I’m fascinated with a phrase I hear again and again from within the immigrants’ rights world: “We are here because you were there.”
The argument is that a Congolese person ought to be able to waltz into Belgium, a country that got rich from viciously exploiting their land and people for the better part of the past century, and ask for some payback. An estimated six out of seven Congolese people live on less than $1.25 per day, while Belgium is consistently and comfortably middle class.
But of course, like every other European country, Belgium has strict immigration policies and makes no exception for the citizens of a nation it is responsible for wrecking. In author and immigration expert Suketu Mehta’s new book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, he makes a compelling case for immigration as a form of reparations.
“If the rich countries don’t want the poor countries to migrate, then there’s another solution,” Mehta suggests. “Pay them what they’re owed.”
Take the Northern Triangle of Central America, composed of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These nations have some of the highest national homicide rates in the world. Gun, gang, and gender violence are rife, as are poverty and corruption. You can understand the unprecedented levels of migration; it is a huge humanitarian crisis.
Watching that crisis roil at the border this summer while I read Mehta’s book, I wondered about the relationship between the United States and our Central American neighbors. Aside from our human rights obligations under international law, do we owe it to these families to let them in? Like, actually owe it to them?
I have no interest in cultivating some sort of proprietary guilt and I understand that most nations and individuals have some degree of autonomy. Also, many resilient and talented Central Americans are working to heal their countries, and doing just fine on their own. However, the United States has long been a powerful player in the region, impacting the people there and their choice, or need, to flee.
One way it has done this is by causing climate chaos. By far the largest share of global greenhouse gases emitted since the Industrial Revolution comes from the United States. We are responsible for most of the climate change that has already occurred.
For Guatemalans, according to a World Food Program study in 2017, the main “push factor” driving emigration was not violence but drought and its inevitable results: no harvest, no work, no option but to leave.
For Guatemalans, the main “push factor” driving emigration is not violence but drought.
Climate-related disasters have also impacted El Salvador, causing severe deforestation, land degradation, and crop loss. The nation’s coastal areas, home to more than 30 percent of the population, are highly vulnerable to the combination of rising sea levels and El Niño events.
But when Salvadorans arrive at our borders, they’re more than likely attempting to escape from even deadlier violence than that wreaked by the climate—violence that the United States had a direct hand in creating.
In the 1980s, during the civil war between the FMLN and the rightwing government, the United States sent billions of dollars of economic and military aid into the tiny country, with President Ronald Reagan believing he was standing up against communism. More than 75,000 civilians were killed during the war, and thousands more were tortured and disappeared. More than 85 percent of those atrocities were committed by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government, according to a United Nations Truth Commission report.
After the war, a traumatized and militarized population was the ideal recruitment ground for drug cartels and other organized crime groups. Young men who fled to the United States during the war formed the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, in part to cope with life in inhospitable neighborhoods in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Many were then deported back home in the 1990s by the Clinton Administration. The gangs thrived back in El Salvador, hugely helped by their access to guns from the weapons capital of the region, the USA.
I’m only beginning to make the connection between the people at the border and our own behavior as a nation, but I can already see that we owe them much more than we’re willing to give. Perhaps that’s why we’re turning them away. Perhaps our debt to them is one we dread so much we’d rather put them in cages than pay it.