All posts tagged Migration

Book Excerpt: A Life Before Leaving

Catherine Grau, Research & Data Coordinator of the Immigration Lab

Ernesto Castañeda, Director of the Center of Latin American & Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book, A Mountain of Dreams, an ethnographic exploration of unaccompanied youth migration to the United States between 2019-2022. This project centers a small community of new arrivals in the DC area as they navigate new adulthood, immigration law, and complex relationships.

Note: Names have been changed where needed for interviewee privacy

Photo of cane field on fire in Central America, taken by Catherine Grau.
Photo of cane field on fire in Central America, taken by Catherine Grau.

As the weeks stretched into months, even Sol stopped asking when her father was coming home. Her younger brother was still in diapers. Her mother had been working in the nearby city of La Libertad, El Salvador but she wasn’t making enough to support three kids on her own, so she moved further away. “For a long time, my mother had to go work in the big city, in San Salvador,” Sol expressed. Her mother explained that she was going to find work in the big city and send money to Sol’s sister for anything that they might need. She blinked the tears away as her mother explained why she had to leave, that Sol’s father wasn’t going to live with them again right now, and that her sister was going to be just like her mother and do all the things that her mother wouldn’t be able to do anymore. It made Sol sad to see her mother go, but she thought she understood. Her mother would come back; she just couldn’t be home right then.

Sol remembered, “I got a little bit used to the fact that my mother was gone, but the situation changed because I had my little brother. Now he was the one who was crying when she was gone, it was him who was sad. I felt really, really bad watching him, and aside from that I felt bad seeing that my sister was responsible for both him and me, basically she had to raise us”[1]. They were forced to start acting like adults at a young age. “At that time my sister was fourteen, and well, my brother, older sister, and I lived alone. To be honest, it was very difficult.”2 Her sister tried her best to take care of young Sol and their baby brother. Every morning, Sol’s sister combed her hair before she met her friends for the long walk to school. Her sister stopped attending school.

It was only in the years after her mother left that Sol began to understand how alone she and her siblings really were. They lived in the countryside; their nearest neighbors were little more than distant shapes beyond the fields in the morning. Three children living alone in an isolated house was not a secret that they wanted anyone to discover. They shuddered at each rustle in the sugarcane fields and shrank from the window as slow-moving trucks spat dusty gravel toward their door. For years, Sol and her siblings spent each night waiting anxiously for the morning to come. Eventually, Sol’s mother returned from the big city. Her worn sandals searched for open dirt along the overgrown footpath that led to her children. The door swung open, the barricade forgotten in a corner. Sweet words, small hands, and tight embraces all tumbled together. Once, Sol had been too small to wrap her arms around her mother’s shoulders. But she had grown in the years that had passed. They stood together awkwardly, all four of them, uncertain where one hug ended and the next should begin. The stars seemed a little brighter that night, and the whispers of the sugarcane field seemed a little further away. Then one morning, Sol watched her sister fold the same blouse that she always wore to church. Instead of putting it where it belonged, her sister packed it into a small bag. Sol was confused. Her sister said that she was going to live somewhere else. She said she was sorry. She promised that it was still going to be okay. She said that she would miss Sol very much. She kept talking after that, but Sol never heard what she said. Her ears felt as if the ocean was inside them.

Mothers were supposed to leave for work. Sisters weren’t supposed to leave at all. The bag she was holding looked much too small to carry Sol’s world away. The tears were back, and they wouldn’t stop coming. “When she left, I felt like I lost my other half. And that was where it all came spilling out…I cried every day, I was sad every day for a year,”[3] she said. Sol had grown to accept that her father was gone so long ago that the grief had been replaced by a dull ache. She had nodded her head when her mother left and tried her best to understand. But with her sister gone, Sol felt like a stranger in her favorite places. For years, she had fallen asleep knowing that her sister was only one whisper away. Now she wasn’t.[4] The day that her father appeared on her doorstep, the pandilleros had been waiting for him after work. They wanted money that wasn’t his to give. The man with the money was wealthy enough that everyone in the region knew his name. The Mara Salvatrucha knew it too. They couldn’t reach him, but they could reach the men who worked for him. They found Sol’s father first. “The only person that they could contact was him,” Sol remembers learning. “So, one day they stopped him, out of nowhere”[5]. Everything she knew was explained by her mother, who had heard it from her father. “They threatened him. They told him that he had to make the man pay them an enormous sum of money. I don’t know how much it was, but it was thousands and thousands of dollars and if he didn’t do it, my father, his wife–even though they weren’t together anymore–and my siblings and me, they would kill us all. That was how it all started,” Sol explained.

The first day that the men with tattoos looked at her, Sol told herself it was a coincidence and kept walking. She wasn’t sure on the second day, but her feet didn’t stop moving. By the third, they were calling after her. They told her that her father needed to pay. She kept walking. They told her they weren’t asking. She kept walking. The ocean in her ears wasn’t there to protect her. She heard every word clearly. There was no glass wall to separate her from them. She didn’t turn around. There was no barricade to protect her. She wasn’t even sure she would make it home. They shouted her name, drawing out the last letter into a leer. She couldn’t breathe. Their footsteps were close. She needed to keep moving. All that mattered was the door. She kept walking. “They told me that if they weren’t paid, before they killed us, they would do things to me…,”[6] Sol remembered. She made it home before she cried. That day and every day that came after, she always made it home before she cried. As soon as the door was barricaded, the tears poured out. She shut herself into the furthest corner and refused to talk to anybody. Sol remembers being more afraid than she had ever been before. The panic attacks came next. She gasped for air, choking on fear and desperation and temporary relief all at the same time. In the moments where her lungs simply refused air, she drew small breaths in a low rattle before the next round of sobs forced out more than she could hope to inhale again. Even as her mind screamed, her body refused to seek solace in the arms of her worried mother. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was afraid, but I didn’t want my family to be more scared than they already were.”[7] Even if her mother hadn’t heard Sol crying, it would have been impossible for her to ignore her  daughter’s uniform folded and untouched for days at a time. She knew that Sol had always dreamed of being an architect. But as more and more school days were spent behind a wooden beam at home, they both knew that it was all slipping away. Her first year of secondary school was unfinished. There was no chance for university anymore.

Sol’s teachers never knew what had happened to her. She had been a promising student; she imagined that her teachers would agree. Sol had been among the first to raise her hand when a new question was poised. She sat quietly while her classmates scribbled on the chalkboard and always waited for her turn to speak. Her assignments were always pristine, her uniform neatly pressed, and her words carefully chosen. When her classmates grumbled or folded their arms across their chests, Sol had pressed harder. She had dreamed of a scholarship to university for as long as she had known that they existed. She never missed a day of school. But suddenly, her desk was empty. When attendance was taken, her name went unanswered for weeks. She had never told her teachers about home, so sharing the details of her journey back from school had been unthinkable. By the time she might have wanted to explain or apologize, it hadn’t been safe for her to try. Sol hoped that her grades wouldn’t fall too far with all the assignments she had missed. Of course, if her name disappeared from the roster then it didn’t matter anyway. She wondered if anyone had asked about her. Maybe they just assumed that another empty desk meant another family gone in the night. Sol was still there, hiding in her home. But for all anyone outside knew, she was gone.

The pandilleros laughed as they saw the small family walking down the road to church, sending Sol and her family fleeing back to safety behind the wooden plank. Nothing changed. “You know, in that time we didn’t even think about leaving.” Sol explained, “After insisting and insisting to my father, he finally tried to file a report with the police. And, well, basically the police told him that they couldn’t do anything, that they were sorry, but they couldn’t involve themselves in this”[8].Nothing changed after the police report. Except that the pandilleros burnt the sugarcane fields next to their house. Sol was told that photos of the burned fields had landed in the rich man’s lap with a message that morning. MS-13 wanted silence, and they wanted money. The fields outside Sol’s house were a warning of what would follow if either of their demands remained unmet. “It wasn’t just words anymore,” Sol explained, “they were beginning to act physically…they were already committing actions. And that was when we started to search for alternatives, where to move or what to do, but in El Salvador the gangs are very organized.” Sol knew that their government-issued Documento Único de Identidad cards would prevent them from ever living somewhere that was not controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha. She also knew that moving anywhere controlled by Barrio 18 would mean death. The pandilleros there would see their former municipality printed right below their photos and assume that they were spies. “If we went to another place that also belonged to [MS-13], they would communicate with each other and then kill us,” she said. Their IDs meant that they could never simply disappear into another town. “So, we came to a point where there was nowhere to go in El Salvador, because the police didn’t do anything. The rich man too, he protected himself, but he didn’t protect us. My father didn’t do anything, and we couldn’t do anything”[9].

Sol’s mother called and explained everything to a friend living in the United States. “Thank God, he helped us, he could not pay for us to live in the U.S. indefinitely, but he could help us escape El Salvador if we wanted. We made the decision to accept his proposal, because we were desperate. We had no idea what to do,”[10] Sol remembered. Soon after, Sol, her mother, her brother, and her sister packed their backpacks and left. It was December of 2019, and Sol was sixteen years old.

1. “Pues después de eso, la situación cambió un poco, yo me llegué a acostumbrar un poco a que mi mamá se fuera, pero ahora la situación era distinta, porque tenía a mi hermano pequeño, y ahora él era el que lloraba cuando ella se iba, él que estaba triste, y pues, yo me sentía muy, muy mal viéndolo a él, y aparte me sentía mal viendo que mi hermana estaba responsable de él y mí, siendo ella una niña, básicamente.”

2.“Yo nunca tuve la certeza de si iba a permanecer en un solo lugar en toda mi infancia, y pues era muy triste para mí. Como hija de ellos, ver como ellos discutían y como pasaba todo. Y era muy triste para mí también ver mi mama muy triste ella.”

3. “Entonces, cuando ella se fue, yo sentí como que se fue mi otra mitad, y es donde se derramó todo. En ese tiempo yo estuve, se podría decir llorando todos los días, triste todos los días, como por un año. … Y pues, mi mamá regresó a casa, pero mi hermana fue la que se tuvo que ir, se tuvo que mudar, y pues básicamente yo me crié con mi hermana, y a falta de tener mi figura materna presente todo el tiempo, quien estaba presente para mí era mi hermana.”

