‘Calling the border “broken” and “in crisis,” in a media-driven storm that repeats these words endlessly, foments a hysteria that treats these people as criminals or an enemy, justifying repression targeting them.’
Editor’s note: This article by David Bacon is part of a Tribuno del Pueblo and People’s Tribune series on debunking the lies about refugees, migrants, and immigrants. View the articles at https://peoplestribune.org/campaign-to-debunk-the-lies-about-immigrants-migrants-and-refugees/
No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage — these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the U.S. border every year. Calling the border “broken” and “in crisis,” in a media-driven storm that repeats these words endlessly, foments a hysteria that treats these people as criminals or an enemy, justifying repression targeting them.
Yet the Department of Homeland Security statistics show that over the decades the numbers of people crossing the border, and subject to deportation, rise and fall, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022 about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992 about 1.2 million were stopped at the border and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border totaled over a million in 29 of the last 46 years.
Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the real point is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, “In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”
In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992 it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an “invasion”, threatening to “shut the border”.
Should Trump win the election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing might be easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Oklahoma Senator James Lankford wants to reintroduce the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the U.S. to file their applications, and the Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited. Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding, applying to stay or stopping a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources for processing them.
But the whole idea that the people arriving at the border must be met with deterrence and enforcement does more than justify the tortuous immigration court system and the detention centers. Enforcement and deterrence are the means used to try to stop people from coming in the first place.
Texas Governor Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents.
But centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these, Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat anti-immigrant hysteria. Yet centrist Democrats, caving in to the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes, won’t acknowledge the causes of immigration. This failure long predates the current election season.
When large numbers of unaccompanied children started coming from Central America during the Obama administration, as it faced mid-term elections in 2014, the President told mothers not to send their children north, admonishing them as though they were bad parents. “Do not send your children to the borders”, he said. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.”
President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impelled them to come despite his warning, but drew the line at recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of our government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message – don’t come.
Today this unwillingness to look at US responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.
After Haitians finally rid themselves of the U.S.-supported Duvalier regime and elected Jean Bertrand Aristide president, the U.S. put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Miguel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of U.S.-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. “The treatment of Haitian migrants,” charges Bill Ong Hing (author of Humanizing Immigration), “demonstrates how immigration laws and policies are…a concrete manifestation of systemic and institutionalized racism.”
Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from U.S. political intervention and economic sanctions. Meanwhile, the ongoing effort to unseat its government continues. The current effort to discredit Venezuela’s recent election is a destabilization campaign, which will produce even more migration.
These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans into custody, and 163,701 Haitians. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.
The U.S. media endlessly interprets this as a “border crisis”, but the disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. For Sergio Sosa, who grew up during the Guatemalan civil war and now heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, migration is a form of resistance to empire. “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy,” he points out. “Now it’s our turn to cross borders. Migration is a form of fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we’re in the U.S.’s backyard. People have to resist to keep their communities and identities alive. We are demonstrating that we are human beings too.”
To win an alternative to the present system we have to uproot the causes of the displacement that makes migration involuntary, while recognizing the ongoing reality of migration and making it easy for people to come and to stay. No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come anyway. But we can easily see the consequences of this system — one that first produces migration and then tries its best to bar migrants and send them away — in the death of Victerma de la Sancha Cerros and her two children in the cold water of the Rio Grande this past January. It’s important to know the number of those who died last year trying to cross, but we can’t forget that these were people with names, whose lives have as much value as our own.
To republish this article, please contact David Bacon.
David Bacon is author of Illegal People—How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008) and The Right to Stay Home (2013), both from Beacon Press. His latest book, about the US-Mexico border, More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro, is coming in May 2022 from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
