people are talking about even like ten generations will pass and we won’t be able to survive,” explains Maricel. “So, realistically speaking, when is it going to be better? Is there a possibility that the economy gets better? You’re paying the debt, and on top of it you have this big, big interest. It’s not very realistic that you will come out of it, like the Philippines will come out of it in one piece.” With no opportunities in her home country, Maricel ended up in New York City, and eventually became an organizer helping other domestic workers fight exploitation.22
When people have no hope that things will get better, they are more likely to uproot themselves and go elsewhere to survive. If they believe they can improve the situation in their countries, they are less inclined to leave. And if things do get better in their home countries, many people who left will return.
Starting in 1910, an estimated one to one and a half million Mexicans crossed the northern border to escape the violence of the Mexican revolution. Mexico’s population was about fifteen million at the time, so this was a major migration—almost one out of every ten Mexicans. But many returned to Mexico once the violence let up and the revolution opened new opportunities back home, including social programs such as a sweeping agrarian reform.23
What happens when people do try to fix their countries?
In the Central American nation of Nicaragua, an earthquake struck on December 23, 1972, killing as many as 10,000 people and destroying or damaging about 80 percent of the buildings in the center of the capital city, Managua. The country’s U.S.-backed dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, funneled much of the international aid into his own family’s pockets, leaving the population without help. Yet the disaster did not provoke a massive wave of migration. A movement to overthrow Somoza had been building for the past decade, and many Nicaraguans stayed home to push for change.24
Washington continued to support Somoza, despite the earthquake aid debacle and a series of worsening human rights abuses, but in the end it could no longer prop him up against widespread opposition. On July 19, 1979, an insurrection led by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled Somoza and began to transform Nicaragua from a dictator’s feudal estate into a real country, with political pluralism and a “mixed economy” based on the economic models of countries like France and Sweden, which combine public and private ownership of important economic sectors.25
Nicaragua’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by a total of 7.67 percent per capita from 1979 to 1983; this was at a time when the real GDP fell by 14.71 percent per capita for Central America as a whole.26 But with fiercely anti-communist Ronald Reagan as president, the U.S. government chose not to tolerate the way Nicaraguans were fixing their country; it started funneling money, weapons, training, and other “assistance” to recruit local fighters, known as the contras, for a proxy war that targeted civilian supporters of the Sandinista government. The war halted economic progress. Eleven years and some 30,000 deaths later, the United States won its war of attrition when Nicaraguans, tired of fighting, voted the FSLN out of office in February 1990.
For all their struggles and sacrifice, Nicaraguans were cheated out of the chance to fix their country. The new U.S.-backed government quickly imposed IMF-sponsored “structural adjustment” programs that brought a sharp rise in unemployment and triggered a recession, plunging the already impoverished population into desperate misery. Many Nicaraguans fled to neighboring Costa Rica, whose 1984 census counted 45,918 Nicaraguans; by 2000 the country had 226,374 Nicaraguan residents, two-thirds of whom said they had arrived during the 1990s.27
In El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. government backed right-wing regimes as they tried to crush revolutionary leftist movements similar to Nicaragua’s. These wars ended with peace accords—in 1992 in El Salvador and in 1996 in Guatemala—that allowed the leftist forces to regroup as political parties. But 70,000 Salvadorans and 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed, the vast majority of them by the U.S.-backed regimes, which remained in power and began imposing neoliberal economic programs. The wars left deep wounds in the countries’ social and economic fabric. By 2005, El Salvador’s homicide rate of fifty-four murders per 100,000 people was the highest in Latin America;28 nearly half of the country’s rural population lived below the poverty line, and 61 percent had no access to water piped into the home.29
The U.S. Census reported that 44,166 Nicaraguans were living in the United States in 1980, shortly after the overthrow of the Somoza regime; the number jumped to 168,659 over the next decade. The number of Salvadorans living in the United States rose from 94,447 in 1980 to 465,433 in 1990, and the number of Guatemalans went from 63,073 to 225,739 during the same period, when the wars in those countries were at their worst. The numbers rose almost as much again during the 1990s, as neoliberal economic programs were imposed: by 2000 there were 220,335 Nicaraguans, 817,336 Salvadorans, and 480,665 Guatemalans in the United States.30
Haitians suffered a similar fate. In December 1990, Haitians seized an opportunity for change, overwhelmingly electing popular priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Turnout was about 63 percent of eligible voters, according to official figures, with 67.5 percent voting for Aristide, compared to 14.2 percent for his closest competitor. Haitians hoped Aristide would carry out his promises to oppose IMF programs and raise the standard of living in the hemisphere’s poorest country.
But less than a year later, in September 1991, Aristide was overthrown in a military coup. Army officers and right-wing paramilitaries unleashed massive repression against grassroots and leftist activists. According to reports judged credible by Human Rights Watch, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded the main paramilitary leader, Emmanuel Constant. The military regime and its supporters killed an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people before being forced to give up power in September 1994.31 Their hopes for change crushed, Haitians fled. U.S. Coast Guard data showed a notable drop of migrants fleeing Haiti by boat after the December 1990 elections, followed by a dramatic upturn after the 1991 coup.32
Aristide was returned to office in October 1994 after then-president Bill Clinton ordered a U.S. military intervention—once Aristide had agreed to a U.S.-inspired neoliberal economic program, including a “drastic reduction” of the tariffs that protected Haitian food producers from foreign competition. Many Haitian farmers, especially rice producers, were forced out of business, and Haitians became largely dependent on imported rice. Clinton later apologized for the tariff reduction policy. “I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did,” he told the U.S. Senate in March 2010.33
Haitian migration to the United States swelled after the 1991 coup, and continued as the 1994 neoliberal program took effect. About 200,000 people born in Haiti lived in the United States in 1990. By 2009, that number had reached nearly half a million.34
Why are children coming here from Central America?
Although the total number of undocumented immigrants in the United States fell by nearly one million after 2008, in the middle of 2014 there was a sharp rise in unauthorized border crossing by children. Most came from Mexico and three Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency detained 57,525 unaccompanied children—those traveling without a parent or guardian—at the Mexico-U.S. border from October 2013 through June 2014, more than twice as many as for the same period the year before. The number of children apprehended with a parent or guardian also jumped dramatically: 22,069 accompanied children were detained from October 2013 to June 2014, almost three times the number for the year before. About 16 percent of the unaccompanied children were under the age of thirteen, as were a full 81 percent of the children who were accompanied by a parent or a legal guardian. The upsurge in child migration started tapering off in the second half of 2014.35
Poverty