4. We interviewed Sol (a pseudonym) in the DMV in 2026 and reconstructed this part of her life as part of a project for the Humanities Truck at American University and a book project we are working on.

5. “Entonces, un día se acercaron a él, así de la nada, entraron y todo. Yo no estaba, yo no presencié eso, pero me lo contó mi mamá, porque él habló con ella. Pero básicamente lo amenazaron. Le dijeron que él tenía que hacer que el señor les dieran una suma muy grande de dinero. No sé cuánto era, pero era una suma muy grande de miles de dólares y que, si no lo hacía, que mi papá, su esposa, me decían ellos que era mi mamá, pero ellos ya no estaban juntas, y sus hijos, que eran mis hermanos y yo, básicamente que nos iban a matar a todos. Y, este, pues para nosotros fue horrible.”

6. “Y empezaban a decirme que, si no les pagaban, de que antes de matarnos que me iban a hacer cosas a mí, ya saben en qué tono, no…lo decían de una forma horrible, sinceramente muy, muy fea. Pues básicamente ellos empezaron a seguirme, a acosarme, a decirme cosas feas, cosas vulgares, y yo me acuerdo de que yo me sentía muy insegura.”

7.“A mí en ese tiempo sí, ahora que me acuerdo me daban ataques de ansiedad. Cuando llegaba a la casa yo llegaba a llorar, me encerraba, no quería hablar con nadie. Porque estaba en yo, que estaba asustada y aparte porque no quería asustar a mi familia más de lo que ya estaba.”

8. “Pues fíjate que en ese momento no pensábamos en migrar, de hecho, en un tiempo, después de tanto insistir e insistir a mi papá, él intentó poner una denuncia, una denuncia con la policía, y pues la policía básicamente dijo que ellos no podían hacer nada, que lo sentían, que es que ellos no podían meterse en eso.”

9. “y ahí fue donde empezamos a buscar alternativas de a dónde movernos o qué hacer, pero en El Salvador las pandillas tenían esto que eran muy organizadas y si tú te ibas para un lado, que era, por ejemplo, era la MS-13, si nosotros nos íbamos para otro lugar que era también de la pues ellos se comunicaban y básicamente nos mataban. Y si nos íbamos a un lugar que no era de la MS 13, sino que de la 18, pues ellos decían que nosotros éramos como espías de ellos y también nos mataban. Entonces llegamos a un punto en el que nos encontramos sin salida en el país, porque la policía no hizo nada, el hombre rico tampoco, él sí se protegió él mismo, pero no nos protegió a nosotros. Mi papá no hizo nada, nosotros no podíamos hacer nada.”

10. “Y mi mamá le contó a un amigo de acá la situación y gracias a Dios, él nos ayudó, nos dijo que él no podía mantenernos pero que nos podía ayudar a salir del país. Y sí, nosotros queríamos venirnos para acá y pues tomamos la decisión de aceptar esa propuesta porque nos encontramos desesperados, no sabíamos qué hacer.

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by clalsstaff on October 20, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in El Salvador, Uncategorized, United States
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Posted by clalsstaff on October 20, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/10/20/book-excerpt-a-life-before-leaving/

Suspended Dreams: Asylum Seekers in Tapachula, Mexico

Tens of Thousands of Displaced People are Stuck in Mexico’s Poorest State?

Marshall Plane, CLALS Researcher and the Immigration to New York City Research & Data Coordinator

A Mural in Spanish and Haitian Creole reads: “Sister, believe in yourself, don’t be afraid to start again.”
A Mural in Spanish and Haitian Creole reads: “Sister, believe in yourself, don’t be afraid to start again.”

Note: Names have been changed where needed for interviewee privacy.

At 19, Samantha summoned the courage to leave her abuser, who is a gang member and the father of her three-year-old son. She knew this might also mean leaving her country. “In Honduras, we have so many femicides, and you can’t rely on the police because they’re working with the same gangs who commit them,” she told me.

Yet Samantha’s departure was quicker and more painful than expected: her abuser followed through on his threat to have her father killed, and she was told she had a matter of days before meeting a similar fate.

For decades, people fleeing such situations in Central America have hoped to reach the United States. By May 2026—eight months after leaving Honduras—Samantha instead found herself living in a shelter near Tapachula, a city just twenty miles north of the Mexico-Guatemala border, and navigating the asylum bureaucracy of Mexico rather than the US.

When we spoke, Samantha was spending her days in the shelter’s sweltering backyard caring for her son. Her new partner—who had similarly fled gang violence in Ecuador—worked day jobs in the coffee and banana fields surrounding Tapachula, which sits in the humid coastal lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.

“Here I feel trapped,” Samantha told me. “Once the current president is no longer there, I want to go to the United States. I feel that it’s safer there and that there my son will have opportunities to grow, to study, to have a better life.”

Lingering in the shade behind this austere Catholic shelter were dozens of migrants in similar states of limbo. Their unusual visitors—myself and other students visiting Chiapas as part of a two-week migration course organized by Juniata College and the Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas—provided many with a unique opportunity to vent their frustrations.

Throughout our time in Tapachula, the fruits of a longtime goal of US immigration policy—to make the journeys of northward-bound asylum seekers terminate in Mexico—were on full display. This unassuming city of 350,000 has become a kind of purgatory for people fleeing the Western Hemisphere’s worst humanitarian crises. Unable to enter the United States under the second Trump administration’s draconian policies, many have decided that, for the time being, Mexico offers the best available respite from hunger and violence in their countries of origin.

Tapachula is the first city migrants reach after crossing from Guatemala into Mexico. The manager at Albergue Belén, a Catholic shelter, told us that since the 1980s, thousands of mostly Central American migrants have passed through Tapachula each year on their way to the United States. In the early 2020s, they were joined by Cubans, Haitians, South Americans, Africans, and Asians. Olga Sánchez Martínez, director of the shelter Jesús el Buen Pastor, said that spending by northward-bound migrants had long been central to Tapachula’s economy.

A residential area of Tapachula near our hotel.
A residential area of Tapachula near our hotel.

At the end of 2023, Mexico—at the insistence of the US, which is determined to prevent people from moving northward—began requiring asylum seekers to remain in the city where they first seek asylum while their case is pending. This policy, combined with the closure of the US border, has rapidly transformed Tapachula from a transit hub to a holding ground.

None of the migrants we spoke to described Tapachula, a poor city in Mexico’s poorest state, as their preferred destination. Yet due to its proximity to the border, Chiapas received 66 percent of the 52,000 asylum applications submitted in Mexico in the first nine months of 2025. While their cases are being processed—which now frequently takes upwards of a year—those applicants are bound to Tapachula by the mandatory biweekly check-ins at the city’s Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) office.

Tapachula is now home to an estimated 60,000 migrants in addition to its 350,000 permanent residents. The largest groups are an estimated 20,000 Haitians and 18,000 Venezuelans. Cubans are perhaps the fastest-growing group: they represented nearly half of asylum applications in Mexico in 2025, and that was before a US oil blockade worsened Cuba’s already dire economic situation.

A store called “Mini Bangladesh” near downtown Tapachula advertises wholesale and retail sales of various items, including hats, purses, glasses, and toys.
A store called “Mini Bangladesh” near downtown Tapachula advertises wholesale and retail sales of various items, including hats, purses, glasses, and toys.

Due to color and language, Haitians are the city’s most visible migrants. As the sun rose on our first day in the city, I passed two men speaking Haitian Creole while loading cement barrels onto a pickup truck. A sticker on the truck’s rear window read: somos negritos, pero útiles a la sociedad. We are Black (using the diminutive form of the word), but useful to society.

On our third evening in Tapachula, I spoke with two of the many Haitians who were selling water bottles in the city’s lively central plaza. Both had crossed the border into the Dominican Republic in 2021 as Haiti spiraled into violence following the assassination of its president. “In Haiti there is no safety. There is no president,” said Jonel, the younger man, in accented but fluent Spanish.

“The United States is not helping Haiti to get out of this situation,” added his friend Bernard, noting that the gangs who control most of the capital are armed with trafficked US-made guns.

In 2025, an escalating deportation campaign led both to flee the Dominican Republic to avoid being sent back to Haiti. “In the DR, there is work, but you can’t be calm because immigration [enforcement] is looking for you every day,” said Jonel. “That’s why we crossed the jungle to come here. And well, here, it’s not as racist, but there’s no work.”

Jonel and Bernard both said they left home early each morning to look for construction or farm jobs. When none could be found, they would instead spend the day selling water bottles. “Imagine, you leave home at four, three in the morning.  How much will they pay you for a day of work? Maybe 300, 250 pesos [$14.50-17],” said Bernard, who was supporting a wife and two children in Haiti with remittances. He hoped to eventually reunite with them and join his brother in Florida. Jonel, lacking family in the US, said he intended to settle in Tijuana, a Mexican border city where a sizeable Haitian community has emerged in recent years.

We heard these economic frustrations repeatedly during our time in Tapachula. According to Sánchez Martínez, Tapachula’s businesses have been struggling since 2025 as fewer migrants pass through the city and spend money, while the requirement for asylum seekers to stay in Tapachula has swelled the number of people looking for work and housing. Migrants and natives alike said this was depressing wages and increasing rents.

“I’m earning less now,” a Tapachula-born construction worker told me at a brightly lit taqueria near our hotel. “If I want 400 pesos [$23] a day and a Cuban will work for 250 pesos [$14.50], who do you think they’ll hire?”

Our server at the same taqueria, Ángela, was herself a Cuban migrant—one of over one million people who have fled the island this decade amid crippling shortages of food and medicine. Shortly after crossing into Mexico in October 2024, she and her fellow travelers were kidnapped by a cartel. “We were eight. Only three made it out,” she said. Ángela avoided a grisly death only because her aunt in the US helped pay the $5,000 ransom. 

