The intersection of foreign policy and asylum policy

I’ll concentrate on certain socio-demographic features and, above all, migratory status and its causal factors and consequences, a field we could call “the juridical conditions of migration,”

because it’s the legal area that has supported the oscillating but—in recent years—unstoppable tendency to outlaw migration, as affirmed by Daniel Kanstroom with overwhelming historiographic evidence in his Deportation nation: Outsiders in American history (2007)² and

1 Bosniak, 2014, p.230.

2 Kanstroom, 2007.

Nicholas De Genova in Working the boundaries: Race, space and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago (2005).¹ The cumulative amounts for each Central American nationality, which I mentioned at the beginning, are the result of unequal policies. I will contrast them in order to show some features of American migratory politics, mainly the potent influence of geopolitical strategies. The first divergence to be emphasized is that in the early 1980s Nicaraguan migration to the United States was largely by the upper and middle classes, which expanded with members of the working class at the end of that decade it. Salvadoran and Guatemalan migration, in contrast, began with poor refugees. Moreoever, the first three waves of those Nicaraguan immigrants benefited from anti-Castro Cubans lobbying their Republican politician friends as an expression of solidarity toward those with whom they felt ideological affinity as opponents of the Sandinista regime.² This was a pristine example of what Susan Gzesh, from the University of Chicago, called the intersection of foreign policy and asylum policy³, which, in turn, is an example of how realpolitik conditions the various branches of governmental policy and how, as Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen explains,

“…international migrations are a function of larger geopolitical and transnational economic dynamics.”⁴

As a corollary, although migration policy has rarely been explicitly recognized as a component of US foreign policy, imperialism’s foreign aid and military ventures have had a wide-ranging impact on migration.⁵ The policy of welcoming Nicaraguan migrants was a domestic complement to the foreign policy of providing technical assistance and financial support to the armed counterrevolution actively undertaken by the Reagan administration in Nicaragua within the framework of the Cold War’s death throes. This geopolitical opportunity harvested beneficial conditions for the Nicaraguan immigrants with effects we can still trace today. We see the importance of a regularized initial migratory wave as a basis for future migrations in the fact that 70% of Nicaraguans who obtained permanent residency in 2012 did so by claiming immediate family ties with previously nationalized Nicaraguans. That step towards permanent residency was only used by 59% of Hondurans, 45% of Salvadorans and 43% of Guatemalans.⁶ This long protective shadow of Nicaraguan migrations from the eighties has also had other visible impacts.

1 De Genova, 2005.

2 Portes and Stepick, 1993.

3 Gzesh, 2006.

4 Sassen, 1995, pp.66-67.

5 Sassen, 1995, p.73.

6 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Office Statistics, Table 10:

Persons obtaining legal permanent resident status by broad class of admission and region and country of birth: fiscal year 2012.

For example, 20% of Nicaraguans in the United States aged 25 and older have a university degree, compared with 7% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and 8% of Hondurans¹; and 62% of Nicaraguans aged five and older speak fluent English, compared to 48% of Salvadorans, 47% of Hondurans and 43% of Guatemalans.²

Although the Nicaraguans’ favorable situation in these indicators is partly due to their mostly urban and middle or upper class origins, Nicaraguans have tended to be less subjected to deportations and more likely to be granted permanent residence and citizenship, as the figures in the table eloquently show. There are two ways to demonstrate this relative privilege in proportional terms. The first is to expand the number of deported Nicaraguans in line with that of each of the other Central American nationalities’ residents. Applying a simple rule of three and taking into account the proportional number from each country living in the United States: 1,383 deported Nicaraguans in 2013 would be equivalent to 4,201 Guatemalans, 2,457 Hondurans and 7,000 Salvadorans being deported. But these numbers are in sharp contrast with the 47,769 Guatemalans, 37,049 Hondurans and 21,602 Salvadorans who actually were deported in 2013.³ This indicator’s greatest explanatory weakness is that it doesn’t adjust for the dimensions of the current flow, as it is based on an aggregate over time that doesn’t necessarily coincide with today’s influx of migrants. Nor does it take into account any other immigrant policy apart from deportation, despite a legal environment where “illegal” and its complementary antithesis

“regularized” are at play in the granting of residence and citizenship, and in the temporary protection and temporary workers programs, refugee and asylum-seeker quotas, etc. The combination of these two limitations leaves this indicator based on a figure (the total of those currently living in the US) that is the result of policies, not a reflection of flow: if there are only 702,000 Hondurans in the US, it doesn’t mean that the flow of Hondurans has been just 35% of the flow of Salvadorans. The dimensions of the aggregate reflect a combination of factors: the size and longevity of its flow as well as selection and rejection policies. But even with these precautions, this indicator provides us some interesting pointers. There’s a clear disparity in the yardstick by which Nicaraguans and the other Central Americans are measured.

