OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
The following chapters provide a history of Central American migration in the 1980s and 1990s, government responses to that migration, and the advocacy networks that emerged to shape the policies of states. Chapter1 provides a brief history of the wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala to explain the causes of the migration. It discusses the reasons why people migrated and where they settled, following their migration within Central America to countries such as Costa Rica and Honduras, and explaining why thousands ultimately chose to migrate northward. Chapters 2 through 4 examine how Mexico, the United States, and Canada, the countries that received the largest aggregate number of refugees, each responded to the refugee crisis. It examines how refugee policy was made, the role that different agents and interests played in shaping that policy, and the impact that individual policies had on neighboring countries.
Mexico is known as an emigrant-producing nation, but this discourse denies its parallel tradition of accommodating exiles and immigrants from all over the world. During the 1980s alone, Mexico became host to an estimated 750,000 Central Americans, primarily from El Salvador and Guatemala; and over a million more transited through the country on their way to the United States and Canada. Chapter 2 examines the political debates within Mexico regarding sovereignty and international responsibilities as well as refugees and economic immigrants.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico tried to assert itself as a middle power in hemispheric affairs, challenging the United States on its Nicaraguan and Salvadoran policies, and assuming a prominent role in the Contadora peace initiative. (The Contadora Group consisted of representatives of Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, who first met in 1983 on the island of Contadora, off the coast of Panama, to establish a blueprint for a negotiated peace settlement.) From the beginning, Mexico denied the US discourse that the wars in Central America were part of an East-West struggle and asserted the rights of Central Americans to challenge unjust structures and institutions in their own countries and to shape their own destiny. However, this position was threatened by the presence of thousands of refugees along its southern border, which exacerbated centuries-old tensions with neighboring Guatemala almost to the brink of war, and jeopardized the political stability of Chiapas, a state of key importance to Mexico's overall economic development. Mexico's challenge, then, was to assert and balance its international responsibilities without alienating Guatemala and the United States. Its refugee and immigration policy was conceptualized against the backdrop of these foreign and domestic policy debates.
Even though Mexico was not a signatory to the UN Convention and Protocol, it granted official protection, albeit reluctantly, to one of the largest groups of refugees in the region, in large part because of pressure from various non-governmental organizations and from the refugees themselves. With the help of the UNHCR, the Mexican government established camps in Chiapas, Campeche, and Quintana Roo that housed forty-six thousand refugees, mostly Maya Indians, and then later assisted them either to repatriate or to legalize their status in Mexican society. However, the majority of Central Americans living in Mexico did not receive any recognition or assistance from the state or the UNHCR. Churches and charitable organizations that had direct contact with the refugees estimated that as many as half a million Salvadorans lived and worked anonymously in the major cities, and as many as two hundred thousand Guatemalans preferred to live outside the UNHCR camps and settlements, even if it meant forfeiting assistance. The Mexican government justified its neglect by claiming that the Central Americans were transmigrantes, or economic migrants, traveling through Mexico on their way to the United States or Canada, even though evidence suggested otherwise. In the end, Mexico's neglect encouraged many Central Americans to move further northward in search of higher wages and better working conditions. As a result, by the late 1980s the United States actively pressured Mexico to do more to control its southern border and step up its deportation of Central American workers, and in the NAFTA era Mexico was willing to comply.7 Once again, Central Americans became the pawns of foreign policy decisions.
Of the three countries, the United States hosted the largest number of Central American refugees. Those who entered the United States—most of them illegally—encountered a society that was less than enthusiastic about their arrival. Since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the United States had accommodated millions of immigrants, refugees, and undocumented workers from a variety of countries, and Americans perceived the Central Americans as yet another drain on their economy. The influx of so many undocumented migrants in particular—from Mexico, Central America, and other regions—contributed to the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1980s that culminated in the passage of the restrictive 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which imposed a variety of measures and sanctions to try to control the entry of undocumented workers.
But for a segment of the US population, the migration of Central Americans presented a moral dilemma. Its members believed that the United States had a responsibility to assist the migrants from Central America because of the role their government had played in escalating the violence. The Reagan and Bush administrations denied that the “feet people” were refugees, because to acknowledge this would have implied that the governments they supported with billions of dollars each year were terrorizing their own citizens—an action that would both alienate the United States' Central American allies and sabotage continued congressional aid for these regimes. In the 1980s, the Central America advocacy networks in the United States called for a reassessment of US foreign and immigration policies. Chapter 3 examines how these networks demanded accountability from the US government for its actions in Central America and on the United States-Mexico border—first, through protest and civil obedience, lobbying, and the manipulation of the media and, ultimately, through the courts and the Congress.
Of the three countries, Canada did not have a long tradition of immigration from Latin America, in part because of its climate and geographic location, but also because of its limited diplomatic presence and trade relations within the hemisphere prior to 1970. During the administrations of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1968—79, 1980—84), Parliament reevaluated its relationship with Latin America, increasing its embassies and consulates and creating a number of new institutions to oversee trade, investment, and development. Like Mexico, Canada tried to craft a foreign policy independent in tone and substance from the policies of the United States, partly in response to nationalist complaints that Canada was a “US territory” overly influenced by the culture and world view of its superpower neighbor. Canada's foreign and immigration policies, then, became means through which to distinguish its international priorities and assert its distinct cultural identity.
Canada's first experience with accommodating large numbers of immigrants from Latin America came in the 1970s, when it agreed to offer asylum to Chilean refugees fleeing the rightist military dictatorship. Less than a decade later, thousands of Central Americans migrated to Canada because of its more generous asylum policies. Unlike the United States, which prior to 1990 granted asylum to fewer than 3 percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, Canada granted asylum to up to 80 percent of applicants. The number of Central Americans increased significantly after the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, demonstrating the impact that the polices of neighboring countries had on the character and flow of migration. In response to IRCA, thousands of Central Americans, especially Salvadorans, arrived at Canadian border cities requesting asylum. The administrative backlog that it created pointed to the weaknesses in its refugee determination system. That Canada kept the door open was in no small part due to pressure from advocacy networks that forced a reexamination of national debates about Canadian identity and the country's role in the hemisphere.