Government posters for missing people are a common sight in southern Chiapas. These posters at Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor feature people from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Jordan, and Venezuela. All were last seen in late 2024.
Government posters for missing people are a common sight in southern Chiapas. These posters at Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor feature people from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Jordan, and Venezuela. All were last seen in late 2024.

Without money to continue northward, Ángela began working in Tapachula and was still there when Trump took office. By May 2026, she had married a Mexican man and used her restaurant earnings to help her brother escape Cuba and join her in Tapachula. “We’ll see what happens, but for now I’m content here,” said Ángela.

“Most of us here are migrants,” Ángela told me, gesturing to her coworkers. “She’s Guatemalan, he’s Venezuelan, those two are Cuban, and in the back there’s also a Haitian.” Tapachula’s restaurant and nightlife sectors, she said, had become reliant on immigrant labor.

The relative stability Ángela achieved in Tapachula seemingly felt out of reach to the more recent arrivals we spoke to in the shelters. Once their asylum cases were processed, everyone planned to go to more prosperous locations: Mexico City, Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, or Tijuana.

Murals depicting people with missing legs at Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor. The shelter was initially opened to help migrants who were injured while riding atop La Bestia, a notorious train long used by mainly Central Americans trying to evade Mexican migration patrols en route to the US border.
Murals depicting people with missing legs at Albergue Jesús el Buen Pastor. The shelter was initially opened to help migrants who were injured while riding atop La Bestia, a notorious train long used by mainly Central Americans trying to evade Mexican migration patrols en route to the US border.

“Nobody wants to be here,” said Diego, a single father who fled Honduras with his three-year-old son in February 2026 when a gang demanded that he deliver drugs along his bus route. Like several other Hondurans I spoke to in the shelters, he said organized crime in the country had worsened to the point of intolerability.

“Here in Tapachula you make up to 300 pesos [$17] a day, and that’s if you find work. In Monterrey you can make 800 pesos [$46],” said Diego. Most of the jobs he found in Tapachula were day-to-day, and like many migrant workers, his promised wages had been withheld multiple times.

“We now see caravans forming on an almost weekly basis, and the main reason is the employment issue,” said the manager of Albergue Belén. “Some people who can’t find jobs here to sustain themselves while they go through the asylum process end up giving up and trying to get to places like Mexico City or Monterrey.”

Sánchez Martínez said the same, and added that cartels had taken to extorting and kidnapping migrants who headed north on foot along Chiapas’s coastal highway. “We beg people not to go,” she said. “Just the other day, they disappeared a group of twelve Hondurans.”

Those who remain in Tapachula rely on support and guidance from two main sources: the large networks of co-nationals that have emerged in the city, and an underfunded but determined collection of NGOs and shelters dedicated to serving its refugee population. One of these is Casa Frida, an NGO that assists LGBT+ refugees. They hosted a panel for our group on our second day in Tapachula.

One of the speakers, Adrián Lozano, had joined the exodus from Cuba in 2024, not long after earning his degrees in theater and journalism. Material concerns put these dreams on hold. “The minimum [monthly] wage in Cuba is 2,500 pesos1. A carton of eggs costs 3,000 pesos,” said Adrián. Medical treatment, he said, is free but sparse: his mother was diagnosed with cancer in early 2024 and faced a years-long waiting period for her treatment, which Adrián suspected was partly due to his own record of anti-government statements.

Adrián’s partner, who had crossed the US-Mexico border in 2023 and settled in Phoenix, helped finance his flight out of Cuba. Due to Trump taking office, Adrián’s journey—and his relationship—ended shortly after he crossed into Mexico. With the help of Casa Frida, he found work as a waiter in Tapachula. His immediate priorities, he said, were to help his mother and younger brother in Cuba buy food, and eventually to bring his mother to Mexico for her cancer treatment.

“I don’t want to denigrate the importance of service work, but I studied to be a writer, a professional,” said Adrián. Tapachula lacked professional opportunities, he said, and he had also faced more homophobia there than he ever had in Cuba. (Another speaker, accustomed to intense homophobia in eastern Venezuela, reported the opposite experience.) Adrián said his dream was no longer to reach the US, but rather to build a career as a television writer in Mexico City.

While he hoped to see the Cuban government fall—even if it required violence or US intervention—Adrián said he did not plan to return to the island, even if things improved drastically. “In Cuba, I was happy, and they say if you were happy somewhere, don’t go back there,” he said.

Another speaker at Casa Frida, Natalie, candidly showed us the deep bruises on her neck—remnants of the abuse she had suffered as a trans woman placed in a men’s prison in Cuba. Lacking relatives abroad who could finance her journey to the US, she instead flew in 2023 to Russia, which allows visa-free entry for Cubans. In Moscow, she saved up money through sex work.

“It was my first time seeing the capitalist world, so I was amazed by some of the things they had. But it was also kind of a scary place to be. They saw me as some kind of exotic symbol,” said Natalie, who identifies as Afro-Cuban. Natalie used her earnings to fly to Nicaragua in 2024, but her journey northward was also cut short by the change in US policy.

Like the other panelists, Casa Frida helped her find housing, submit her asylum claim, and, she said, build a much-needed sense of community with other LGBT+ people. Nonetheless, like everyone I spoke to, Natalie found life in Tapachula constraining. She hadn’t found employment and was still relying on sex work against her wishes. “You know, like everyone, I have my goals, I have my dreams, and I know this isn’t the best place to achieve them,” she said.

I asked where that place was. Without hesitation, she responded that it was the United States. “I want to live a normal life. I want to get married, have kids, maybe start a business,” she said. “And like lots of us who have had to abandon our countries, I believe the United States is the best country to do that.”

“I know it’s not possible right now with this president,” she added. “But nothing in this world is forever.”

A mural outside the UNICEF-funded Solidarity and Hospitality Shelter represents people who have stayed at the shelter with paper planes featuring the flags of their countries. The text on the bottom right reads: “Solidarity is the way.”
A mural outside the UNICEF-funded Solidarity and Hospitality Shelter represents people who have stayed at the shelter with paper planes featuring the flags of their countries. The text on the bottom right reads: “Solidarity is the way.”

Edited by Ernesto Castañeda, Director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, and Catherine Grau, Research & Data Coordinator of the Immigration Lab.

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by clalsstaff on October 20, 2026  •  Permalink
Posted in Mexico, Uncategorized
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Posted by clalsstaff on October 20, 2026

https://aulablog.net/2026/10/20/suspended-dreams-asylum-seekers-in-tapachula-mexico/

Lifestyle Migration from the United States and Canada to Ecuador

By Ernesto Castañeda

American University

Matthew Hayes looks in depth at a population that moves from one country to another without asking for permission. They expect to keep their cultures and worldviews intact and to be respected. They live together in the same part of town. They talk to each other in their native language and are slow to learn the local language. Some start new businesses. They increase economic activity and revitalize urban areas, sometimes pushing long-time residents out.

A street in Cuenca, Ecuador

We are talking about the many North Americans that have moved to an area of Cuenca, Ecuador, as described by Hayes in his original book: Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The author interviewed 108 American and Canadian retirees in Cuenca and a rural area also favored by them, along with Ecuadorians, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork during visits across seven years – all before the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of this phenomenon. This book vividly describes an interesting case study and helps improve our overall understanding of human migration and how race affects immigrant reception.

These North American communities are not unique to Ecuador. For example, well over one million Americans live in Mexico today. Some estimate that, currently, more people move from the United States to Mexico than the other way around; this includes white retirees receiving social security benefits to finance their stay and many tourists overstaying their visas. Therefore, the discussions in this book are relevant for other expatriate communities. Many interviewees in Ecuador frame their migration as an adventure, a way to stay active and gain new experiences,  or a bold instance of individual freedom and self-expression.

Many of the participants in Hayes’s study call themselves gringos or expats; others call themselves ‘‘economic refugees’’ because they needed to move abroad to find a place with a lower cost of living. Yet others see themselves as ‘‘medical refugees’’ because they would be unable to afford healthcare in the United States, but can access health services and other subsidies and social programs in Ecuador (p. 109). Therefore, inequality, economic and geopolitical reasons motivate the decision to migrate, justifications that are similar to those offered by many people moving from the global South to the global North.

Nevertheless, these retirees not only benefit from a retirement income that goes further in their new location, but also from their whiteness. This arrangement is what allows them to frame precarity-led displacement as an adventure and a personal decision. Hayes finds that ‘‘North Americans think of their relocations mostly in terms of their own lives, even as they continue to be rooted in unequal global social relations’’ (p. 7). Problems created by neoliberal policies are met with individual neoliberal solutions that transfer the burden of some of those individuals aging into poverty in North America to the global South.

Another big difference between Latin American immigrants in the United States and U.S. emigrants in Ecuador is that the latter group can easily obtain immigration papers. One can get an Ecuadorian residency visa by demonstrating at least 800 dollars of continuous income, which can include Social Security payments. Indeed, most of Hayes’s respondents reported monthly incomes between $800 and $1,500. Foreigners can also get an investor visa if they deposit $25,000 in an Ecuadorian bank. Many others choose to overstay their tourist visa, and they rarely face consequences for this. Local officials are welcoming, offering integration courses and help with relocation.

By receiving income from the global North and moving to a place with a lower cost of living in the global South, these retirees profit from ‘‘geoarbitrage.’’ Migration allows them not only to make ends meet but to be financially better off. Retirees have been doing this within the United States for decades, but as retirement incomes and inequality in the U.S. increase, even retirement communities in Florida or Arizona can be unaffordable to many. Thus, some people move to places in the global South. Colonial cities in Latin America such as San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Cusco, Peru, or Cuenca, Ecuador, offer the appeal of Mediterranean European-like cities but are much more affordable.

The book includes a fascinating discussion about who benefited from UNESCO’s designation of Cuenca as a World Heritage City. Hayes discusses the intermediaries that have popped up to lure North Americans into Cuenca and other areas, as they profit from it. They lure customers with neoliberal phrases such as ‘‘Half the Cost, Double the Freedom’’ or ‘‘Living a Six-Figure Life . . . on Much Less.’’ Interestingly, the relocation of North Americans leads to price increases in Cuenca and helps to propel the gentrification of certain downtown neighborhoods and areas in the idyllic countryside, resulting in the relocation of poorer Ecuadorians, often of indigenous origin. Hayes cites work calling these processes ‘‘transnational gentrification.’’

