A ‘revolving door’ for illegal immigration
Comic books sit on the counter of a Mexican immigration office in Ciudad Juárez with the title “Migrants” splashed across the cover in stylized letters suggesting a horror story.
In the books — produced by the Mexican government’s human rights commission and directed at Central Americans — migrants face graphic abuse and extortion by Mexican police, beatings and kidnappings by criminal gangs and mutilation or death on the freight train known as the beast as they make their way north to the U.S.
All these risks are not just the stuff of graphic novels. They are real. And yet los migrantes keep coming.
Homeland Security’s annual report, released last week, showed overall apprehensions of migrants by the Border Patrol down 30 percent in fiscal 2015 and apprehensions of “family units” down 42 percent from last year — an indication of slowing illegal immigration, which has reached historic lows. Total apprehensions of 337,117 hit their second-lowest point
since 1972.
But in October and November — the first two months of fiscal 2016 — Central American families and children again began streaming north as they did two summers ago.
Apprehensions of “family units” at the Southwestern border surged 173 percent to more than 12,500 families in October and November compared with the same two months a year earlier, when agents apprehended more than 4,500 families. Apprehensions of unaccompanied minors more than doubled to 10,588 from 5,129.
The vast majority of the children and family units apprehended in October and November came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Holloman Air Force Base announced last week that it would temporarily house up to 400 Central American immigrant children starting in January.
The sudden increase came after nearly a year of declining immigration to the U.S. from these countries, as the Obama administration has tried to detain more families and has advertised in Central America that migrants won’t get a permiso — a pass — when they cross the border illegally.
The U.S. government’s “Know the Facts” campaign, drier in style than the graphic Mexican comic books, seems to have had limited power of persuasion compared with the “push” factors that keep driving people north.
The homicide rate in El Salvador has risen this year to a level not seen since that country’s civil war in the 1980s, only this time the “war,” not targeting a government, is off the books, and the U.S. government hasn’t officially classified the migrants as refugees (although the United Nations has).
Rival gangs with pervasive reach in El Salvador known as maras are killing one another and terrorizing the country. Gang violence and economic strife are endemic in Guatemala and Honduras, as well. The region has some of the highest murder rates in the world, especially of women, according to the United Nations, which warned in October of a “looming refugee crisis.”
The United Nations reports that 82 percent of 16,077 women from these countries interviewed by U.S. authorities in the past year were found to have a credible fear of persecution or torture and were allowed to pursue their claims for asylum.
Deportations of Central Americans by the U.S. and Mexico may not stop migrants from trying again: “Returning to worse conditions than they tried to escape in the first place,” the report finds, “this rapidly growing population of deportees — including tens of thousands of children — is in danger of entering a revolving door of migration, deportation and re-migration,” the nonpartisan, nonprofit Migration Policy Institute said in a report this month.
Even if the numbers of Central Americans landing on our doorstep fall temporarily, the circumstances driving them here show no sign of improving. Surges of illegal immigration at the border should come as no surprise.
The last page of the “Migrants” comic book depicts young men and women gripping the roof of the beast as it speeds through the jungle, concluding dramatically: “Forgotten, almost invisible, there go los migrantes, those for whom having nothing meant having to abandon everything.”