The three migration models and the consequences of going from one

share its belief. Furthermore, admitting as citizens the refugees from countries whose governments were receiving US military and economic support would have been a tacit admission that the Reagan administration had established alliances with human rights violators. In Nations of Emigrants: Shifting boundaries of citizenship in El Salvador and the United States, the much published socio-cultural anthropologist, Susan Bibler Coutin, points out: “The State Department, which was required to weigh in on asylum cases, routinely advised INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] district directors to deny Salvadorans and Guatemalans asylum cases.

These recommendations were generally followed.”¹

As with migrations by other Latin Americans, Central American migrations were, as investigative journalist Juan González noted so well in Harvest of Empire: A history of Latinos in America², the harvest of an Empire’s major intervention in the economic, political and military of the Central American countries’ affairs, in which the migration policies were responsible for separating the anti-Sandinista wheat from the revolutionary chaff. Salvadorans, lacking sponsors, hardly obtained 2-3% approval rates from their asylum applications.³ Guatemalans were even a percentage point lower. Nicaraguans, on the other hand, were rewarded with high approval rates, reaching a peak of 84% in 1987. A State Department spokesperson backed this prerogative by stating: “The Sandinistas, however, have developed Nicaragua’s legal system, mass organizations and armed forces into instruments of repression. The State Security Directorate in the Ministry of Interior has institutionalized human rights abuse with the national police system and the security prisons.” These substantial approval rates were reduced to a meager 19% in 1990, as soon as government officials noticed that the new applicants were “only” fleeing economic conditions or seeking family reunification.⁴ In fact, the attitude was modified by the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat and the change in the Nicaraguan government’s political-ideological model.

1.2 The three migration models and the consequences of going from one model

arrival of workers, who had few recognized rights. Massachusetts received with open arms those who shared the same religious vision as the founders but excluded all those whose beliefs challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. Pennsylvania, in contrast, had a high regard for pluralism, a trait that made it the most diverse colony with respect to religion, language and culture.¹ US migration policies in the eighties followed a secular version of the migration selection model applied in Massachusetts. It was Reagan’s sieve, which strained out rebels and welcomed fugitives from communist regimes. Besides the contrast between nationalities, recent figures also show a marked descent from the pedestal on which migration policies had earlier placed Nicaraguans and a deteriorated situation for all Central Americans. Nicaraguan deportations went from 468 in 2002 to 1,383 in 2013. In the same period they made an Olympic leap from 5,396 to 47,769 for Guatemalans, from 4,946 to 37,049 for Hondurans and from 4,066 to 21,602 for Salvadorans. In total, deportations from these Central Americans countries went from 14,876 to 107,803.² And those figures aren’t about a greater flow producing more deportations. With more migrants, proportionally fewer residence applications were successful, falling from 56,271 to 38,667. At each end of the funnel, migration policies exacerbated its dominant traits: narrower to enter and wider to expel.

The decline of the “Massachusetts model” didn’t clear the way for a more balanced model with policies less welcoming to Nicaraguans and less antagonistic to Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans. Rather it was replaced by the “Virginia model,” that of workers with very few rights, applied with indiscriminate severity. Nicaraguans stopped being pampered by migration policies. Despite what the figures indicate at first glance, they are now as hard hit as the region’s other nationalities. The positive indicator of 2.5 residents for every deportee only expresses inertial movement: a relatively high volume of legal migration has been maintained through family reunification based on a large group of previously established, authorized migrants. Among all admission categories, authorized migrants’ family members represented about 66% of those admitted as permanent residents for all nationalities in the broad span between 2002 and 2012.³ This means that today’s migrants are reaping the fruits sown by previous migrations. That’s why Hondurans seem to be the most affected by deportations and have less access to residence. Unlike Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, Hondurans weren’t included in the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997, better known as the NACARA law. Nor were

1 Martin, 2010.

2 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ERO Annual Report, FY 2013 ICE Immigration Removals, p.4.

3 Monger and Yankay, 2013, p.3. Monger and Randall, 2010, p.3. Jefferys, 2007, p.2. Rytina, 2005, p.3.

they included in the ABC law, so called because it derived from American Baptist Churches v.

Thornburgh, the suit the Baptist Churches won in 1990 against the US attorney general and the INS director for violating national and international laws by denying asylum to Salvadorans and Guatemalans who arrived in the US fleeing political repression in the eighties.¹ The ABC ruling ipso facto stopped deportation of these nationalities, benefiting those who hadn’t been included in the amnesty known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. It covered some 190,000 Salvadorans and 50,000 Guatemalans.² ABC and NACARA were forms of amnesty, belligerent regularization processes that between 1990 and 2000 officially reduced the number of undocumented Nicaraguans from 50,000 to 21,000 and of Salvadorans from 298,000 to 189,000.

The arrival of new migrants, however, increased the net number of undocumented Guatemalans from 118,000 to 144,000 in that same time period, while the number of undocumented Hondurans, excluded from these initiatives, jumped from 42,000 to 138,000.³

We can hypothesize from these figures that the policies are no longer favoring Nicaraguans, even in an attenuated way, are moderately affecting Salvadorans and Guatemalans and hitting Hondurans the hardest. While some deportations may be proportional to the flow and have some chance of regularization depending on the situation each nationality’s migrants have accumulated over time, the United States, simply put, didn’t want to pay, in migration legislation, for the services Honduras provided as a military base during the eighties. As the operational base and R&R area for US soldiers and armed anti-Sandinista counterrevolutionaries, Honduras didn’t figure as a war zone. Today, its migrants are at a relative disadvantage as the residue of geopolitical-migratory history. Certain nationalities are less affected due to favorable remnants:

established migrants on which family reunification can be built, greater familiarity with bureaucratic procedures and greater networks to communicate this knowledge. Countering disproportionate faith in public policies, it is due far less than assumed to their governments lobbying US politicians.