By moving to South America, working class retirees, burnt out professionals tired of their work schedules, recent widows, and new single mothers a few paychecks away from homelessness in the U.S., are suddenly closer to the top of the social hierarchy in Ecuador and are able to afford many comforts that they could not in the global North. They cannot pass as local white elites, though; they are identified everywhere and mostly benignly as gringos. Hayes shows how self-conscious long-time gringos are about how locals perceive their group, as their numbers increase, and why they themselves openly critique ‘‘obnoxious gringo’’ behavior (p. 93).

North Americans benefit from white privilege in Ecuador, but ‘‘the visibility of their somatic whiteness contrasts with its invisibility in North America’’ (p. 95). Furthermore, some interviewees felt that increased numbers of North Americans might change ‘‘gringoness from something unique and interesting into something humdrum and even somewhat of a hassle’’ (p. 105). One interviewee complained about being increasingly seen as a part of a group. This sense of the loss of individuality racialized their whiteness and deeply bothered those who were used to being in the majority and in the dominant racial group in North America. They became concerned about the behavior of other gringos in Cuenca because they felt it could affect them. Many respondents saw their new home in Cuenca as like America in the 1950s, partly implying nostalgia for a white-dominant America with a stronger social safety net and economic security.

One takeaway is that migration creates change in the short term, but overall and in the middle and long-term, it is good for migrants and locals (See Castañeda 2026); another is that short- and long-distance relocations cannot be understood outside the context of population growth, capitalism, global inequality, and power dynamics. Thus, the book is not only about expats but also about political economy and whiteness. It is a captivating read and a solid contribution to the growing body of academic work on migration, global inequality, and race.

References

Castañeda, Ernesto. 2026. “Immigration and Urban Vitality: How Newcomers Make

Cities Strong.” Washington, DC: Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the

Immigration Lab, American University.

Hayes, Matthew. 2018. Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ernesto Castañeda is Professor and Director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University

Edited by Vincent Iannuzzi-Sucich

*This post continues an ongoing series, as part of CLALS’s Ecuador Initiative, examining the country’s economic, governance, security, and societal challenges, made possible with generous support from Dr. Maria Donoso Clark, CAS/PhD ’91.

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The First Freedom

The First Freedom: How We Lost Sight of Our Oldest Right—The Freedom of Movement

By Bashir Mobasher  

Image: David Peinado Romero / shutterstock.com

Today, when we speak of migration, we no longer picture the awe-inspiring journeys of Herodotus, Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, or James Cook, men who ventured across oceans and deserts, through empires and unknown lands without needing a permit to enter and sometimes even received an audience with curious royalties.[1] We forget that their stories represent countless others, unnamed, unrecorded. We overlook the migration of the earliest human, homo erectus and homo sapiens, those bold crossings over mountains and plains, rivers and seas, islands and continents, by people who knew no boundaries, only the pull of necessity, survival, and discovery. They exercised the most ancient human freedom: the freedom to migrate.

Now, when we hear the word migration, our minds leap not to the journey, but to borders, passports, patrols, visas. We ask whether someone’s movement is legal or illegal, allowed or forbidden. We debate thresholds and quotas, risks and threats. Rarely do we ask the more human question: Does a person have the right to move freely? Doesn’t a person have the right to seek safety, pursue happiness, or simply adventure elsewhere?

What once seemed instinctive is now seen as impermissible, unnatural, even immoral. But this distorted view of movement is astonishingly new. It is newer than carriages and clocks, than spectacles and telescopes. For most of human history, the idea that one needed permission to move would have been absurd. Questioning human migration was questioning human nature—it still is. For over 90% of our existence as hunter-gatherers, humans were entirely dependent on movement.

Even with the rise of agriculture and the building of cities, migration between spaces remained natural to individual and social life. Entire communities shifted with the seasons. Trade and travel routes like the Silk Road, the trans-Saharan highways were arteries of constant movement. Nomadic peoples endured. Even the settled recognized migration as a response to drought, war, or opportunity. One needed no reason, or any reason would suffice.

This right to move is older than nearly all others. It predates the right to property, that most revered right in American political mythology. Property only became relevant when humans began to fence off land. Even the American settlers who enshrined property rights had to first migrate across oceans and continents to claim the land often by force. The right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence (1776), presupposes freedom of movement. Before there was freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote, or the right to due process, there was the right to migrate. Kings and empires might silence your tongue, outlaw your prayers, chain your thoughts, but they rarely questioned your decision to migrate. To migrate was beyond question. Often, it was the only freedom you could use to protect other personal rights by going to a new place. As the most respected freedom, it was the guardian of all other rights and freedoms.

Ancient thinkers, and traditions revered it as a sacred endeavour. Herodotus wrote, “Human prosperity never abides long in one place.” Aristotle saw migration as part of the natural order, while Socrates found it preceded new polities and civilizations. Religious traditions elevated migration into a moral duty: Abraham’s journey across deserts, the Exodus of the Israelites, the disciples’ missions across lands and cultures, and the Prophet Muhammad’s Hijra from Mecca to Medina were not mere detours or escapes. They were profound tales of faith, survival, and liberation in these traditions. Similarly, the Buddha’s Great Renunciation, the exiles in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and the Anishinaabe migration were considered sacred journeys in these traditions shaping both the self and the world.

And yet today, that great engine of human history has been stalled. The rise of modern nation-states, colonial cartographies, and rigid immigration regimes has replaced this freedom with control. The invention of passports, visa systems, and surveillance bureaucracies has shackled what was once humanity’s most basic instinct. A species that roamed the earth for millennia now finds itself trapped inside boxes, walled by citizenship papers, embassies, fences, and checkpoints.

Ironically, it was the very colonial powers who once championed expeditions, economic and political adventurism, and settlement expansion that later rebranded rather more peaceful and kinder versions as a threat. The same empires that moved freely across oceans and continents in search of resources and dominion turned around to criminalize movement when it came from the margins. They eagerly promoted a pantheon of liberal rights, including free speech, religion, property, and even humanitarian intervention, but withheld the most ancient and universal of them all: the freedom of movement.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, freedom of movement was included but subtly severed from the act of migration. A quiet sleight of hand. The right to leave was affirmed; the right to enter was not. It was a masterstroke of legal illusion, a political magic trick from the Western sleeve that has since cast a spell over global consciousness. A disillusion so complete, we forgot that the right to move was indeed the right to migrate; and it was never theirs to define, give or take. It was ours all along.

They even manufactured some baseless rights like preemptive self-defence, preemptive strikes, trade liberalization, and economic embargo, but somehow framed the right to migrate as too unrealistic, too disruptive, too dangerous to recognize. Denying the right to free movement has never been merely a matter of security or order; it reflects much deeper structural concerns. Facilitating and even coercing the flow of capital and resources from the Global South while restricting the movement of people ensures that global inequality remains entrenched, locking entire populations into structural disadvantage. These deeply embedded, often racialized, immigration systems have historically privileged certain regions and populations over others.

This redefinition has traveled far beyond its Western origins. For example, it is not only the United States or Germany that now deport Afghans, the very people they once claimed to protect. So too does Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan, who call Afghans their ‘Muslim brethren’, their ‘cultural kin’, their ‘linguistic neighbours’. Yet all these words evaporate at the border. Solidarity collapses at the gate.
Today, we no longer speak of migration as a right. We speak of it as a problem. A crime, a disruption to be managed. The image of the migrant has shifted from that of a seeker or survivor to that of an invader. We no longer greet them with wonder. We do not ask about their journeys, their struggles, their dreams. We fear them. Our attention has shifted from people to policies, from humanity to geography. We have created a world where those most in need of movement are the most forbidden to move. People are trapped in war zones, failing economies, and ecological disasters, not because they cannot escape, but because they are not allowed to. The powerful still glide across borders with ease; the vulnerable are held hostage by the coordinates of their birth. Worse still, this system has seeded hatred and xenophobia, nationalism, and exploitation. It has enabled trafficking where safe passage is denied. It has weaponized difference and built moral hierarchies out of geography. Borders are no longer lines; they are Great Walls of China, dividing people, excluding them.

To forget this freedom is not only to forget our past; it is to endanger our future. In boxing humanity into artificial lines, we have betrayed the very idea of freedom. We have turned a natural preservation instinct, a birthright, into a crime. We have silenced the journey. And in doing so, we have not only lost sight of our first freedom; we have lost a piece of what it means to be human.
 

[1] The empires were, however, hesitant to let Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo leave because they needed their services, not because they had some random law about migrations.

Dr. Bashir Mobasher teaches at the American University (DC) Department of Sociology, New York University DC, and the American University of Afghanistan Departments of Political Science. Dr. Bashir is the current President of Afghanistan Law and Political Science Association (in Exile). He is an expert in comparative constitutional law, identity politics, and human rights. He has authored, reviewed, and supervised numerous research projects on constitutional law, electoral systems, and identity politics. His recent research projects are centered around decentralization, social justice, and orientalism. Bashir obtained his B.A. (2007) from the School of Law and Political Science at Kabul University and his LLM (2010) and PhD (2017) from the University of Washington School of Law.

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What is a migrant? What is ICE? 10 terms to help you understand

By Ernesto Castañeda, Daniel Jenks

President Donald Trump aims to upend the immigration system in the United States in his first few days in office. On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed various executive orders that temporarily prevent refugees from coming to the U.S. and block immigrants from applying for asylum at a U.S. border, among other measures.

Another executive order calls on federal agencies to not issue passports, birth certificates or Social Security numbers to babies born in the U.S. to parents not in the country legally, or with temporary permission. Eighteen states sued on Jan. 21 to block this executive order that challenges birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

We are scholars of immigration who closely follow public discussions about immigration policy, trends and terminology. Understanding the many different immigration terms – some technical, some not – can help people better understand immigration news. While not an exhaustive list, here are 10 important terms to know:

1. Migrant

A migrant is a person who moves from their place of birth to another location relatively far away. There are different words used to describe migrants and their particular circumstances. Internally displaced people, for example, means people who are forced to move within their own country because of violence, natural disasters and other reasons.

