{"id":121977,"date":"2018-11-12T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=121977"},"modified":"2018-11-12T11:01:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T11:01:17","slug":"stop-saying-migrant-caravan-theyre-asylum-seekers-escaping-a-conflict-that-the-us-created","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/11\/stop-saying-migrant-caravan-theyre-asylum-seekers-escaping-a-conflict-that-the-us-created\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Saying \u2018Migrant Caravan\u2019: They\u2019re Asylum Seekers Escaping a Conflict That the US Created"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 Oct 2018 – <\/em>On Monday [22 Oct] evening, journalist and author Steve Silberman tweeted<\/a> a video interview clip of three white, middle-aged Trump supporters waiting to hear the president speak at a rally in Houston. When asked what they were looking forward to hearing the president address, one woman mentioned the so-called \u201cmigrant caravan\u201d as a point of concern.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s an invasion of our country,\u201d she said of the travelers, and she was eager to see what the president had to say about it. \u201cBut,\u201d she added, \u201cI love everything that comes out of his mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t really matter what he says,\u201d chimed another woman, this one\u00a0clad in a red MAGA cap and sweatshirt. \u201cWe\u2019ll support it.\u201d She then explained, beaming, that she\u2019s a \u201cTrumpette\u201d who will support anything the president says or does.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

(Photo by John Moore\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

Silberman expressed requisite horror at the interviewees\u2019 flagrantly uncritical support of President Trump, whose fandom seemed to him more cult-like than political. But partisan politics are often cult-like in nature, and where it comes to the years-long plight of Central American asylum seekers, a population\u2019s unchecked support of presidential decision-making is loyal to no party.<\/p>\n

And, to be clear, the roughly 5,000 men, women, and children<\/a> making the northward trek, by foot, from the Central American isthmus upward through Mexico and into the US are <\/em>asylum seekers, not \u201cmigrants.\u201d The difference is meaningful, and there are grave human rights implications in the repeated misuse of language to describe their predicament.<\/p>\n

For the sake of everyone following along at home, a quick vocab refresher. Migrants are temporary, itinerant travelers who move between countries for (usually) work. The term \u201cmigrant workers\u201d is actually kind of redundant; when correctly using \u201cmigrant\u201d to describe a person regularly crossing back and forth over borders, it\u2019s implicit that they\u2019re a \u201cworker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, it\u2019s become a point of accepted political conversation that a majority of Central Americans entering the United States are \u201cmigrants.\u201d That word has been repeated in journalistic coverage over a course of years and across political administrations. It was eventually adopted by aid groups and NGOs as shorthand for the complex, decades-long political reality that formed these immigrants\u2019 tragic circumstance \u2014 that is, the reason they\u2019re fleeing en<\/em> masse. But, well-meaning as intentions may have been, that terminology condenses their lived reality into a rhetorically misleading catchphrase that, by this point, has taken on a double entendre of xenophobic threat: \u201cthe Central American migrant crisis<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Moore\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

There is no migrant crisis.<\/p>\n

There is, however, a refugee crisis. That crisis is the effect of at least a half-century (and, arguably, twice that<\/a>) of calamitous US political intervention in Central America, and not \u2014\u00a0as President Trump would have us believe \u2014 the inevitable byproduct of \u201cbad hombres\u201d who may as well be \u201canimals<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

US-funded military coups, resource exploitation, and American policies of economic neoliberalism in El Salvador have destabilized the entire region, and effectively created a climate where paramilitary-aligned drug cartels can thrive.<\/p>\n

Many Americans, including the president himself, conveniently forget that El Salvador was embroiled in a bloody, 12-year civil war from 1980 to 1992 that the US essentially funded. The Reagan administration poured money into the Salvadoran government\u2019s right-wing military regime, training paramilitary and death squad units who were later found to have committed more than 85 percent<\/a> of the murders, kidnappings, and tortures that marked the ugly, dozen-year ordeal. At the same time, similar wars were under way in Guatemala and Nicaragua, spurring a mass exodus of immigration from the region throughout the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Flash forward to 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act<\/a>. The new law made a legal path to citizenship much more difficult for immigrants, and also facilitated deportations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Moore\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Clinton\u2019s law coincided with the mass incarceration of Central American gang members and petty criminals in US cities like Los Angeles. These gangs reconvened when their members were deported<\/a> to their politically and economically destabilized, and militarized, Central American homelands; it was there that they were able to amass influence and establish a reign of terror, armed with American assault weapons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

MS-13, the most infamous gang in the world, is the direct byproduct of United States policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a problem that\u2019s American made through and through, so to treat it as though it\u2019s some external threat being foisted on America obscures the fact that it\u2019s our foreign policies, our military intervention, and our long history that created MS-13 in the first place,\u201d Daniel Denvir, writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School\u2019s Fair Punishment Project, told\u00a0Democracy Now<\/a><\/em>\u00a0in January.<\/p>\n

At this point, membership in MS-13 is estimated up to 50,000<\/a> members worldwide. Recent history has shown us that mass detention and deportation only accelerates the gang\u2019s growth. If Trump \u2014 or really any American political administration, ever \u2014 wanted to demonstrate a serious commitment to staunching the violence of this terrifying, multinational gang, they\u2019d begin by enacting a modicum of accountability for a chain of effects that the United States\u00a0 nearly singlehandedly put into place. Allowing asylum seekers to make their claims to safety would be a notable start. In the meantime, let\u2019s call them by their name.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 yahoo.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no migrant crisis. There is, however, a refugee crisis. That crisis is the effect of at least a half-century (and, arguably, twice that) of calamitous US political intervention in Central America, and not \u2014 as President Trump would have us believe \u2014 the inevitable byproduct of \u201cbad hombres\u201d who may as well be \u201canimals.\u201d US-funded military coups, resource exploitation, and American policies of economic neoliberalism in El Salvador have destabilized the entire region, and effectively created a climate where paramilitary-aligned drug cartels can thrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":121980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}