A second method of calculation, which attempts to overcome these weaknesses, is to compare the numbers of Central Americans who have been granted permanent residence with the number of deportees. This calculation can be complicated through the inclusion of those receiving

1 López et al., 2013, p.8.

2 López et al., 2013, p.9.

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

temporary protection status, temporary worker programs, naturalizations, etc., but the contrast between the numbers of deportees and those receiving permanent residence is enough to give an idea of how the migration policy filter is treating each nationality at any given time. This comparison is preferable because it measures the two extremes of the anti-migrant mood: the narrowing of acceptance (relative decline in residents) and the expansion of rejection (increase in deportees). And it has the advantage of sidestepping the thorny, hard-to-resolve issue of measuring the volume of migration flows, assuming that both positive and negative contact with migration authorities is proportional to the volume of migrants: the greater the flow, the more migrants in contact with migration authorities, both to regularize their status and for deportation.

Admittedly this contrast is impossible to measure “at a given moment.” Deportations are dealt with by only relatively expeditious processes, which could take a few days, months or even more than a year. The latter was the case with 3% of those detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009. Including the days before and after the deportation order, the whole process took 114 days on average in 2009.¹ On the other hand, the process of obtaining permanent residency often lasts several years and varies depending on the applicants’ virtues and defects: the way they enter, family ties with US citizens or residents, their work situation, their interests as an investor and their relationship with different US government bodies (especially the Army) and other background information.² Taking that time gap into account, my indicator contrasts the quotient of residencies granted in 1999 and deportations in 2002 with the quotient of deportations in 2013 and residencies issued in 2010. The results are reflected in this table, with Hondurans and Nicaraguans representing the two extremes.

1 Kerwin and Yi-Ying, 2009, pp.16-17.

2 For example, entrepreneurs who invest one million dollars – or at least half a million – in a poor area with high unemployment rates in the United States, are eligible. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Green Card Through Investment, http://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/green-card-through-investment

From 1999 to 2002, 1.2 Hondurans obtained residence for every 1 deported. From 2010 to 2013, the situation was reversed in which the implementation of migration policies resulted in 5.8 Hondurans deported for every 1 granted residence. At the other extreme are the Nicaraguans, who obtained 39 residences for every deportation in the first period. Their numbers never “went into the red” in the second period but they did drop to 2.5 residencies obtained for every deportation. This is the only nationality where the last column of the table continues to represent the number of residencies granted for every deportation. For their regional neighbors to the north, that column records deportations for every residency. Although this rate is quite imprecise and may seem an exceedingly defective reflection of the effects of migration policies (among other reasons because of the elastic time gaps explained above), it is consistent with figures from the Pew Hispanic Center based on the 2011 American Community Survey’s tables: 53% of immigrants with Nicaraguan origins have US citizenship, a rate placing them far above Salvadorans (29%), Guatemalans (23%) and Hondurans (22%).¹ Consequently, as there’s a correlation, albeit surely ambiguous, between migration status and household income, it also needs to be looked at.

The average annual income per household among Nicaraguans in the United States is $46,700.

Although it doesn’t greatly exceed the $40,000 of Salvadorans, it leaves the Guatemalan $36,400 and Honduran $31,000 in the dust, and is close to the national average of $50,000.² The poverty rate among Nicaraguans is 18%, over 10 points below Guatemalans (29%) and Salvadorans (33%).³ Finally, while 31% of Nicaraguans say they don’t have social security, 46% of Hondurans and Guatemalans say they don’t.⁴

The roots of these double standards must be unearthed from the thorny ground of the eighties, which was fertilized by Cold War geopolitics. As with the Afghanis and Iraqis today, Nicaraguans in the eighties benefited from adhering to the Republican government’s anti-communist creed. The Salvadorans and Guatemalans who began to arrive as refugees weren’t as well received because the Reagan administration reckoned, rightly so, that most of them didn’t

1 Brown and Patten, 2013, a2013, b2013, c2013.

2 López et al., 2013, p.10.

3 López et al., 2013, p.10.

4 López et al., 2013, p.11.

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