to the stream of payments for passage.
“What awaits them in Guatemala and Mexico can be just as bad if not worse,” Meyer said. “Mexico is a lot of abuse at the hands of corrupt Mexican agents and criminal groups that kidnap or rape.”
That’s not including instances like the fire at a migrant center in late March, just across the border from El Paso in Juarez, which left 40 dead. Mexican authorities said that among the dead and injured were migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, El Salvador, Colombia, and Ecuador. VICE reported that, according to survivors of the fire and security guards at the facility, the migrant center operated more as an extortion center where only migrants who could pay at least $200 were released.
Presumably, many of the migrants at the Juarez facility intended to eventually enter the U.S., further emphasizing how the Juarez center is a micro-example of the kinds of black markets entirely sustained by human desperation and suffering—a downstream effect of the Biden administration’s preference for deterrence as a strategy over easing restriction.
THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S POSTURE toward the border and enforcement activities has been based upon an “addressing the root causes of migration in Central America” approach, to quote a July 2021 report whose foreword was written by Vice President Harris just after the White House announced that Harris was in charge of spearheading a private economic development effort throughout the Northern Triangle. The idea is that because so many migrants move because of terrible problems in their home countries, American policy should try to fix those problems.
The idea isn’t wrong. When migrant justice advocates talk about root causes, Khury Petersen-Smith, a researcher from the Institute for Policy Studies, told me, “we’re talking about economic policies that have devastated economies such that people can’t make a living in [their native countries].” But concrete effects have been scarce. Other advocates who spoke to the Prospect characterized administration language and policy as sounding nice, but in practice amounting to very little.
Perhaps the most glaring embarrassment for the U.S. has been that Central America’s “success story” is El Salvador’s immensely popular president Nayib Bukele. Under Bukele, his autocratic government has exterminated gang life from the former homicide capital of the world. Outside Western groups have criticized Bukele’s action against gangs as coming at the cost of unlawful killings, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, detention, and more. Even as that may be true, Bukele still touts an approval rating between 60 and 90 percent, depending on the polling you look at.
Meanwhile, by allowing El Salvador to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, Bukele has hitched his economy to the volatile cryptocurrency, and the results have been tumultuous. Bitcoin is trading at less than half the value it had in 2021 when Bukele made it a legal currency, and Salvadorans who rely on it for payments could end up losing a fortune. Bukele has earned positive notices for authoritarian crackdowns, but with economics often being the biggest driver of Central American migration, he has not addressed the root causes and maybe even exacerbated them.
Advocates characterized administration language and policy in the Northern Triangle as sounding nice, but in practice amounting to very little.
The story is somewhat different in Mexico. When it and the U.S. signed free-trade deals in the 1990s, economists promised rapid growth would follow. One mining magnate even promised it would save Mexican politics, in a New York Times op-ed from 2000: “Because of NAFTA, Mexico can now afford the luxury of democracy.”
For a period, those new jobs in Mexico offered new opportunities, Princeton University professor Filiz Garip told me. But since these new jobs were concentrated along border towns, it meant that people had to move from rural areas to cities where these jobs were located. “This was a lot of assembly work,” Garip said. “After one year, [the new workers] would be totally exhausted and replaced by a new group of people … then they would be in the border region where they couldn’t find any other work and then they had to migrate.”
A 2003 Times article on NAFTA’s impact in Mexico alludes to these economic distortions and worker burnout: “Real wages in Mexico are lower now than they were when the agreement was adopted despite higher productivity, income inequality is greater there and immigration has continued to soar.” As a result, thousands of Mexicans continued to cross the border into the U.S. during these years.
Garip noted that the degradation of economic opportunities came as the United States militarized its border. Taken together, those factors created a dynamic that undermined efforts to tighten the border, becoming a flashpoint for the sorts of immigration policy battles seen today. “Employers still needed the same workers, their [labor] demands did not diminish, and they knew they could hire [migrants],” she said. Without a legal framework for managing labor mobility between countries, Garip said, the result was unpredictability.