Migration to the United States began to decline in 2009, the year after the onset of the financial crisis and what has been called “the job drought.”⁴ But that decline has been less drastic, fluctuating between 26% and 32% a year. In February 2011, researchers from the Pew Hispanic Center talked about a decline in the number of undocumented migrants, attributed to a fall in

1 U.S. Department of Justice, 1990.

2 Eig, 1998.

3 Office of Policy and Planning, p.17.

4 Krugman, 2012, p.16.

Mexican migration.¹ A year later they spoke about “zero migration” of Mexicans and a slowdown in Central American migration.² The Mexican Interior Ministry’s National Institute of Migration said the flow of Central Americans was stabilizing, which it attributed to the effect of restrictive policies.³ Anti-migrant policies, specifically the implementation of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities Program,” were identified as the decline’s causal elements. The resurgence of Operation Gatekeeper was of high importance.⁴ The volume of deportations had allegedly reached a historic peak of 395,000 in 2009.⁵ The economic crisis was also assumed to have given potential newcomers negative signals and encouraged their voluntary return, according to findings from a workshop on economic cycles, demographic change and migrations that the International Organization for Migration quickly put together.⁶

However, regarding migration to the United States, subsequent evidence showed that Central American migration to this country had not necessarily begun a new cycle but rather had perhaps entered a small depression within the great, long and ascending, migration wave. In September 2013 the Pew Hispanic Center released a new report in which it announced a migration surge of undocumented non-Mexican groups in 2011 and 2012, with a strong presence of Central Americans.⁷ This was due to the economic crisis motivating migration through its effects on Central American countries, whose economies are dependent on the US; especially El Salvador, whose symbiosis with the US economy has been firmly fixed by dollarization of its currency since 2001. Another spur to migration was shown to be the growing levels of violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, statistically associated with intentions to emigrate.⁸ A December 2013 survey by the Jesuit’s Reflection, Research and Communication Team (ERIC) in Honduras revealed that 36% of those interviewed wanted to emigrate.⁹ We will see this in detail in the following section about asylum and violence.

If the illegalizing machinery fails to stem migration even in times of crisis, what does it achieve? Policies are a sieve, not a dike. What do they strain out and what do they let through?

1 Passel and Cohn, 2011.

2 Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2012.

3 Rodríguez, Berumen and Ramos, 2011.

4 Nevins, 2010.

5 López et al., 2011, p.11.

6 IOM, 2012, p.36.

7 Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera, 2013, p.16.

8 Hiskey, Malone, and Orcés, 2014.

9 ERIC, 2014, p.12.

There are clear indications that there’s a filter, but we don’t know how much systemic/automatic premeditation and/or malice aforethought is embodied in the policies. Does the destination impose a requirement that means only those who can afford a coyote’s expensive services and, therefore, those who have had access to more education tend to go to the US? Or does illegality work like a “scarlet letter” limiting access to better paid neighborhoods, schools, incomes and occupations? We can see this in information that comes from my fieldwork. Up to now, this inquiry does show that there was a filter with ideological criteria in the eighties: an open door to those who shared the same beliefs. Geopolitical criteria continue to be applied to nations at war, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and are blatantly flaunted in the expedited path to residence for Iraqi or Afghani interpreters who assisted US officials and those employed by the US government for at least one year since 2001 (for the Afghanis) or since 2003 (for the Iraqis), as established in the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 and the National Defense Authorization Act, a federal law stipulated in the Defense Department’s budget.¹ But this filter has ceased to be applied to Central Americans, whose “illegalization” or acceptance has undergone an ideological change in migration policy: From a geopolitical to a nationalist/racist focal point? To a focus on class? To the “Virginia model,” where the market imposes its demand for labor or for “clients” in private migrant detention centers?

An increase in undocumented migrants is connected to a shift in the legality line, reflected in chronological evolution. The dark side to the increase in undocumented migrants is that it provides an opportunity for big capital to avail itself of a reserve army while holding down salaries.

As anthropologist Nicholas De Genova pointed out, the “illegal alien” classification is enormously profitable because it serves (not always) to provide cheap labor. This crucial finding is so well established it’s irrefutable, but in itself, this isn’t enough because it doesn’t examine—and therefore normalizes—the origin of this legal status, which De Genova calls the “illegalization” of the migrant.² This illegalization also has a flip side: it increases the number of those who defy the State, with the census revealing that Nicaraguan migrants react by assuming illegality, not avoiding it. In this illegalization process, migrants have assumed illegality, with all its risks and challenges.

Some experts’ appeals for universal citizenship, and the semantic battle attempting to eliminate—

1 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Green Card for an Iraqi Who Assisted the U.S. Government, http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/green-card-through-special-categories-jobs/green-card-iraqi-who-assisted-us-government U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Green Card for an Afghan Who Assisted the U.S. Government, http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/green-card-through-special-categories-jobs/green-card-afghan-who-assisted-us-government

2 De Genova, 2005, p.214.

or delegitimize, so showing its spurious origin—the stigma of “illegal” that the State stamps on undocumented migrants can’t erase the fact that the foundational act in the relationship of most Central American migrants with the United States is a transgression of that country’s laws.