for this sudden increase in child migrants. In March 2014 the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, reported the results of a survey it had made of underage immigrants from Mexico and the three Central American countries. The researchers found that “no less than 58 percent of the 404 children interviewed were forcibly displaced because they suffered or feared harms that indicated a potential or actual need for international protection.” A survey of 322 underage migrants from El Salvador published by the Immigration Policy Center in June 2014 found that “59 percent of Salvadoran boys and 61 percent of Salvadoran girls list[ed] crime, gang threats, or violence as a reason for their emigration.”
The UNHCR report noted that the increase in migration from the three Central American countries wasn’t just affecting the United States. Asylum requests by people from these countries to Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama jumped by 435 percent from 2009 to 2012.36
Experts on Central American history noted that continuing effects of the wars of the 1980s and the neoliberal policies of the 1990s had contributed to high poverty and crime rates in Central America.37 Political repression added to the new level of violence in the area, especially in Mexico and Honduras, and so did a militarized approach to fighting the trafficking of drugs through the region to the United States. More than 60,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico from 2007 to 2014, but instead of stopping the drug cartels, the fighting in Mexico just seemed to encourage the spread of narco-trafficking into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The U.S. government had helped fund this militarized approach since 2007 through a $2.5 billion program, the Mérida Initiative.38
In Honduras another factor was government corruption following a 2009 military coup. Despite evidence of links between security forces and drug gangs, the Honduran military continues to get millions in U.S. aid. As of 2014, Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. A Human Rights Watch report noted “rampant crime and impunity for human rights abuses,” including violent attacks on journalists and peasant organizers.39
How can we address the root causes of immigration?
Many people around the world are trying, often at great personal risk, to build a better future for themselves, their families and their communities, and a more equitable society for everyone. Those of us who live in the United States can join them in these efforts, generally without risking our lives.
During the 1980s, many thousands of people in the United States spoke out against their government’s intervention in Central America. Activists protested and lobbied Congress; many traveled to Central America to provide assistance and bring back information on conditions in the region, seriously undercutting the Reagan administration’s public relations campaign to depict Central American leftists as a threat to the United States. This activism seems to have had an impact on public opinion: a New York Times/CBS poll in April 1986 showed some 62 percent of U.S. respondents opposed financial aid to the U.S.-backed contras in Nicaragua, while just 25 percent supported it.40
In the early 1990s, labor unions and activists led a campaign against NAFTA, and in late 1999, giant protests erupted in Seattle against the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), sparking a new “anti-globalization” movement in the United States. These protests took their lead from workers in Latin America and elsewhere, who had long been out in the streets fighting the same policies. Mexicans organized innumerable marches, rallies, strikes, sit-ins, and occupations of government buildings in the 1990s. Thousands of indigenous farmers rose up in southern Mexico on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect. Naming their movement the Zapatistas—after Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata—they denounced the trade pact as a “death sentence” for indigenous people.41
Starting in the mid-1990s, campus and labor activists in the United States built an anti-sweatshop movement that has made important gains in supporting successful local worker-organizing campaigns in Latin America and throughout the world.
For example, in 2002 and 2003 a group called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) exerted pressure through its Sweat-Free Campus Campaign to help workers at the BJ&B factory in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic win the first union in a Caribbean “Free Trade Zone” in five years. The company closed the plant in 2007, despite international pressure to keep it open, but the factory reopened in 2010 under an agreement that South Carolina–based Knights Apparel signed with the Workers Rights Consortium, an independent U.S.-based monitoring organization, in collaboration with the former union leaders. Knights Apparel rehired some of the laid-off workers to produce college-logo apparel for a new “fair trade” brand, Alta Gracia. The workers are paid a living wage—three times higher than the country’s minimum—and their union contract also guarantees health and safety standards and fair treatment.42
Such efforts are continuing. In November 2013 two major apparel manufacturers, Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc. and Kentuckybased Fruit of the Loom, announced that they would require their Haitian suppliers to stop violating the country’s minimum wage laws. This followed a long-term campaign by Dominican, Haitian, Honduran, and Nicaraguan unions backed by Canadian and U.S. antisweatshop activists to end labor violations by Gildan and its suppliers.43
USAS and other groups have also been working to get U.S. brands to sign a legally binding agreement protecting worker safety in the Bangladeshi garment industry following the deaths of at least 1,129 people in the April 2013 collapse of a factory building at Rana Plaza in Dhaka. As of June 2014 the campaign had succeeded in convincing seventeen college clothing brands to sign the accord, while twenty-three universities had agreed to require their brands to sign it.44 Worldwide, 200 companies have signed the accord.45
Major unions in the United States and Europe are also backing labor struggles in other countries, often by linking up with local unions. In October 2014, the Metal Workers Union of the Philippines (MWAP) won a new collective bargaining agreement for its members employed by Dutch multinational NXP Semiconductors, a supplier to Apple. The contract included reinstatement for twelve union officers and “decent severance” for another twelve who had been fired in a union-busting move. The union called the victory a “showcase of what international solidarity can do.” It thanked the Geneva-based international union IndustriALL and online campaign organizations like SumOfUs, which mobilized 150,000 supporters to write to Apple, for putting pressure on NXP to respect workers’ rights.46
In early 2015 a newly formed Panamanian dockworkers union, SINTRAPORSPA (Sindicato Industrial de Trabajadores/as Portuarios y Similares de Panamá), won a contract from a subsidiary of the Hong Kong–based Hutchinson Port Holdings Limited (HPH). The agreement would raise wages by 27 percent over the next four years. The Panamanian union is affiliated with a major U.S.-based dockworkers union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which had helped the Panamanian workers in their fight for union recognition.47
3. Does the United States Welcome Refugees?
U.S. REFUGEE POLICY DEVELOPED out of a Cold War focus on defeating communism. For many years, refugees were explicitly defined in U.S. law as people fleeing Communist rule. This priority resulted in unequal treatment for people attempting to reach safety—even after 1980, when the legal definition of a refugee was made politically neutral. People displaced by U.S.-sponsored wars, or fleeing U.S.-backed human rights violators, have historically been denied asylum, while those migrating from Communist countries have generally been given the benefit of the doubt. The asylum process has gradually evolved away from its Cold War origins, yet many forms of bias still affect who is granted protection.
What’s a refugee?
In ordinary usage the word refugee refers to people forced to leave their country because of war, persecution, or natural