“You know that you can go back [to your native country],” Garip said, referring to migrants on temporary visas. But when those avenues are restricted, and migrants thus cross illegally, the calculation changes. With steep penalties for attempting to cross back to one’s home country, it makes more sense from a migrant’s perspective to stay in the U.S., even if it’s unlawful.
Today, economic conditions in Mexico itself have improved somewhat, despite an ongoing crime crisis. This generation of migrants from Latin America are coming from Honduras, Guatemala, or even Venezuela. And they are not fleeing their countries for the exact reasons as the wave of Mexican migrants from the immediate post-NAFTA years, though the broad strokes are similar. However, they are hitting the same administrative hurdles in the U.S. immigration system that were set up in the early 21st century.
SALVADOR MELENDEZ/AP PHOTO
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is seen as a regional hero, despite his autocratic rule.
ON MAY 11, THE ADMINISTRATION phased out its use of Title 42. Technically, Title 42 comes from the 1944 Public Health Service Act. In theory, the law is intended to allow federal agencies to control the spread of disease. It was the basis for the Centers for Disease Control’s authority throughout the worst bouts of the pandemic. Applied to immigration, Title 42 became an easy tool for border control, allowing federal officials to expel migrants from the United States without a formal asylum process.
Anticipating chaos after the end of Title 42, the Biden administration announced that it would be sending 1,500 active-duty troops from the Army and Marine Corps to the U.S.-Mexico border. According to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, authorities anticipate that up to 15,000 migrants a day will try illegally entering the United States. In a follow-up report from the Free Beacon, internal communications said that those troops would be assisting with “data entry” and not border enforcement.
In a post–Title 42 world, immigration officials will revert to using Title 8, the immigration laws in place before the pandemic—but this is cold comfort. Under Title 8, for example, being caught for unauthorized immigration results in removal for 5 to 20 years, depending on how many times a migrant has attempted to enter the country. The idea is that steep penalties will incentivize migrants to apply for asylum before arriving at the border.
But it hasn’t worked. The United States’ refusal to process asylum claims has backlogged the Mexican government’s asylum system, a result of the continued “Remain in Mexico” policy first put forward under former President Trump. Though Biden has tried to end the program, a U.S. judge paused Biden’s move, and so the system remains clogged. As I reported earlier this year, the U.S. had 1.6 million pending asylum hearings.
The end of Title 42 is expected to create additional dysfunction. In early May, in El Paso, Texas, the city’s mayor announced it would be entering a state of emergency ahead of the end of Title 42, in addition to opening up two temporary shelters.
Any plan for dealing with immigration policy is likely to stoke outrage from all sides. On the one hand, Republican attorneys general across the country have asked Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to designate Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs). That pressure increased as Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) reintroduced legislation with the same effect.
Rebekah Wolf from the American Immigration Council said in an interview that this was merely a symbolic gesture, but it seems to have had an effect. When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently asked U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland if he would object to Congress designating cartels as FTOs, Garland responded: “I wouldn’t be opposed.” If cartels were designated as FTOs, Wolf said, it would further complicate the ability for migrants to claim asylum, because it’s nearly impossible for a migrant to make it to the southern border without paying cartels and other crime syndicates for passage.
On the other hand, harsh Trump-style immigration policy infuriates immigrant rights activists who feel betrayed by Biden’s moves.
Meyer summarized the Biden administration’s predicament like this: On the one hand, it is increasing access to legal pathways for migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua, so long as they can provide valid passports and they have sponsors in the U.S. That’s a legal pathway for entry into the U.S. for up to 360,000 people a year. In addition, the administration plans to boost resources for migrant processing centers, thereby setting migrants on a path to filing family-based petitions for refugee status.
On paper, those changes should increase legal pathways. But in practice, Meyer said that based upon migrants she and her colleagues encountered in Honduras, they don’t have the documents or meet eligibility requirements, yet still plan on making the journey northward. Desperate people are like that. She recalled frequently being asked by migrants questions such as “What should I do?” or “What are my options?” The most likely scenario is migrants stuck in Mexican border towns hoping for a change in U.S. policy that may never even come.
