Behind the Immigration Crisis

Boston, MA, Nov. 19, 2014 – This summer, a media firestorm centered around an influx of children coming over the border illegally from Mexico and Central America. Commercial news outlets like CBS, NBC and CNN called it an immigration “crisis.”

Somerville Neighborhood News (SNN), which recently focused on the issue [see stories here and here] decided to ask a scholar about some of the root causes of immigration from Central America.

“When we think of the word crisis, It’s often used in the mainstream media to mean a crisis for the United States,” Professor Aviva Chomsky of Salem State University began.

Chomsky had just spent the evening speaking at a forum in downtown Boston along with Gabe Camacho, the Immigration Programs Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The forum focused on the causes behind this crisis as well as the roll the U.S. has played.

The issues covered ranged from the historical precedents set by the Bracero program in World War Two to the current North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). All of this lead to, according to Chomsky, “people being turned into refugees by economic policies that make it impossible to survive on their land.”

In an interview with SNN after the event, Chomsky spoke about the use of the word “crisis” by the commercial media.

“There has to be some sort of a crisis going on to make children leave their homes and take an extraordinarily dangerous journey to the border and across the border. The crisis is clearly in Central America,” she said. However, “when the term ‘crisis’ has been used, it’s been more to refer to a crisis that’s been happening to the U.S…. rather than thinking about who is actually in crisis.”

Chomsky also noted that the people are not fleeing from all Central American countries.

Instead, “they are coming from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They are not coming from Nicaragua, Belize, Panama and Costa Rica,” she said.

“There are very clear reasons why migrants are coming from those three countries and they have to do with U.S. interventions in those countries that have created extraordinary repression against popular movements for social change in those countries, scorched earth tactics have driven people off the land, tactics amounting to genocide in Guatemala throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. As well as the neoliberal policies that have followed those. It was the wars of the 1980s that sent the first generation of migrants to the U.S., many of those migrating now are the children of those who migrated in the 1980s,” she said.

“Many, many immigrants don’t want to migrate,” the professor added. “They migrate because they have to, not because they want to. Many, many immigrants would much rather stay home, if they could stay home. So one of the goals of our domestic, foreign and immigration policy should be to allow people who want to stay home to stay home and that means drastically changing our foreign and economic policies towards Mexico and Central America, the places people are coming from.”