International migrants move from one country to another, sometimes without the legal authorization to enter or stay in another country. There are also seasonal or circular migrants, who often move back and forth between different places.

Between 30% and 60% of all migrants eventually return to their birth countries.

There is not much difference in why people decide to migrate within their own country or internationally, with or without the legal permission to do so. But it is easier for people from certain countries to move than from others.

2. Immigrants

The terms immigrants and migrants are often used interchangeably. Migration indicates movement in general. Immigration is the word used to describe the process of a non-citizen settling in another country. Immigrants have a wide range of legal statuses.

An immigrant in the U.S. might have a green card or a permanent resident card – a legal authorization that gives the person the legal right to stay and work in the U.S. and to apply for citizenship after a few years.

An immigrant with a T visa is a foreigner who is allowed to stay in the U.S. for up to four years because they are victims of human or sex trafficking. Similarly, an immigrant with a U visa is the victim of serious crimes and can stay in the U.S. for up to four years, and then apply for a Green Card.

An immigrant with a H-1B visa is someone working for a U.S. company within the U.S.

Many international students in higher education have an F-1 visa. They must return to their country of birth soon after they graduate, unless they are sponsored by a U.S. employer, enroll in another educational program, or marry a U.S. citizen. The stay can be extended for one or two years, depending on the field of study.

Mexican migrants prepare to turn themselves in to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers after crossing the border into Ruby, Ariz., on Jan. 5, 2025. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Photo cerdits to Brandon Bell/Getty Images

3. Undocumented Immigrants, Unauthorized Immigrants and Illegal Immigrants

These three charged political terms refer to the same situation: migrants who enter or remain in the country without the proper legal paperwork. People in this category also include those who come to the U.S. with a visa and overstay its permitted duration.

Some of these immigrants work for cash that is not taxed. Most work with fake Social Security numbers, pay taxes and contribute to Social Security funds without receiving money after retirement.

Immigrants without legal authorization to be in the U.S. spent more than US$254 billion in 2022.

4. Asylum Seekers

An asylum seeker is a person who arrives at a U.S. port of entry – via an airport or a border crossing – and asks for protection because they fear returning to their home country. An immigrant living in the U.S. for up to one year can also apply for asylum.

Asylum seekers can legally stay temporarily in the U.S. while they wait to bring their case to an immigration judge. The process typically takes years.

Someone is eligible for asylum if they can show proof of persecution because of their political affiliation, religion, ethnic group, minority status, or belonging to a targeted group. Many others feel they need to leave their countries because of threats of violence or abusive relationships, among other dangerous circumstances.

A judge will eventually decide whether a person’s fear is with merit and can stay in the country.

Ukrainian immigrants attend a job fair in New York City in February 2023. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Photo cerdits to Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

5. Refugees

Refugees are similar to asylum seekers, but they apply to resettle in the U.S. while they remain abroad. Refugees are often escaping conflict.

The Biden administration had a cap of admitting up to 125,000 refugees a year.

Refugees can legally work in the U.S. as soon as they arrive and can apply for a green card one year later. Research shows that refugees become self-sufficient soon after they settle in the country and are net-positive for the country’s economy through the federal taxes they pay.

6. Unaccompanied Children

This is a U.S. government classification for migrant children who enter the U.S. without a parent or guardian, and without proper documentation or the legal status to be in the country. Because they are minors, they are allowed to enter the country and apply for the right to stay. Most often, they have relatives already in the country, who assume the role of financial and legal sponsors.

7. Family Separation

This refers to a government policy of separating detained migrant parents or guardians from the children they are responsible for an traveling with as a family unit. The first Trump administration separated families arriving at the border as part of an attempt to reduce immigration.

At least 4,000 children were separated from their parents during the first Trump administration. The Biden administration tried to reunite these families, but as of May 2024, over 1,400 children separated during Trump’s first term still were not reunited with their families.

Legal migration systems that lack avenues for immigrants who work in manual labor to move with their families, and deportations, both also create family separations.

8. Immigration Detention

Immigration detention refers to the U.S. government apprehending immigrants who are in the U.S. without authorization and holding them in centers that are run similar to prisons. Some of these centers are run by the government, and others are outsourced to private companies.

When a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official apprehends an immigrant, they are often first brought to a building where they are placed in what many call a hielera, which means icebox or freezer in Spanish. This refers to cells, cages or rooms where the government keeps immigrants at very low temperatures with foil blankets and without warm clothing.

Immigrants might then be quickly deported or otherwise released in the country while they await a court date for an asylum case. Other immigrants who are awaiting deportation or a court date will be placed in an immigration detention center. Some must post bond to be released while awaiting trial.

9. Coyote

A coyote is the Spanish word for a guide who is paid by migrants and asylum seekers to take them to their destination, undetected by law enforcement. Coyotes used to be trusted by the migrants they were helping cross into the country. As the U.S. has tried to make it harder to enter illegally, the business of taking people to and across the U.S.-Mexico border unseen has become more expensive and dangerous.

10. The Alphabet Soup of Government Players

The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, is a law enforcement agency created after 9/11. It includes a number of agencies that focus on immigration.

These include U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, an agency that is in charge of collecting import duties, passport and document controls at airports, ports, and official points of entry along the border.

The Border Patrol is a federal law enforcing agency under CBP in charge of patrolling and securing U.S. borders and ports.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is a branch of DHS that works within the U.S., within its borders, focusing on detaining and deporting immigrants.

The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, takes care of unaccompanied minors after they enter the country.

Ernesto Castañeda is the Director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and Professor at American University. 

Daniel Jenks is a Doctoral Student at the University of Pennsylvania,

This piece can be reproduced completely or partially with proper attribution to its author.

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Immigration Realities

Book Review

by Blogger Ben from ACEMAXX Analytics

It seems that the modern world is drowning in crises.

Imperialism, decolonization, violence, natural disasters, instability, and poverty have been uprooting people around the world for thousands of years.

Migration is part of human history. But “Migration” is a highly politicized theme.

Refugees are people who are facing problems and do not fundamentally pose a problem themselves.

A serious, systemic problem related to expulsion is the legacy of imperialism and current neo-colonial relations.

Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione: Immigration Realities – Challenging Common Misperceptions, Columbia University Press, Nov 2024.

According to the UNHCR, the real crisis is that a few countries have “a disproportionate responsibility for taking newcomers,” and not there is a relatively disproportionate number of arrivals:

Politicians and journalists speak of “immigrant and refugee crises,” but the authors explain why “we see it as a political crisis, not a crisis of migration.”

The constant production of refugee crises influences the public’s political and social views about migration.

“Migration cannot be “solved” because it is a timeless and constantly fluctuating phenomenon.”

It is an open secret that the strong opinions that people often have are based on idiosyncratic personal experiences, prejudiced views, and false assumptions spread by politicians and mainstream media.

However, the average citizen often does not have all the facts at hand to look at the topic of migration from an objective yet sensitive perspective – and cannot do so.

The authors attach great importance to summarizing academic literature to help promote public understanding of today’s international migration.

The recent book summarizes relevant research results on common myths for readers who are not familiar with contemporary migration or border studies.

In other words, the authors present the relevant scientific research, which is often closed behind paywalls, research specialization, and subject-specific jargon so that most readers find it awkward and difficult to understand. This book is clearly aimed at the general public.

Each chapter revolves around a certain misunderstanding and can be read as an independent work or together with the others. The individual chapters contain relevant and up-to-date knowledge about the realities of migration, which is presented in such a way that it is also appealing and accessible to non-professionals.

Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione distinguish how some rhetoric accuses, patronizes, and criminalizes refugees, which, in connection with xenophobia, stereotypes, and fear-mongering, support the myth of a crisis.

A refugee is defined as someone who has left his home country and cannot return because he has a reasonable fear of violence and/or persecution due to his identity or political conviction.

The word has two meanings: a “legal meaning” that describes a person entitled to asylum under international law, and a “colloquial meaning” that describes a person who has fled their homeland. The criteria for international recognition as a refugee are strict, and other displaced people can be wrongly referred to as refugees.Neo-colonialism under the auspices of neoliberal capitalism, for example, contributed to the fact that entire regions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which were first described as “the third world” and then now the “Global South,” because they were oppressed in the past and the present, and not simply because of their low national income or the degree of integration into international trade.

Every “refugee crisis” is a socially constructed term that distracts from the real problem: the high-income and imperialist countries do not take responsibility for their violent actions because they benefit from the equally violent postcolonial world order.

The current neo-colonial conditions are undoubtedly part of the neoliberal driven dismantling of the welfare state, which leads to a lack of state programs for the public and the acceptance of tax cuts for the rich.

Globalization and migration are presented as two sides of the same coin, but in reality, they are very different phenomena – economic globalization and migration are not causal since migration tendencies do not necessarily agree with trade trends: periods of expanding international trade do not always correlate with migration waves or vice versa.

The authors also clarify usual terms such as “integration, assimilation, and acculturation.” Yours truly, for example, has so far preferred the term “acclimatization” to “assimilation” and “integration.”

According to Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione, comprehensive integration is a social integration; it does not mean cultural assimilation to the morals of the dominant group, but rather presupposes certain negotiations, reciprocal communication, and mutual influence.

Integration is often mistakenly equated with assimilation and acculturation. However, these are different concepts.

Acculturation refers to the process of getting to know the culture of the new place of residence and the achievement of a fluid cultural language. Immigrants can acculturate while maintaining many of their native traditions and culture.

In the spirit of Ernesto Castañeda’s previous work, social integration means equality and equal opportunities while maintaining cultural differences.

Assimilation is based on intolerance towards identities that deviate from the dominant and often Eurocentric culture.

Migration is an inherent human phenomenon that is subject to changes that are influenced by local and national political, economic, and social conditions. Data relating to the overall world population does not allow the conclusion that globalization is driving migration forward.

Research refutes widespread misconceptions about immigration. In fact, only 3.5% of the world’s population live in a country other than the one in which they were born.

