The public discussion surrounding immigration has descended into a depressing state. Comprehensive immigration reform seems all but impossible in the current political climate. Democrats, rather than offering progressive alternatives, are mostly either unwilling or incapable of forcefully countering the xenophobic framework of a migrant “invasion.” Meanwhile, prominent Republicans use the influx of migrants and refugees to promote the Great Replacement Theory—a far right conspiracy theory that wealthy “globalists,” often Jews, are funding demographic change in the United States.
The stakes of the immigration debate are far from abstract. Refugees are in desperate need of safe haven, migrants risk death attempting to cross the border, and hate crimes against Latino immigrants continue to rise.
There are few intellectuals or leaders who can offer a more insightful and urgent alternative to the mainstream message on immigration than Camilo Perez-Bustillo. Currently the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild's San Francisco Bay Area chapter, Bustillo is the former director of research, advocacy and leadership development at the Hope Border Institute based in El Paso, Texas, and co-founder and coordinator of the International Tribunal of Conscience of Peoples in Movement. He is the co-author of Human Rights, Hegemony and Utopia in Latin America: Poverty, Forced Migration and Resistance in Mexico and Colombia.
I interviewed Bustillo over the phone on July 7.
David Masciotra: When Trump was in office, there was a great deal of attention on human rights abuses at the border, particularly family separation. Since Trump left office, the attention has diminished. What is American discourse presently missing in regard to immigration and the Southern border?
Camilo Perez-Bustillo: I was in El Paso, working for a leading non-profit there involved in defending immigrants at the Southern border in the summer of 2018, which was the apex of family separation. I was physically present where we were being targeted by the Trump Administration with family separation on one hand, and mass detention of immigrant youth on the other. At the same time, the Trump administration, rhetorically, was enabling the worst dimensions of racism and xenophobia against Latinos and Mexican immigrants specifically. It was a double-edged moment…. The good news was that we got attention. The downside was that it was clear that the attention would be fleeting. Now, we have a huge vacuum.
It is extraordinary that discussions of racism are often marginal in the United States, but within that discussion, Latinos and border issues are even more marginal. There is often an erasure of Latinos, but there is no erasure that is greater in the U.S. consciousness than [of the] U.S. Empire, and there is nothing more central to U.S. Empire than its role in Latin America, and that is because Latin America is its so-called backyard.
Puerto Rico is even more invisible. But what does the media do daily in conducting this erasure? Well, when they report on border issues and public opinion surrounding immigration, the connection to imperialism is virtually never made. Most of the time, it isn’t even made superficially through the history of Mexico or the history of the Caribbean. So, if we lose that, there is no substantive discussion. It would be like discussing racism against Black Americans without mentioning slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow. You lose everything.
Q: Before we return to imperialism, in the more immediate context, how has the Biden Administration improved immigration and border policy, and what are its failures?
Perez-Bustillo: The good news is that the Biden Administration has significantly modified the official discourse in terms of what is going on at the border. It has wrapped everything up in a velvet glove and, at least, makes gestures toward understanding “root causes.” The bad news is that, in practice, if you look at it from the perspective of the people most affected, which is where you have to begin, virtually nothing has changed.
If you consider whether or not the United States is living up to its obligation under [national] and international law pertaining to the right to seek asylum — not even to get it, but just to apply for it — the regression on the part of the Biden Administration is absolutely stunning. The way that right has been actively undercut is momentous because it has global implications in terms of human rights and rule of law, which you would think would be fundamental in the wake of a lawless Trump Administration.
We need some form of legalization for the millions who are undocumented [here], but we also need more than that to address the quality of life for people who are labeled that way.
If we look at family separation, the good [news] is that the Biden Administration does not practice family separation, except in rare, isolated cases, but the bad is that they have blocked compensation for the families that were separated. The Biden Administration created a commission to explore the issue of compensation for these families, and those efforts have been shut down because, in court, the administration has taken the position that these families are not entitled to compensation…these families are out in the cold.
Also very important is the Biden Administration’s nomination of Elliot Abrams to the Public Diplomacy Commission. Abrams embodies the criminality of US interventionism in Central America in the 1980’s and all of its persistent legacies, which are the principal root causes of current inequities, including continued mass forced migration from the region.
Q: What are the stakes here in terms of human suffering, the suffering that motivated mass migration, and the suffering that takes place at the border itself?
