Published on
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
byTomDispatch
A Closer Look at Biden's Immigration Plan for Central America
Biden's plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has
long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly
militarized version of "security" on the people of that region.
byAviva Chomsky
While the economic model lurking behind Biden's plan may be old indeed, the
attempt to outsource U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central
American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly
twenty-first-century twist on border policy. (Photo: John Moore/Getty
Images)
While the economic model lurking behind Biden's plan may be old indeed, the
attempt to outsource U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central
American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly
twenty-first-century twist on border policy. (Photo: John Moore/Getty
Images)
Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory
positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald
Trump's draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his "Plan to Build
Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,"
restoring "U.S. leadership in the region" that he claimed Trump had
abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such "leadership" has an ominous
ring.
Although the second half of his plan's name does, in fact, echo that of
left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador (CISPES), its content highlights a version of
security and prosperity in that region that's more Cold War-like than
CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central
America, Biden's plan actually promotes an old economic development model
that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a
distinctly militarized version of "security" on the people of that region.
In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in
particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of
repression.
Linking Immigration and Foreign Policy
The clearest statement of the president's Central America goals appears in
his "U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021," sent to Congress on January 20th. That
proposal offers a sweeping set of changes aimed at eliminating President
Trump's racist exclusions, restoring rights to asylum, and opening a path to
legal status and citizenship for the immigrant population. After the
anti-immigrant barrage of the last four years, that proposal seems worth
celebrating. It follows in the footsteps of previous bipartisan
"comprehensive" compromises like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act
and a failed 2013 immigration bill, both of which included a path to
citizenship for many undocumented people, while dedicating significant
resources to border "security."
Read closely, a significant portion of Biden's immigration proposal focuses
on the premise that addressing the root causes of Central America's problems
will reduce the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. In its own words, the
Biden plan promises to promote "the rule of law, security, and economic
development in Central America" in order to "address the key factors"
contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy language, however, are
long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that should sound familiar to
those who have been paying attention in these years.
Their essence: that millions of dollars in "aid" money should be poured into
upgrading local military and police forces in order to protect an economic
model based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the
privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it happens, this
is the very model that Washington has imposed on the countries of Central
America over the past century, one that's left its lands corrupt, violent,
and impoverished, and so continued to uproot Central Americans and send them
fleeing toward the United States.
Crucial to Biden's plan, as to those of his predecessors, is another key
element: to coerce Mexico and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall
only partially built along the southern border of the U.S. and proudly
promoted by presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump
While the economic model lurking behind Biden's plan may be old indeed, the
attempt to outsource U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central
American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly
twenty-first-century twist on border policy.
Outsourcing the Border (from Bush to Biden)
The idea that immigration policy could be outsourced began long before
Donald Trump notoriously threatened, in mid-2019, to impose tariffs on
Mexican goods to pressure that country's new president into agreeing to his
demand to collaborate with Washington's anti-immigrant agenda. That
included, of course, Trump's controversial "remain in Mexico" policy that
has continued to strand tens of thousands of asylum-seekers there.
Meanwhile, for almost two decades the United States has been bullying (and
funding) military and police forces to its south to enforce its immigration
priorities, effectively turning other countries' borders into extensions of
the U.S. one. In the process, Mexico's forces have regularly been deployed
on that country's southern border, and Guatemala's on its border with
Honduras, all to violently enforce Washington's immigration policies.
Such outsourcing was, in part, a response to the successes of the immigrant
rights movement in this country. U.S. leaders hoped to evade legal scrutiny
and protest at home by making Mexico and Central America implement the
uglier aspects of their policies.
It all began with the Mérida Initiative in 2007, a George W. Bush-initiated
plan that would direct billions of dollars to military equipment, aid, and
infrastructure in Mexico (with smaller amounts going to Central America).
One of its four pillars was the creation of "a 21st century border" by
pushing Mexico to militarize its southern border. By 2013, Washington had
funded 12 new military bases along that border with Guatemala and a 100-mile
"security cordon" north of it.