Worldwide, the percentage of people who change residences due to war, political or religious persecution, poverty, or lack of opportunity is not as high as ever before and is not unmanageable for host countries.

Migration is a geographical and social relocation process. Subjective affiliation also depends on the objective conditions, including the absorption capacity of the new environment and the attitude of the locals towards immigrant groups.

In the US, for example, there is still no national integration program specifically designed to support immigrant integration. Migrants are expected to go through this process alone.

In sum, “Immigration Realities” is an indispensable masterpiece of intellectual honesty.

Immigration Realities – Challenging Common Misperceptions, by Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione – Columbia University Press, Nov 2024.

Originally published in German in ACEMAXX-ANALYTICS’s Newsletter!

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Biden’s executive order to protect immigrant spouses of citizens from deportation will benefit their families and communities

by Jane Lilly López, Kristina Fullerton Rico*

President Joe Biden prepares to board Air Force One in California on June 16, 2024. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images/ Creative Commons License

Rodrigo Salazar is a man who entered the U.S. without a visa and has been living in the country without legal status ever since. Because of this, Rodrigo, who asked that we not use his or his wife’s real names in order to protect their identity, cannot advance from low-paying jobs at restaurants and car washes. 

His wife, Carmela, is a U.S. citizen, but she is also facing career limitations. Carmela doesn’t feel safe moving to a place where she could get a higher-paying job. She worries that Rodrigo’s lack of legal status would be more obvious in a city with a smaller Latino population, which would put him at risk for arrest and deportation.

The entire Salazar family, including their two children, live with the constant fear of family separation if Rodrigo is deported.

Immigrants like Rodrigo, who are living in the U.S. without legal status but are married to U.S. citizens, will now have protectionfrom deportation, President Joe Biden announced on June 18, 2024. In order to qualify, they must have arrived 10 or more years ago and be married to a U.S. citizen. Those who meet these criteria will be able to get work permits and can get on the pathway to citizenship while working and living in the U.S. legally. 

The Biden administration estimates that about 500,000 immigrant spouses of citizens will be protected from deportation with this policy change. The policy will also apply to approximately 50,000 U.S. citizens’ stepchildren who are living in the U.S. without legal immigration status.

We are migration scholars who study mixed-citizenship marriages – meaning some family members are citizens or have the legal right to stay in the U.S., while others do not – and the consequences of being undocumented. Our research shows that when one family member lacks legal immigration status in the U.S., the family as a whole assumes an undocumented status. 

When one family member cannot safely travel, work or access health care, all family members suffer. The opposite is also true. When a family member is able to shift from living without legal status in the U.S. to getting legal status, the lives of the entire family improve.

A shift in immigration policy in the 1990s

Generally, having an immediate family member who is a U.S. citizen gives a foreign citizen the chance to live legally in the U.S. with permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship. 

For most of the 20th century, all spouses of U.S. citizens who met the legal standards for qualified marital relationships were able to become citizens through a relatively straightforward process, but that changed in 1996. 

A 1996 law called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act imposed harsh penalties for people living in the U.S. without legal immigration status. One of the penalties is a 10-year “bar to re-entry” for anyone who has lived without a visa in the U.S. for one year or more. This ban goes into effect as soon as that individual leaves U.S. territory.

Technicalities create a divide

A consequence of this 1996 law was that getting a green card, which is an identity document that gives someone legal permanent residency in the country, became dependent on whether an immigrant entered – and remained in – the U.S. with or without a visa. 

This change in the law produced a stark inequality in U.S. citizens’ ability to legally sponsor their immigrant spouses for permanent residency.

If an immigrant spouse of a U.S. citizen has overstayed a visa, this person can apply for legal immigration status – through their spouse – from within the U.S. In these cases, the spouse does not have to leave U.S. territory and is not subject to the 10-year ban. 

In contrast, if a U.S. citizen’s spouse entered the U.S. without a visa or other legal permission, they must leave the country for the final step in their legal immigration application process. But when they leave the country, their 10-year ban automatically goes into effect. 

This means that although every U.S. citizen’s spouse, including those lacking legal immigration status, technically qualifies for legal permanent residency, some of them will have to spend a decade or more outside the country before they can actually get a green card.

As a result, over the past few decades, millions of immigrants who were living in the U.S. without legal permission but were married to U.S. citizens have not gotten legal immigration status. 

While the 10-year bar applies only to immigrants without legal status, in practice it also profoundly affects their citizen spouses, too. 

In these cases, citizens married to immigrants without legal permission to be in the U.S. have two difficult options. They can resign themselves to a life of fear and limitations in the U.S., including the ever-present threat of their spouse’s deportation, or they can give up living in the U.S. altogether for a decade or more.

A new U.S. citizen, originally from Mexico, poses with his family after a naturalization ceremony in November 2023 in Long Beach, Calif. Biden’s new policy will make it easier for undocumented immigrants with citizen spouses to become citizens. Mario Tama/Getty Images

The impacts of Biden’s immigration policy changes

The Biden administration has connected this new executive action on families to its recent announcement that it will heighten restrictions for seeking asylum, which scholars have called a ban on asylum.

The administration said in a press release that it both wants to “secure the border” and expand “lawful pathways to keep families together.” 

Under this new policy, immigrant spouses who entered the country without a visa before June 17, 2014, will be allowed to “parole in place,” which is similar to a policy that benefitsmilitary veterans’ immigrant spouses who lack legal immigration status in the U.S. Parole in place means that these immigrants will have authorization to work and increased protection from deportation. 

Parole in place will also allow immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens to have their immigration applications processed within the U.S., whether they arrived with or without a visa. This means they will no longer need to leave the country for 10 years or more if they entered the U.S. without a visa.

Having the legal right to work in the U.S. will allow these immigrant spouses to find jobs that better match their education and skills. Some estimates suggest that this could increase an immigrant’s wages anywhere from 14% to 40% more than what they currently earn. 

The executive action will also yield economic benefits for the communities where mixed-citizenship families live.

Economic analyses measuring the impact of expanding work authorization and access to citizenship predict that this will create new jobs, boost incomes across communities, increase local and federal tax revenues and encourage ongoing economic growth.

As scholars of migration, we believe that this executive action is an important step toward guaranteeing that U.S. citizens who marry immigrants do not end up experiencing negative consequences because their spouses cannot legally live, work or vote in the U.S. It will also prevent the de facto deportation of U.S. citizens alongside their noncitizen spouses.

In essence, this policy change benefits American families and protects the rights of U.S. citizens to marry the person they love, keep their families together and even live in their own country. Beyond helping families, this change will have far-reaching economic benefits for the communities – and country – where they live.

Copyleft Creative Commons. Reproduction with full attribution is possible by news media and for not-for profit and educational purposes. Minor modifications, such as not including the “About the Study” section, are permitted. 

*Jane Lilly López is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brigham Young University. Jane Lilly López’s research on mixed-citizenship couples has received funding from the National Science Foundation, UC MEXUS, and the Center for US-Mexican Studies.

*Kristina Fullerton Rico is a Research Fellow, Center for Racial Justice, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Kristina Fullerton Rico’s research on the impact of long-term undocumented immigration status has received funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and Sociologists for Women in Society. 

This is reproduced from The Conversation with the authors’ permission.

https://theconversation.com/how-bidens-executive-order-to-protect-immigrant-spouses-of-citizens-from-deportation-will-benefit-their-families-and-communities-231651

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by clalsstaff on June 25, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on June 25, 2024

https://aulablog.net/2024/06/25/bidens-executive-order-to-protect-immigrant-spouses-of-citizens-from-deportation-will-benefit-their-families-and-communities/

We Must Ensure Access to Health Care for Immigrants

by Rodrigo Stein, MSc.*

This graph summarizes the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, capturing the percentage of uninsured adult Latinos in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area. By Rodrigo Stein / Creative Commons License

Gaps in access to public health insurance like Medicaid and other subsidized programs, coupled with restrictions in private job-based health coverage, create significant barriers for immigrants in obtaining essential healthcare services. The disparate treatment of immigration statuses leads to a fragmented health coverage system, resulting in many immigrants, including those lawfully present, foregoing necessary medical care. This contributes to poorer health outcomes, reduced life expectancy, and increased morbidity rates among immigrant populations in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.1

Immigration Status Impacts Health

The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area is home to over 900,000 Latinos, 53% of whom are foreign-born.2 A significant portion of this immigrant population hails from Central American countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Numerous studies highlight how immigration and immigration status impact health outcomes through various material and psychological mechanisms.3,4  These include heightened fear and stress, unequal access to resources, experiences of prejudice and violence, and disparities in accessing safe employment and quality housing.2,3 Despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), individuals with Central American heritage are still less likely to have health insurance compared to non-Latino Whites.4

Over 32,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders who have sought protection in the United States due to conflict or natural disasters in their home countries reside primarily in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.5 TPS holders (the majority, Salvadoran nationals) qualify for ACA subsidies and plans but not Medicaid.6 Medicaid, the primary public health program for low-income working-age adults, is limited to citizens and “qualified non-citizens,” a category that requires both legal status and (in most cases) completion of a five-year waiting period to be eligible for public assistance programs.7

These provisions combine to make thousands of immigrants ineligible for public health services and financial assistance for purchasing insurance, forcing them to choose between purchasing expensive private market insurance at cost, going without health insurance, or relying on the emergency room as their main source of care. (See Table 1).