Perez-Bustillo: The damage takes so many different forms. We have to apply a historical lens, and when we zoom out, we see that the entire history of U.S. immigration and border policy was always about white supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialism. As much as those might register as buzzwords or slogans, they are actually historical processes that are reflected every step of the way in 250 years of immigration and border policy.
So, something like the Biden Administration cutting out the right for refugees to seek asylum, and subjecting them to indefinite exile in Mexico under horrific conditions, mean(ing) tens of thousands of people turned away - more than the sum total of the Trump and the Obama Administrations. Plus, we have the largest amount of deaths ever under a single administration. We’ve had more than 890 deaths at the border in the last year. You cannot exaggerate the need for alarm and attention, and yet we almost never see headlines anywhere about any of it.
Q: When we discuss immigration, it tends to happen within a rightwing framework. How do you react to talking points like the supposed “fiscal burden” and “danger” of immigrants, and the perception that any hospitality at the border will inevitably devolve into “open borders”?
Perez-Bustillo: All of that was considered extreme rhetoric until the Trump Administration took power, and now it is normal. You hear not only Republicans, but many Democrats assuming those premises. The most frightening aspect of this is that we have a bipartisan consensus now. The first sentence we hear from almost any public official, including Biden, on immigration is, “We have to have a strong border to defend ourselves.”
In the first few years after 9/11, I was on the Hill as Director of Immigrant and Refugee Rights at the American Friends Service Committee fighting for comprehensive immigration reform. There were bipartisan efforts to address underlying structural problems with border policy by cutting a deal that acknowledges the need for control and combining that with some form of legalization. All of that died. The last time there was an attempt was in the U.S. Senate in 2009…. Now, the discussion is only about control, which means militarization, and containment, which means repression and detention. This is the new centrist opinion.
Q: Why is imperialism essential to understanding migration patterns into the United States?
Perez-Bustillo: People migrate because they are seeking a better life. Anytime you have two countries that are disparate in their possibilities of offering people a decent life, there is going to be flow from one to the other. We have to ask, why is there so much inequality between the U.S. economy and the economies of its neighbors to the south?
Might this be because the United States has continually undermined the sustainability of those economies through the exploitation of their labor and resources? Why is Puerto Rico still part of the United States? Why is the Mexican economy structurally subordinated to the United States? We can call it many things, but [these relationships are] the result of an imperialistic asymmetry at the core. That’s why we have a hundred years of mass migration from Mexico into the United States.
There are so many iniquities and outrageous treatment toward Haitian immigrants within our system. You cannot separate that from U.S. interventions on the ground, with the Marines and beyond, in Haiti for one hundred years.
Central America is the most dramatic example, because, at least, in the 1980s there was a fleeting moment of attention on U.S. imperialistic policies [in the region]. People said “Salvador” was Spanish for Vietnam. All of that has been forgotten, even though we have continuing surges from those countries. In the case of Guatemala, I’ve documented this directly—the communities from which most current migration comes to the United States are the same Indigenous communities, in the same regions, that were ravaged by U.S.-supported genocide in the 1980s and 90s. The migrants today are the children and grandchildren of those families.
Q: If the White House consulted you on immigration and border policy, what would you tell them?
Perez-Bustillo: The place to begin is with a genuine conversation about “root causes,” because they’ve used that phrase. Let’s really have that conversation. If we look at Vice President Kamala Harris, who is not only the first Black vice president, but also the child of immigrants, she goes on a tour of Latin America, and she appears with the president of Guatemala, who is one of the most discredited presidents of my lifetime, and when asked about migration from Guatemala, her response is, “Don’t come.” That summarizes the Biden Administration’s approach to root causes, and the Trump Administration would say the same thing.
Of course, Harris has been stuck with an impossible job in an impossible position intentionally, and we should talk about that, but she is still accountable for what she does and fails to do. The key thing is that when there is any conversation about root causes, it is all about increasing private investment in the region. To say that, in a country like Guatemala, private investment is the solution neglects to acknowledge that it is investors from the United States and Canada exploiting Guatemalan mineral resources through extraction. Well, that’s what is driving migration through the region. So you want more of that? Then you are going to get more migration.
We need some form of legalization for the millions who are undocumented [here], but we also need more than that to address the quality of life for people who are labeled that way. They make rich contributions to our commerce, culture, community, and everything else. They are our essential workers. Remember “essential workers”?
The bottom line is that, until the United States fully respects the rights of the people in Latin America to self-determination and dignity, the flows will continue.