In response to what was seen as a child-migrant crisis in the summer of 2014
(sound familiar?), President Barack Obama further pressured Mexico to
initiate a new Southern Border Program. Since then, tens of millions of
dollars a year have gone toward the militarization of that border and Mexico
was soon detaining tens of thousands of migrants monthly. Not surprisingly,
deportations and human-rights violations against Central American migrants
shot up dramatically there. "Our border today in effect is Mexico's border
with Honduras and Guatemala," exulted Obama's former border czar Alan Bersin
in 2019. A local activist was less sanguine, protesting that the program
"turned the border region into a war zone."
President Trump blustered and bullied Mexico and various Central American
countries far more openly than the previous two presidents while taking such
policies to new levels. Under his orders, Mexico formed a new, militarized
National Guard and deployed 12,000 of its members to the Guatemalan border,
even as funding from Washington helped create high-technology infrastructure
along Mexico's southern border, rivaling that on the U.S. border.
Trump called for reducing aid to Central America. Yet under his watch, most
of the $3.6 billion appropriated by Congress continued to flow there, about
half of it aimed at strengthening local military and police units. Trump
did, however, temporarily withhold civilian aid funds to coerce Guatemala,
Honduras, and El Salvador into signing "safe third country" agreements that
would allow the United States to deport people with valid asylum claims to
those very countries.
Trump also demanded that Guatemala increase security along its southern
border "to stem the flow of irregular migration" and "deploy officials from
U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement to advise and mentor host nation police, border security,
immigration, and customs counterparts." Once the Central American countries
conceded to Trump's demands, aid was restored.
This February, President Biden suspended those safe third country
agreements, but is clearly otherwise ready to continue to outsource border
enforcement to Mexico and Central America.
The Other Side of Militarization: "Economic Development"
As Democratic and Republican administrations alike outsourced a militarized
response to immigration, they also sought to sell their agendas with
promises of economic-development aid to Central America. However, they
consistently promoted the very kind of assistance that historically brought
violence and poverty to the regionand so led directly to today's migrant
crisis.
The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if
Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved
infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the "free
market" will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in
theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over
and over again in Central America's tormented history, however, exactly the
opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to take advantage
of the region's fertile lands, natural resources, and cheap labor. This form
of developmentwhether in support of banana and coffee plantations in the
nineteenth century or sugar, cotton, and cattle operations after World War
IIbrought Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its
north-bound mass migration of today.
As a model, it relies on militarized governments to dispossess peasant
farmers, freeing the land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror
are brought to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class,
allowing investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such
operations, in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while
their cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster
the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate
changebringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea levels, more
intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined the
livelihoods of the Central American poor.
Starting in the 1970s, many of those poor workers and peasants pushed for
land reform and investment in basic rights like food, health, and education
instead of simply further enriching foreign and local elites. When peaceful
protest was met with violence, revolution followed, although only in
Nicaragua did it triumph.
Washington spent the 1980s attempting to crush Nicaragua's successful
revolution and the revolutionary movements against the right-wing military
governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. The peace treaties of the 1990s
ended the armed conflicts, but never addressed the fundamental social and
economic divides that underlay them. In fact, the end of those conflicts
only opened the regional floodgates for massive new foreign investment and
export booms. These involved, among other things, the spread of maquiladora
export-processing plants and the growing of new export-oriented
"non-traditional" fruits and vegetables, as well as a boom in extractive
industries like gold, nickel, and petroleum, not to speak of the creation of
new infrastructure for mass tourism.
In the 1980s, refugees first began fleeing north, especially from El
Salvador and Guatemala, then riven by war, repression, and the violence of
local paramilitary and death squads. The veneer of peace in the 1990s in no
way brought an end to poverty, repression, and violence. Both public and
private armed forces provided "security"but only to elites and the new
urban and rural megaprojects they sponsored.
If a government did threaten investors' profits in any way, as when El
Salvador declared a moratorium on mining licenses, the U.S.-sponsored
Central America Free Trade Agreement enabled foreign corporations to sue and
force it to submit to binding arbitration by a World Bank body. In the Obama
years, when the elected, reformist president of Honduras tried to enact
labor and environmental improvements, Washington gave the nod to a coup
there and celebrated when the new president proudly declared the country
"open for business" with a package of laws favoring foreign investors.
Journalist David Bacon termed that country's new direction a "poverty-wage
economic model" that only fostered the rise of gangs, drug trafficking, and
violence. Protest was met with fierce repression, even as U.S. military aid
flowed in. Prior to the coup, Hondurans had barely figured among Central
American migrants to the United States. Since 2009, its citizens have often
come to predominate among those forced to flee their homes and head north.
