Central America, Migrants, Workers and The Class Struggle

Who are these Central American Children? 

 Although the media talk about “Central American children,” almost all of the detainees are, in fact, coming from only three of the six countries of Central America:  Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  There are almost none from Belize, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica.  Anybody who remembers the 1980s can probably guess why.  The enormous quantities of military “aid” that the United States poured into Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras helped create an environment of violently enforced inequality whose bitter fruits are still being reaped.
 In fact, the so-called “crisis” of these last months is anything but new, while the “debate” over where to temporarily detain the children is beside the point.  The number of Central American youths crossing the U.S.-Mexican border has been rising steadily since 2000.  Figures for minors apprehended at the border have gone up from a few thousand a year as the twenty-first century began, to 6,000-8,000 annually through 2011, 13,625 in 2012, and 24,668 in 2013.  A study released in February 2014 predicted that as many as 60,000 children were likely to be apprehended this year.

Why the Children Are Coming?

  First, U.S. policies directly led to today’s crises in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.  Since Washington orchestrated the overthrow of the reformist, democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, it has consistently cultivated repressive military regimes, savagely repressed peasant and popular movements for social change, and imposed economic policies including so-called free trade ones that favor foreign investors and have proven devastating to the rural and urban poor. Refugees from U.S.-sponsored dirty wars in Guatemala and El Salvador -- mostly peasants whose communities had been subjected to scorched-earth policies and the depredations of right-wing death squads -- began to pour into the United States in the 1980s.
 The refugee flood from Honduras didn’t begin until the United States supported a military coup against that country’s elected leftist president in 2009.  The youths crossing the border today are often the children and grandchildren of those initial refugees, and are fleeing the endemic violence and economic destruction left behind by the wars and the devastation that resulted from them. 
In other words, the policies that led to the present “crisis” were promoted over the decades with similar degrees of enthusiasm by Republicans and Democrats.

Second, an enormous demand for undocumented labor had already drawn the parents of many of these children to the United States where they clean houses and yards, wash dishes, and grow and process food.  Their underpaid labor helps sustain the U.S. economy.  For generations, this country’s immigration policy has focused on using Mexicans and Central Americans as “workers” without granting them legal and human rights.  But workers are people and people have children.  In other words, the present crisis stems in part from the way our economy depends on separating parents from their children in order to exploit their cheap labor.

Finally, the communities and school systems that the federal government expects to receive the border-crossing youth need more federal support.  Many of the locales receiving immigrants are indeed in crisis.  If, thanks to federal legislation and federal agencies, these children are being released in large numbers to communities in which schools are already underfunded, then the federal government should guarantee the services that it requires communities to provide them.  Instead of spending billions of dollars annually underwriting detention, deportation, and the further militarization of the borderlands, it should direct those funds to fulfilling human needs.
All parties should be criticized for their policies in Central America (including President Obama’s free trade agenda), their economic and immigration policies (that criminalize workers), and the ways they are pitting immigrant youth against poor Americans in a struggle for scarce resources.


taken from here