 Table 1 Eligibility for Federally Funded Health Care Coverage Based on Immigration Status

Eligibility for Federally Funded Coverage Based on Immigration Status
Immigration StatusMarketplace EligibleMedicaid/CHIP Eligible
Lawfully Present and Eligible for Federally Funded Coverage
Valid non-immigrant visa holders (e.g. students, worker visas)✔X
Humanitarian statuses or circumstances (including Temporary Protected Status, Special Juvenile Status, asylum applicants, Convention Against Torture, victims of trafficking)✔X
Legal status conferred by other laws (temporary resident status, Legal Immigration Family Equity Act, Family Unity individuals)✔X
Qualified non-citizens • Lawful Permanent Residents [(LPR)/Green Card Holder)]*
• Paroled into the U.S. for at least one year* 
• Battered non-citizens, spouses, children, or parents* • People fleeing persecution (e.g., asylees, refugees) 
• Granted withholding of deportation 
• Cuban/Haitian entrants • Certain Amerasian immigrants 
• Members of a federally recognized Indian tribe or American Indian born in Canada 
• Veterans or active duty military and their family members 
• Victims of trafficking and their family members 
• Citizens of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau who are living in one of the U.S. states or territories [“Compact of Free Association (COFA) migrants”]
• Granted Iraqi or Afghan special immigrant status 
• Children receiving foster care or adoption assistance 
• Conditional entry granted before 1980		✔✔
Ineligible for Federally Funded Coverage
Undocumented immigrants:Individuals who entered the country without authorizationIndividuals who entered the country lawfully and stayed after their visa or status expiredXX
DACA: Temporary status allowing individuals who came to the country as children to remain in the U.S.XX
Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful PermanentResidents (DAPA): Temporary status allowing parents of citizens or LPRs to remain in the countryXX
*Subject to the five-year bar (i.e. requirement to reside in the U.S. for five years or more before becoming eligible for Medicaid/CHIP). Note that there is no five-year bar for accessing subsidized Marketplace coverage.

Health Risks & Social Determinants of Health 

In addition to access barriers, immigrants experience a lack of social support and the absence of culturally and linguistically competent services. This means that many Latino immigrants, even those with access to quality care, forego seeking medical care until they face an emergency. Language barriers contribute to increased rates of misdiagnoses, weaker health literacy skills, and reduced access to acute and preventive care.8

This issue is compounded by the fact that many Latino immigrants are employed in occupations that offer limited access to employer-sponsored health coverage and often have comparatively lower incomes.9 As a result, these individuals face barriers to accessing care when trying to afford employer-sponsored coverage, when available, or when navigating the individual health insurance market. Given these barriers, what policy alternatives exist to ensure thousands of Latino immigrant residents in our region are not excluded from health care? 

Current Options: Federally Qualified Health Centers

Because of their limited access to health care, Latino immigrants often seek services at community health centers (CHCs) where they can access care without insurance (over 35% of CHC patients in the U.S. are Latino).10 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) are CHCs that meet stringent federal requirements and receive funding via the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to provide primary health care services to all people regardless of their ability to pay or documentation status through a sliding fee scale.11

FQHC’s like La Clínica Del Pueblo (La Clínica), play a significant role in reducing racial and ethnic health disparities. The success of these centers in narrowing these gaps is attributed to the wide range of services they offer, culturally competent care, and strong relationships built with underserved communities.12  Since all direct service staff are bilingual, and most are first-generation Latino immigrants, La Clínica provides much-needed culturally and linguistically appropriate health care to a large yet excluded population in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

However, despite their effectiveness in producing high-quality healthcare outcomes, FQHCs are limited in size, scope, and resources. Because these centers vary in size, depth, and jurisdiction, addressing the cost of care for those who are ineligible for federally funded health programs is paramount—without them, FQHCs bear the burden of uncompensated care for a population with significant health needs.

Potential Policy Solutions

As of March 2024, the District of Columbia and six states—California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, Oregon, and Washington—have expanded fully state-funded coverage to some income-eligible adults regardless of immigration status.13 These legislative or administrative actions rely on establishing state Medicaid/CHIP equivalent or comparable programs, and creating state premium or cost-sharing subsidies to enable individuals to purchase marketplace coverage.9 In addition to these six states, Maryland will allow income-eligible individuals to purchase marketplace coverage regardless of immigration status through a Section 1332 waiver.

Maryland’s Access to Care Act

On May 16, Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed the Access to Care Act into law. Sponsored by Delegate Bonnie Cullison and Senator Antonio Hayes, the law removes immigration status as an eligibility requirement for purchasing a health plan through the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange (MHBE). In doing so, Maryland allows the remaining 6% of uninsured Maryland residents to purchase insurance. Immigrants make up a substantial number of that uninsured population; they are 15% of Maryland’s population overall, and the state’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties have the highest concentrations of the Latino population in Maryland, with 21% in each jurisdiction. Soon, they will not only have the choice to buy a healthcare plan in the state but also receive care in a culturally and linguistically competent manner.  

Stepping Toward Equity

By expanding eligibility for public health programs and supporting community health centers, we can ensure that all residents, regardless of immigration status, have access to essential healthcare services. Legislative actions like the Maryland Access to Care Act represent significant steps towards achieving health equity for immigrant populations.

[1] Martinez O, Wu E, Sandfort T, Dodge B, Carballo-Dieguez A, Pinto R, Rhodes SD, Moya E, Chavez-Baray S. Evaluating the impact of immigration policies on health status among undocumented immigrants: a systematic review. J Immigr Minor Health. 2015 Jun;17(3):947-70. doi: 10.1007/s10903-013-9968-4. Erratum in: J Immigr Minor Health. 2016 Feb;18(1):288. Rhodes SD [corrected to Rhodes SD]. PMID: 24375382; PMCID: PMC4074451.

[2] Migration Policy Institute. Central American Immigrants in the United States. Migrationpolicy.org. Published May 2023. Accessed February 18, 2024. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/central-american-immigrants-united-states

[3] Yamanis T, Morrissey T, Bochey L, Cañas N, Sol C. “Hay que seguir en la lucha”: An FQHC’s Community Health Action Approach to Promoting Latinx Immigrants’ Individual and Community Resilience. Behavioral Medicine. 2020;46(3-4):303-316. doi:10.1080/08964289.2020.1738320

[4] Bucay-Harari L, Page KR, Krawczyk N, Robles YP, Castillo-Salgado C. Mental Health Needs of an Emerging Latino Community. The journal of behavioral health services & research. 2020;47(3):388-398. doi:10.1007/s11414-020-09688-3 

[5] National Immigration Forum. Temporary Protected Status (TPS): Overview and Current Issues. Accessed February, 2, 2024. Available from: https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-temporary-protected-status/#:~:text=The%20largest%20populations%20of%20TPS,York%20(23%2C168)%20metropolitan%20areas. 

[6] HealthCare.gov. Immigration status & the Marketplace. Accessed May 16, 2024. Available at: https://www.healthcare.gov/immigrants/immigration-status/

[7] Supporting Health Equity and Affordable Health Coverage for Immigrant Populations: State-Funded Affordable Coverage Programs for Immigrants. Shvs.org. https://www.shvs.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/State-Funded-Affordable-Coverage-Programs-for-Immigrants.pdf. Published 2021. Accessed April 3, 2024.

[8] Nelson B, Tu L and Sanford F. To Advance Health Equity For Patients With Limited English Proficiency, Go Beyond Interpreter Services. Health Affairs (Millwood). October 23, 2023. https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/advance-health-equity-patients-limited-english-proficiency-go-beyond-interpreter

[9] American Immigration Council. District of Columbia Immigration Data. American Immigration Council. https://map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/district-of-columbia/. Published 2023. Accessed February 8, 2024.

[10] Ortega AN, Rodriguez HP, Vargas Bustamante A. Policy dilemmas in Latino health care and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Annu Rev Public Health. 2015;36:525-544. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031914-122421

[11] Federally Qualified Health Centers. Official web site of the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration. https://www.hrsa.gov/opa/eligibility-and-registration/health-centers/fqhc/index.html. Published 2022. Accessed April 10, 2022.

[12] Yamanis T, Morrissey T, Bochey L, Cañas N, Sol C. “Hay que seguir en la lucha”: An FQHC’s Community Health Action Approach to Promoting Latinx Immigrants’ Individual and Community Resilience. Behavioral Medicine. 2020;46(3-4):303-316. doi:10.1080/08964289.2020.1738320

[13] Kaiser Family Foundation. State Health Coverage for Immigrants and Implications for Health Coverage and Care. Kaiser Family Foundation website. Published October 1, 2021. Accessed May 16, 2024. Available at: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/issue-brief/state-health-coverage-for-immigrants-and-implications-for-health-coverage-and-care/

Copyleft Creative Commons. Reproduction with full attribution is possible by news media and for not-for profit and educational purposes. Minor modifications, such as not including the “About the Study” section, are permitted. 

*Rodrigo Stein is a resourceful public health professional with experience in program management, design and evaluation, advocacy, and strategic planning.

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by clalsstaff on May 23, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on May 23, 2024

https://aulablog.net/2024/05/23/we-must-ensure-access-to-health-care-for-immigrants/

The Legacy of U.S. Immigration Policy Towards Cuba

by William M. LeoGrande*

Cuban Privilege by Susan Eckstein / Creative Commons License

Susan Eckstein’s recent book, Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America, is a deep dive into how the U.S. government structured its immigration policy to the advantage of Cuban migrants as part of its Cold War policy to destabilize Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government. The book caused quite a stir among some Cuban Americans, who were insulted that someone pointed out policies that helped make the Cuban American community a success story.  

Cuban Privilege was not Eckstein’s first book on Cuban diaspora. She has written extensively on the threads that connect Cubans abroad with their family still on the island. Her book The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland was one of the first in-depth studies of how the Cuban American community began reconnecting to the island in the 1980s and 1990s, building bridges based mainly on family ties.

In the 1960s and 1970s, both the Cuban and U.S. governments erected a “sugar cane curtain” that made it almost impossible for families to stay connected across the Florida Strait. Travel was prohibited, direct mail service was unavailable, and connecting by phone was nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive. 

But in the 1980s, travel opened up, and remittances began to flow. Ever since the Special Period, Cuba’s economic crisis in the 1990s, Cuban American remittances have made an essential contribution to the livelihood of millions of Cuban families—a stark reality demonstrated by the humanitarian crisis on the island that resulted when Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic cut remittance flows by some two-thirds. 

Cuban Privilege reverses the lens to look not at Cuban immigrants but at the U.S. immigration policies that brought them here. It is the definitive account of how Washington, motivated by the Cold War, gave Cuban immigrants privileged access to the United States and unprecedented support once they got here. Key elements of that privilege remain in place today, exacerbating the current migration crisis—foremost among them the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans living in the United States for a year to apply for permanent residence, regardless of their form of entry.  