President Obama's 2014 Alliance for Prosperity offered a new round of aid
for investor-driven economic development. Journalist Dawn Paley
characterized that Alliance as in "large part a plan to build new
infrastructure that will benefit transnational corporations," including "tax
breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power lines
to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of import, assembly,
and export at low-wage maquilas." One major project was a new gas pipeline
to facilitate exports of U.S. natural gas to Central America.
It was Obama who oversaw Washington's recognition of the coup in Honduras.
It was Trump who looked the other way when Guatemala in 2019 and Honduras in
2020 expelled international anti-corruption commissions. And it was Trump
who agreed to downplay the mounting corruption and drug trafficking charges
against his friend, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, as long as he
promoted an investor-friendly economy and agreed to collaborate with the
U.S. president's anti-immigrant agenda.
The January 2021 Caravan Marks the Arrival of the Biden Years
All signs point to the Biden years continuing what's become the Washington
norm in Central America: outsourcing immigration policy, militarizing
security there, and promoting a model of development that claims to deter
migration while actually fueling it. In fact, President Biden's proposal
designates $4 billion over four years for the State Department and the U.S.
Agency for International Development to distribute. Such disbursement,
however, would be conditioned on progress toward Washington-approved goals
like "improv[ing] border security," "inform[ing]
citizens of the dangers of
the journey to the southwest border of the United States," and "resolv[ing]
disputes involving the confiscation of real property of United States
entities." Significant resources would also be directed to further
developing "smart" border technology in that region and to Border Patrol
operations in Central America.
A preview of how this is likely to work came just as Biden took office in
January 2021.
One predictable result of Washington's outsourcing of immigration control is
that the migrant journey from Central America has become ever more costly
and perilous. As a result, some migrants have begun gathering in large
public "caravans" for protection. Their aim: to reach the U.S. border
safely, turn themselves in to the border patrol, and request asylum. In late
January 2021, a caravan of some 7,500 Hondurans arrived at the Guatemalan
border in hopes that the new president in Washington would, as promised,
reverse Trump's controversial remain-in-Mexico policy of apparently endless
internment in crowded, inadequate camps just short of the U.S.
They hadn't known that Biden would, in fact, continue his predecessors'
outsourcing of immigration policy to Mexico and Central America. As it
happened, 2,000 tear-gas and baton-wielding Guatemalan police and soldiers
(armed, trained, and supported by the United States) massed at the
Guatemala-Honduras border to drive them back.
One former Trump official (retained by President Biden) tweeted that
Guatemala had "carr[ied] out its responsibilities appropriately and
lawfully." The Mexican government, too, praised Guatemala as it massed
thousands of its troops on its own southern border. And Juan González,
Biden's National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere lauded
Guatemala's "management of the migrant flow."
In mid-March, President Biden appeared to link a positive response to
Mexico's request for some of Washington's surplus Covid-19 vaccine to
further commitments to cracking down on migrants. One demand: that Mexico
suspend its own laws guaranteeing humane detention conditions for families
with young children. Neither country had the capacity to provide such
conditions for the large number of families detained at the border in early
2021, but the Biden administration preferred to press Mexico to ignore its
own laws, so that it could deport more of those families and keep the
problem out of sight of the U.S. public.
In late January 2021, CISPES joined a large coalition of peace, solidarity,
and labor organizations that called upon the Biden administration to rethink
its Central American plans. "The intersecting crises that millions in
Central America face are the result of decades of brutal state repression of
democratic movements by right-wing regimes and the implementation of
economic models designed to benefit local oligarchs and transnational
corporations," CISPES wrote. "Far too often, the United States has been a
major force behind these policies, which have impoverished the majority of
the population and devastated the environment."
The coalition called on Biden to reject Washington's longstanding commitment
to militarized security linked to the creation and reinforcement of
investor-friendly extractive economies in Central America. "Confronting
displacement demands a total rethinking of U.S. foreign policy," CISPES
urged. As of mid-March, the president had not responded in any fashion to
the plea. My advice: don't hold your breath waiting for such a response.
Aviva Chomsky
Aviva Chomskys most recent book is "Undocumented: How Immigration Became
Illegal." She is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American
studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
© 2021 TomDispatch.com
