Trump’s anti-immigrant demagoguery reached an ugly climax this week with the U.S. teargas attacks on members of the Central American migrant caravan, including mothers with toddlers who were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
As a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, prepares to take office in Mexico on December 1, the relationship between the United States and our nearest neighbor—and the future of the border—is up in the air.
Trump recently declared that he had won agreement from the incoming Mexican administration to hold Central Americans seeking U.S. asylum in Mexico, and threatened to close the border if Mexico didn’t comply. One day later, the U.S. Border Patrol fired off its teargas attack.
After a round of bad publicity, the incoming Mexican administration backed away from the so-called Remain in Mexico deal and the new interior minister declared that negotiations were ongoing.
“We’ll see how far his human-rights agenda goes,” Mexican senator Emilio Álvarez Icaza says of the new Mexican president, in an interview with The Progressive. “Because the business relationship with the United States is the primary relationship. And it’s a very complicated situation. You’ve got a President of the United States who is a racist. Instead of having the United States be a world leader in human rights, Trump wants to be world leader of racism. It’s very difficult.”
Álvarez Icaza, a human rights activist and former head of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, was recently elected as Mexico City’s independent senator in the new Mexican legislature. He joins a freshman class of legislators who won in a historic landslide, propelling the populist MORENA party of incoming president López Obrador to power, and sweeping aside the old regime at every level of government. As López Obrador gets ready to take office, expectations are high for a more humane and less corrupt government, even as the crisis deepens on the U.S. border.
The migration issue is dicey. Officials on both sides of the border have avoided it in policy discussions.
“The theme of migration is not in NAFTA or in the agreement that came after NAFTA. But it has to be part of the debate,” says Álvarez Icaza. “It’s like the elephant in the living room. They don’t want to talk about it.”
Alvarez Icaza visited the United States in November to meet with Democrats and progressives. Together with progressive members of Congress including Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Chuy Garcia, Democrat of Illinois, he has been constructing a “binational solidarity caucus” to work on a more humane and rational immigration policy with the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
“We’ll see how far his human-rights agenda goes. Because the business relationship with the United States is the primary relationship.”
I spoke with Álvarez Icaza in the living room of a mutual friend in Madison, in Spanish, for about an hour. The U.S. Border Patrol had not yet launched its teargas attack. But the outlines of the crisis were clear.
Trump had been ginning up the rhetoric about the dangers posed by the migrant caravan for months, suggesting, without evidence, that it was harboring Middle Eastern terrorists.
“Osama bin Laden might be there!” Álvarez Icaza said, parodying Trump. “It’s stupid. It’s a very perverse way of manipulating the fears of the public.”
The reality, for the desperate men, women, and children fleeing violence and repression in Central America, is grave. “There are more dead each day than during the civil wars in Nicaragua and Honduras,” Álvarez Icaza said. “There are transnational gangs from Los Angeles operating on both sides of the border. You can’t resolve this with soldiers.”
But Álvarez Icaza was cautiously optimistic about that the López Obrador administration would play a constructive role. He pointed to some positive signs, including the new administration’s appointments to the national immigration agency, and the its criticism of Trump’s handling of Central American migrants. He said the government of outgoing president Peña Nieto is like “an ally of the class bully against Central America.”
“Mexico, in the last three years, has deported more Central Americans than the United States,” Álvarez Icaza noted. “They use all the discourse of human rights in order to do the opposite. ‘Protection’ of immigrants means deportation.”
But change is in the air. For Mexicans, it was a shock when Peña Nieto invited Trump to Mexico, cozying up to the man who had called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals.” The public embraced López Obrador’s more acid response to U.S. bullying.
“There is heavy pressure from the Mexican public” to stand up to Trump, Álavarez Icaza said. “And, on the other side, heavy pressure from the big companies to maintain a good relationship with the United States. It’s a tremendous tension.”
Álvarez Icaza is hopeful that Mexico can lead the world in treating migrants and refugees more humanely, by reverting to its policy during the Guatemalan civil war, when the country took in 500,000 Guatemalan refugees.
A refugee program and an employment program would be a more appropriate response to the crisis driving Central American migration than militarization, he said. “You could invite other world leaders to go along with the program. It’s not a matter of national security. It’s a matter of humanity. Mexico can play that role.”
López Obrador has promised to build a train through the Yucatán peninsula, which would give a big boost to transportation and commerce throughout the region. Álverez Icaza said the new administration would like to bring in Central American workers to build the train line.
Both Mexico and the United States already depend heavily on Central American migrant labor. Far from being a dangerous invading force, the poor people who migrate seeking jobs in the north—from Central America and from Mexico—form the backbone of many industries. And remittances sent home to Mexico by workers in the United States rank with oil revenue and tourism among the top three contributors to the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
“When they need manual labor, the Border Patrol lets people pass.”
Clearly, the flow of people and goods across the border is crucial to both the Mexican and the U.S. economies, and, despite Trump’s provocations, both sides have a lot of reasons to try to maintain good relations.
“Here in Wisconsin, the manual labor of immigrants is what produces your cheese,” Alvarez Icaza said.
Indeed, more than half of the manual labor on dairy farms in the United States is performed by immigrants—mostly undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America.
“When they need manual labor, the Border Patrol lets people pass,” Álvarez Icaza said.
He described a trip he took last year to Honduras: “We saw a plane with 120 Hondurans who had been deported from the United States,” he said. “I interviewed twenty-nine of them. Twenty-eight were going to go back. It was December, and one man told me, ‘They brought me home for Christmas.’ ”
When Álvarez Icaza asked the migrants how they would go back, they told him, “We have insurance. We paid $5,000, and we get three chances. If they deport you a fourth time, you have to pay again.”
“Why not have a legal visa program, instead of paying all this money to coyotes?” Álavarez Icaza asked. That would undercut the whole chain of corruption, violence, torture, and rape associated with trafficking in undocumented workers..
Álvarez Icaza thinks Trump “is destroying the credibility of the office of the President of the United States.”
“His language is the language of power through force. ‘Why? Because I can! And if I have to lie, who cares?’ There’s no check on him.
During his recent visit to the United States, Álvarez Icaza spoke to a group of Democrats and progressives at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. He told the group, “I was impressed by the passivity in the United States in the face of all this.”
In Mexico, Álvarez Icaza finds himself in a unique position. As the only independent member of the senate, elected on a coalition ticket, he is not a member of any political party. “I’m the minority within the minority,” he said. “But I have a lot of freedom.” He is using that freedom to openly criticize MORENA colleagues who have suddenly moved from the opposition to the majority, and, frightened by their new power, have been too timid, in his opinion, to move forward their progressive agenda. He is pushing the new government to stick to its promises and pursue a bold program of democratic reforms and human rights.
And he is building bridges with likeminded people in the United States, preparing for a better future.