Most of the time, academics toil in relative obscurity, writing for one another in hopes of contributing new knowledge to their chosen field. On occasion, they write for a broader audience, hoping that their expertise might have some positive impact on public policy. And most of the time, when they speak truth to power, power isn’t listening. Rarely do academic contributions to the public debate attract much attention or make much difference.

Susan Eckstein’s Cuban Privilege is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the public does take notice. Presenting her book in Miami, Eckstein endured 30 minutes of hate, denounced as an agent of Castroism, because she had the nerve to state the obvious — Cuban immigrants to the United States have enjoyed enormous privileges that no other immigrant group has enjoyed. To say that is not an attack on Cuban Americans; it’s a simple truth. 

Ironically, the policy of privileged immigration for Cubans, which was intended to weaken and embarrass the Cuban government, has instead weakened and embarrassed the U.S. government producing a series of migration “crises” or more correctly punctuated increases (Camarioca in 1965, Mariel in 1980, the rafters crisis in 1994, and the post-Covid increase in emigration that is ongoing today), and distorting U.S. domestic politics by creating one of the most powerful domestic foreign policy lobbies in history—Cuban Americans in south Florida.

For 30 years, successive presidents —with the sole exception of Barack Obama— have been afraid to stand up to the Miami lobby on U.S. policy toward Cuba. As President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft put it, “Cuba is not a foreign policy question. Cuba is a domestic issue.” The result is a policy of regime change that, in 65 years, has done nothing to advance the cause of democracy or human rights in Cuba, but has lowered the living standard of the Cuban people and alienated Washington from allies in Latin America.

Before the Trump administration, Cuban American attitudes were gradually evolving toward moderation and support of engagement. President Obama won more Cuban American votes in Florida than any Democrat before him. And a majority—albeit a narrow one—supported his normalization policy.

But Trump’s return to a policy aimed at overthrowing the Cuban government re-energized the most recalcitrant Cuban American right. Recently both attitudes and voting behavior in the community seem to have swung sharply to the right, the result of a new wave of immigrants, a toxic social media environment, and disinformation spread by some of Miami’s Spanish language media.

As a result, Democrats have gone back to being afraid of Cuba—not the island, but the issue. Despite his campaign promise to return, for the most part, to Obama’s policy of engagement, President Biden has kept in place most of Donald Trump’s draconian economic sanctions aimed at strangling the Cuban economy.

            The final irony is that Florida does not actually matter very often in presidential elections. Conventional political wisdom casts it as a critical swing state. But in the sixteen presidential elections since 1960, Florida has determined the outcome in Electoral College only twice: in 2000, when Cuban Americans gave George W. Bush a 537-vote margin over Al Gore because the Clinton administration returned six-year-old Elián González to his father in Cuba; and in 2004 when Bush narrowly beat John Kerry.

            Kerry lost Florida by such a wide margin that he would have lost the state even if he had won the Cuban vote. So Cuban Americans in Florida have only cost the Democrats the White House once: in the unforgettable election of 2000. Ever since, Democrats have suffered from electoral post-traumatic stress disorder over the issue of Cuba, and it appears that 2024 will be no different. That is the legacy of the immigration policies that Susan Eckstein so expertly chronicles in Cuban Privilege.

Copyleft Creative Commons. Reproduction with full attribution is possible by news media and for not-for profit and educational purposes. Minor modifications, such as not including the “About the Study” section, are permitted. 

*William M LeoGrande is a CLALS faculty affiliate and Professor of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and co-author with Peter Kornbluh of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana(University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

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by clalsstaff on May 21, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on May 21, 2024

https://aulablog.net/2024/05/21/the-legacy-of-u-s-immigration-policy-towards-cuba/

Surviving the Criminalization of Migration

by Ernesto Castañeda, Makenna Lindsay, and Natalie Turkington*

Survivor of Ciudad Juarez Migrant Detention Center Fire / Creative Commons License

On March 27, 2023, a fire at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico killed 40 migrants and injured 29 more. One of those injured was Justen (pseudonym), a man in his late 20s from El Salvador who lost six of his friends in the fire. Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, Director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS) sat down with Justen last year to discuss the horrors experienced inside of the center and what happened after. The following testimony reveals the cruelty inside the Ciudad Juarez detention center fire as well as the treatment victims encountered by both U.S. and Mexican officials after the fact. 

Justen mentioned how difficult it was to transit through Mexico. He crossed into Chiapas in a pickup truck under a tarp. Later in Northern Mexico, he was stopped and questioned. He claimed he was from Chihuahua, Mexico but the authorities decided that given his answers, he was not Mexican, and he was taken to an immigration detention center. At the center, people had different rights and access to necessities such as mattresses and water bottles—only if they had money to pay for them. After some of the immigrants complained that they had no water to drink, the officials would reply that it was not up to them to support them and that it was their fault “por andar migrando” for migrating. Some of the people detained got angry, put the mattresses together, and said “if you do not open the doors or give us water, we will burn them.” An agent said, “Que les vaya bien”— “farewell,” as he saw them light the place on fire and left without opening the door.  

When the fire broke out, Justen felt his skin getting too hot, the smoke made it hard to breathe. He ran to the bathrooms to try to get away from the flames and found dozens of people, all crammed together–there was no running water. He and others screamed “Please let us out! “We do not want to die!” However, migration officials did not open the door. Justen recalls that, “the immigration officials did not at any moment try to open the door or call other authorities or ambulances.” Trapped in the bathroom, Justen lost consciousness, thinking he would die being burnt alive.

He later heard people crediting a passing firefighter who saw the smoke, called the fire department, and ran towards the building. Firefighters stopped the fire before everyone died inside. Justen’s burnt but breathing body was brought to Mexico City where he underwent treatment and a hospital stay of over two weeks and was incubated for much of that time. Immediately following his discharge, he had multiple interactions with agents of the Mexican government to arrange lodging for the remainder of his recovery. “When I saw migración [migrant agents] there, I said, ‘Why, why are our aggressors looking out for us?’’ Even in his injured state, Justen recognized the paradox that although migration officials played a major role in his near-fatal condition, they also “helped” him to recover. Ironically, they also helped bring his mother from El Salvador for humanitarian reasons.  

This is not the only striking paradox illuminated by the fire. The fire, namely smoke inhalation and dehydration caused immense damage to Justen’s lungs and kidneys. The doctor told him that 90% organ function would be considered great given the extent of the organ damage; he would likely never recover full function and health. “…I have to keep living and be more cautious of my lungs, airways, and kidneys… if I ever get too dehydrated because this could jeopardize my life.” Indeed, he would often cough while we spoke. 

The sequelae are not only related to his physical health but also to his mental health. In the interview Justen shared that to this day he still hears the cries of people trapped screaming, ‘We don’t want to die! We don’t want to die!’, and his own screams: ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ Six of his travel companions died in the fire. He also expressed the mistreatment and further neglect he endured from the Executive Commission of Attention for Victims (CEAV), and the chronic health problems he must deal with because of the tragedy. 

Following the fire, Justen was allowed to apply for asylum in the United States. Given his condition, Justen was asked about his health care and public services access in the United States. He specifically notes the conditional nature of his asylee status he understood that “…it was a condition of the government that we were in good health and all that and not to be a public charge.” He will not apply to receive disability income and will depend on remittances from his wife in DC and a job the mom can find in Texas.

The acute irony of the situation is that the United States government played a pivotal role in the development of his condition by asking Mexico to more forcefully enforce its immigration policies and to dissuade Central American and other immigrants from reaching the U.S./Mexico border, and yet it granted him asylum as a survivor of a tragedy abroad. Nonetheless, in establishing such a condition, the U.S. evades its responsibility to not only protect migrants but to protect and honor the rights of asylees.  

As discussed in the book “Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration,” Justen was on his way to the U.S. in part to reunite with his wife and family who are living in the Washington, DC area. Justen’s wife escaped violence from El Salvador and moved to Nicaragua, but then the situation got unstable in Nicaragua and she came to DC. Justen and his mother were relocated by non-profits to a city in Texas under humanitarian parole and applied asylum, but his wife is undocumented and cannot apply for asylum simultaneously because she was not traveling with him and she was not at the fire. Justen is not in condition to work yet, though his wife has a job in DC and therefore, they still live apart despite both being in the United States. Such family separations show how immigration laws tend to work at the individual level, putting family unity and well-being in a secondary place.  

Violence against immigrants, like that in the Ciudad Juarez fire is a direct result of immigrant restrictionism and the externalization of borders that we see in North America and Europe. There is a need for the public to pay closer attention to the realities experienced by migrants, asylees, and refugees. Unjust treatment which goes unnoticed points to the lack of care taken to uphold the human rights of those on the move.   

For more see: 

Délano Alonso, Alexandra. “Before and After the Juárez Fire.” CLALS Working Paper, no. 45 (2023). https://www.american.edu/centers/latin-american-latino-studies/upload/ssrn-id4655183.pdf 

Brashear, Madeline and Diaz, Sarah and American University, CLALS, No Right to Life: Lives Lost and the Legalized Violence That Shaped a Humanitarian Crisis in the Arizona Borderlands (November 15, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4634297 

Book Review: Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas https://www.academia.edu/108876335/Book_Review_Migration_and_Mortality_Social_Death_Dispossession_and_Survival_in_the_Americas 

Guerra, Sofia. Invisible Deaths. https://aulablog.net/2024/03/07/invisible-deaths/  

Copyleft Creative Commons. Reproduction with full attribution is possible by news media and for not-for profit and educational purposes. Minor modifications, such as not including the “About the Study” section, are permitted. 

*Ernesto Castaneda is the Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Immigration Lab. He conducted the interviews and helped write the blog. Makenna Lindsay, Coordinator of the Immigration Lab, and Natalie Turkington, a Research Assistant with the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, transcribed and translated the interview, and drafted and edited this blog. 

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by clalsstaff on April 3, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 3, 2024

https://aulablog.net/2024/04/03/surviving-the-criminalization-of-migration/

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