Blaming the Victims
Political asylum for Central Americans isn't a favor for the United States to bestow; it's an obligation we have failed to fulfill.
My wife’s dad was a left-wing guerrilla soldier in the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. He came to the United States — Los Angeles, specifically — as a refugee after his 11-year-old daughter was kidnapped and murdered by a right wing death squad; my wife is named after that daughter. He married an American and stayed for three decades as a permanent resident, before eventually moving back home to El Salvador.
I’d say I owe the lives of my son and daughter to the U.S.’ asylum policy, but my father-in-law never received it. Hardly anyone from that region did — less than three percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans were granted asylum in the 1980s, versus 60% of Iranians, 40% of Afghans, and 32% of Poles, who, unlike the Central Americans, were fleeing U.S. enemies instead of allies. And even the few who did could hardly be expected to be grateful for it, given that it was the United States that had funded and trained the death squads they were fleeing from in the first place.
Last week, President Biden effectively shut down the asylum system. Under his executive order, asylum is now denied en masse to everyone seeking it, until such time as daily border crossings drop to a level that the administration clearly believes they will never reach.
To anyone who doesn’t understand how the asylum system actually works — which is to say to nearly everyone — the restrictions sound sad but reasonable. Clearly, we have a problem with mass migration: border apprehensions are the highest they’ve ever been. There are new push factors all over the world: the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, turmoil in Haiti, the war in Ukraine, increased repression in China, and the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan, to name a few. Historically, the United States has been generous to people victimized by circumstances such as these, the conventional wisdom goes, but we can’t save everyone, forever.
For most of the examples above, that may be a defensible position. But for Central Americans, who, for the better part of the last decade, and until quite recently, have constituted the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers, it’s an insult and a statement of brazen hypocrisy. The reason the U.S. border has been overwhelmed by Central American migrants is because our government destroyed their countries. It’s that simple.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Social Studies to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.