Asylum seekers – Memphis Flyer

Migration crises — real or imagined — tend to animate voters. So it’s no surprise that a new emergency situation has emerged, manufactured by three Republican governors, two of whom are seeking reelection. The difference this time: The migrants are suing the governors.

First, the migrants in this case are not illegal aliens, or illegal anything. They are asylum seekers, and a class action lawsuit has been engaged by some of these people and their representatives here in the U.S. against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who planned, paid for, and executed the unceremonious dumping of 48 Venezuelans on a tiny Massachusetts island.

The Venezuelans sent from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard are asylum petitioners: They have a right to be here and our nation offers people fleeing from a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home country physical and legal protection. These types of laws distinguish the United States from places like … Venezuela and Cuba which offer no such protections.

Venezuela’s fortunes changed in 2013 when Hugo Chávez, the charismatic, leftist, a-little-less-loco-than-Trump leader died of cancer. Then the price of oil (which represents about 90 percent of all exports) collapsed on the world market and direct subsidy payments to the poor ended. Chaos has ensued, the current leader there is a grim-faced, not-bright, undemocratic leader named Nicolás Maduro, and relations between our two nations have calcified.

These intrepid Venezuelans trekked from their home through Colombia, through the Darién (the meanest, most forbidden jungle in the world), through Panama, Costa Rica, and the rest of Central America, they crossed Mexico and onto America — arriving in Texas. Why could they be treated like disposable cargo by a far-away Florida governor? Because, simply and sadly stated, they’re not Swedes. Or Ukrainians. They’re dark-skinned, poor people who are not nicely dressed — not out of “Central Casting.” What would any of us look like if we walked to Texas — from Venezuela?

The three Republican leaders who have been shipping out migrants govern Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Their theory: We here on the border (Florida is surrounded by water, Georgia, and Alabama) shoulder a disproportionate burden regarding arriving migrants from the south. It’s true that Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California are the first points of entry for migrants — documented or not — arriving over land from the global South but these states receive billions of dollars in federal grants to help offset educational and health costs. It’s also true that states with high influxes of immigrants are much more economically (and culturally) robust. California versus West Virginia, Texas versus South Dakota, for example.

The stunt of the three governors seems to have worked in the short term: They’ve forced a refocusing on our immigration system at a moment before a decisive election. But to paint this as “Biden’s” immigration crisis is absurd, ahistorical, and unhelpful. The three amigo governors don’t want to help solve problems; they only want to score political points. But the newly announced lawsuit and the fact that DeSantis’ state is home to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are a little skeptical of this performance — upset at the unkind treatment in America of brothers and sisters from the pátria — might indicate the stunt has stalled.

The irony behind all of this, of course, is that we desperately need laborers in the United States economy right now. The Biden administration could probably offer some sort of temporary, emergency provision to harmonize the present needs of the U.S. economy with the current migratory patterns affecting our southern border. A real fix — a comprehensive overhaul of our outdated immigration laws and provisions — is what’s really needed, but the Democrats’ majority is too thin in Congress and the Republicans are uninterested in any solutions that would inhibit their ability to weaponize the immigration debate.

Mr. Trump began his 2016 presidential campaign with a giant gamble — a mean-spirited, untrue attack on immigrants from Mexico. It worked. Governor DeSantis of Florida has turned to this Trump playbook, but the Florida governor has the charm, grace, and charisma of a different sort of dictator: Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and past board chair of Latino Memphis. Michael LaRosa teaches history at Rhodes College.

Sometimes sport and politics clash in Latin America, but last month’s “Central America snub” was particularly revealing. Vice President Joe Biden flew to the region to meet with the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the midst of a deepening Central American human rights and refugee crisis. President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras was a no-show — too busy watching his national team play soccer in Brazil.

Over the past several months, tens of thousands of women and children, most of them poor and from those three Central American nations named above, have arrived at our southwest border. From October 2013 to May 2014, the United States detained nearly 35,000 unaccompanied minors at the border. This is up from a total of 21,000 for the entire previous year. Meanwhile, the number of women seeking refuge in the U.S. has increased to a point that 240 female detainees were transferred to a prison in Mason, Tennessee, because the detention centers at the border are at capacity.

We’re not solely blaming President Hernández for a migratory crisis, but the leader’s priorities reflect an unfortunate historic reality: The struggles of women and children, particularly poor women and children — are generally secondary to other more compelling national concerns. In this case, World Cup soccer.

Central America is suffering from demoralizing poverty and widespread violence. Honduras currently has the world’s highest murder rate and ranks first in the world in murders per capita. To appreciate the extent of despair there, imagine making the decision to send your 10-year-old daughter on a solitary journey north — for hundreds of miles — in search of refugee status in the U.S. rather than letting her face the dangers at home.

This crisis did not materialize overnight, as suggested in the mainstream U.S. media, nor is it an indictment of President Obama’s immigration policy; a feckless, unfocused Congress has refused to even consider the moderate immigration reform passed by the Senate last summer and supported by Obama.

No, this crisis is decades in the making, and until the U.S. adopts mature, reasonable immigration reform and sensible partnerships within Central America, we’ll continue to cycle through these crises.

U.S. policy in Central America has hardly helped that region’s poor. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the U.S. pursued three wars in the region. At times, it became difficult to separate our allies from our adversaries. One thing was clear: The U.S. supported, with tens of millions of dollars in military aid and direct CIA intervention, anyone in the region who fought Marxism. We blindly backed the Contras in Nicaragua and the pre-modern militaries in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military, during the 1980s, even committed genocide. To this day, that nation’s Nobel Lauriat in Peace, Rigoberta Menchú, travels with a 12-man security detail. What kind of a nation would want to kill a Nobel Peace Prize winner?

Our policies under President Obama have not pointed any closer to peace or security in the region. In 2009, for example, despite unanimous opposition from the Organization of American States, the U.S. — after briefly protesting — acceded to a coup in Honduras against a leftist regime. In Honduras, young, idealistic Americans (including one of the authors of this op-ed) once served in the U.S. Peace Corps, but the organization pulled out a few years ago, citing legitimate safety concerns for its volunteers.

The recent Free Trade Agreement frenzy, pushed by the U.S., the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, has not generated prosperity in the region: Some 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, and Honduras and Guatemala are the most unequal nations (in terms of overall distribution of goods and income) in Latin America. Almost 20 years ago, the bipartisan “Washington consensus” assured us that free trade agreements between the U.S. and Latin America would create more wealth, income, and prosperity for all in the Americas — and would have the added benefit of reducing migration into the U.S.

Our wars, our trade policies, and now our inability to lead on immigration reform, combined with low levels of enlightened leadership in Central America are the true causes of the current humanitarian/refugee crisis in our region. We could help by passing a clear national reform to our outdated immigration laws, but Congress won’t act.

The president has decided to act unilaterally, where he can. On June 30th, he announced that by late summer, he’ll move on some areas of reform that do not require congressional approval. But women and children fleeing Central American poverty and governments with a genocidal history can’t wait.