Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Forced Flight and False Choices

Joe Biden is making the repair of our immigration system a priority in his first month in office. nnIn a series of executive orders, Biden has reversed about a dozen of Donald Trump’s most noxious immigration policies, sending a signal that the overtly racist and white supremacist approach to the US border is ending. These moves are a good start, but they are not nearly enough, because they leave in place an underlying misconception about immigration that is US-centric.

US failures on immigration stem from a larger problem with the way we — and most nations — view the flow of migrants around the globe. Rather than asking questions about why people flee their homes, we have focused our resources on technical aspects and border protection, or on the end product of their flight.

Consider the early-February action taken by Biden and characterized as being “intended to address the driving forces of migration from Central and South America.” This set of policies and policy reviews, according to The Guardian, “includes working with governments and not-for-profits to increase other countries’ capacities to host migrants and ensuring Central American refugees and asylum seekers have legal pathways to enter the US.” The action also requires a review of the program that forces “asylum seekers to await their court hearings in Mexican border towns instead of in the US,” while also allowing “some minors to apply for refugee status from their home countries.”

These are humane and smart policies, necessary to address the situation in the short term, but they leave larger systems in place that cause people to migrate in the first place: Economic and environmental dislocation, violence, and corruption. The American Progress, in a 2019 report, said any effort at addressing the immigration question “requires understanding what is fueling these mass dislocations.” The report ties mass migration to two words “fear and desperation,” which “have led millions of people to uproot themselves and seek safety and security far from home.”

In 2019, I interviewed a woman who fled Guatemala and ultimately landed in New Jersey. She had family in Guatemala, was not interested in leaving her hometown, but the violence, poverty and political corruption made leaving her only option.

Carmela — a pseudonym — told me she was raped. Her son was threatened by gangs. And the police, who were tied to her rapist, did nothing. Her only option, she told me, was to travel the 3,300 miles by bus and on foot from her town, across the border in Texas, and eventually to New Jersey, where she has some family. She did this despite a Trump administration crackdown on immigrants, and despite gray areas in international law that make it unclear whether women facing violence should be viewed as a protected class.

Her story is not an unusual one. I’ve written it dozens of times. The specific details differ, but the similarities are striking: Violence in the form of gangs, abusive men, police, the military. Poverty. An environment damaged by American and European corporations and prone to drought and flooding. Corruption. War. The men, women, and children who see migration as their best option are not an invading army, but rather a cast of refugees fleeing the damage done by invading corporations and colonial powers. Even the most comprehensive of immigration reform plans cannot address this.

Any real solution needs to recognize this, and enact policies that help stabilize and democratize the region’s politics, while addressing the ongoing environmental calamities that are hitting Central America far harder than the United States.

This is going to take money and a nearly 180-degree turn from our current approach, which has been punitive and ignores our role in the chaos gripping the countries of Central and South America and elsewhere. We need to demilitarize the border by abolishing the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police agencies that have been rife with abuse and are designed to view all immigrants as hostile agents of foreign powers. We need to provide development aid around the globe and democratize its distribution, ensuring it gets beyond the corrupt leaders we have helped prop up. And we — the rich nations — need to pay reparations to indigenous communities, whose lands we have ravaged and whose inherent wealth we have stolen.

I’m not optimistic. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the fact that he received almost 74 million votes in 2020 are indications of just how difficult change will be. Trump’s message was America First, the implication being no one else matters. Biden is calling for a shift, but not a real change. Biden’s message is “America is indispensable,” which recognizes that other nations matter, but maintains the paternalism that has been central to the post-Cold War mindset and that has allowed corporations to inflict so much pain on so many regions.

It’s not about us. It is about the people who are being forced to migrate. We have to stop setting their houses on fire and then blaming them for seeking refuge in what they think will be a warm, dry place.

Hank Kalet is a writer in New Jersey. E-mail, hankkalet@gmail.com; Substack: hankkalet.substack.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021

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