“El Salvador has so many scars that it is a privilege to be able to show them ours. Because all those who died are present here.” Salvadoran doctor Juan Romagosa clung to these words when he was before a jury in Florida, in 2002, when exposing the wounds on his body. He was a key witness in the trial for war crimes committed by the army in his country during the civil war of the 1980s. An army that the United States had financed.
Romagosa also feels that the border between the United States, Mexico and Central America is another scar. He helped hundreds of Central American refugees cross it during the Cold War, and then he did the same while escaping the war. The doctor ended up in Washington DC running a clinic for migrants. He carries violence and migration in his body and that is why he understands well a phenomenon that has been talked about a lot lately on both sides of the border: the migration crisis.
Juan Romagosa is one of the protagonists of Everyone who is Gone is Here, a book by Jonathan Blitzer, journalist for the magazine The New Yorker, which has not yet been translated into Spanish. “The migration crisis is not inevitable,” says Blitzer in an interview with EL PAÍS about a work that points out all those responsible and its victims, the migrants. “The United States had a responsibility in the displacement of a generation of Central Americans, both for the interventions they made in the region during the Cold War, and for leaving structures there that explain migration in the following decades until today,” he adds.
A responsibility not yet assumed politically. Last week, President Joe Biden decided to limit asylum at the United States border a little more, despite the fact that the numbers of migrants arriving there have decreased in recent months, an evidently political move before the November elections.
Ask. Many times we understand the migration crisis as crossing the Darién jungle or the Rio Grande, but you argue that at the heart of this crisis is a bureaucratic drama
Answer. Yes, bureaucracy may seem mundane, but it is necessary to understand the mechanics of the United States Government to understand its consequences. And the reality is this: there are many officials in the United States who would like to make good faith decisions for migrants, good decisions, but they are prevented. They hit a wall that limits them and is created by the political reality they live in Washington, fights between different departments that end up affecting people.
Q. He says that there are officials, who one would believe are right-wing, who actually support the same thing as some liberals or progressives to make a more humane immigration policy.
R. Yes, for example, people in the Border Patrol (border patrol) or ICE (the immigration and customs service). One assumes that all of them are hard-line officials on immigration issues. But several of them are quite pragmatic. They realized that the harshest policies are not effective. The policies of Trump, who made some of the cruelest decisions like separating families at the border, do not work. These “deterrent” policies do not help to “deter” migrants. Despite this, Donald Trump’s administration managed to move everything that is acceptable, or admissible, in immigration policy further to the right. That is why Joe Biden’s administration has also made very harsh decisions against migrants. Evidence, however, has shown that if there are legal options, people prefer them instead of traveling to the border.
Q. Didn’t Biden initially open one of those legal avenues?
R. Yes, the Biden administration has tried to expand something called parole (a status that allows conditional release before resolving the immigration situation). I think about the legal paths that were opened for migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, the number of people from those countries who traveled to the southern border fell by 90% when they had another alternative to enter—in just six months.
Q. A positive achievement that is hardly talked about
R. The White House does not want to talk about this publicly because today what is politically rewarded is having a very tough speech on immigration issues. Even when there are officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who say, ‘You can’t deny entry to everyone with everything that’s going on, you have to recognize that people are leaving their countries because they are desperate, they have to open legal paths to enter’. These are not left-wing officials, they are pragmatists, it is a matter of common sense.
Q. What has been one of Biden’s biggest mistakes on immigration?
R. Not having immediately overturned what is known as Title 42, [lo hizo en mayo del 2023, dos años y medio después de su posesión]. When the pandemic began, Trump imposed this Title 42, which basically said that, for health reasons, the Government would suspend the asylum system at the southern border and expel people who arrive at it. Scientists at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) then said that this did not make sense, in part because the coronavirus was already widespread throughout the United States, more so than in Latin America, where the migrants came from. Trump ignored the CDC and one of the consequences was that people tried to cross anyway, en masse, because the Government obviously couldn’t catch them all. That policy only brought chaos to the border, a chaos that continued into Joe Biden’s administration.
Q. Trump also allied himself with Central American presidents to stop migration
R. Yes, and there is an irony there, a historical parallel. In the Cold War years, the United States supported and protected governments that committed egregious human rights violations because the priority was to limit the left in the region at all costs. At present, the United States is only moved by one thing in the region: stopping the increase in migration by any means necessary. So now they turn a blind eye to corrupt governments. Something I tell in the book is how Enrique Degenhart, former President Jimmy Morales’ interior minister, traveled to meet with the Trump administration when the Constitutional Court of Guatemala did not allow the government to sign a ‘safe third country’ agreement. [un acuerdo que Trump promovió para que los migrantes pidiendo asilo tuvieran que quedarse esperando en Guatemala]. And Degenhart asked the Americans to threaten to sanction Guatemala, in order to scare the people, and through political pressure the agreement would be approved. That seems scandalous to me, an interior minister calling for sanctions against his own country. Trump then wrote a threatening tweet against Guatemala, Morales blamed the Court, and in the end it worked for them: the United States signed the agreement with Guatemala.
Q. And what is happening to Biden in the region?
R. Biden has had a hard time making allies. Some politicians were immediately ruled out, like Juan Orlando Hernández, from Honduras, because he was about to be arrested and extradited when Biden arrived. The president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, was the most obvious ally, but his government also had a lot of corruption. Something interesting has started to happen with Nayib Bukele. Although Biden has criticized his anti-democratic tendencies, the United States’ concern lately has been: how do we keep the Salvadoran economy stable so that there is no mass migration from there? And they are becoming less critical of their anti-democratic tendencies.
Q. Doesn’t having a progressive migration policy give political returns?
R. The most progressive position is the most difficult. It would require appealing to people’s reason and humanity, and that is a scarce resource lately. How to explain to people that it was thanks to the work of migrants that the United States avoided a recession after the coronavirus? The Biden administration is afraid of risk and they are so afraid of saying something politically incorrect that they prefer not to say anything. That void in the discourse is then filled by anti-immigration populists who are on the right, like Trump. It surprises me that, according to surveys, citizens trust the right more than the left to deal with immigration issues, even though the right’s record has been horrible and cruel. Democrats do not dominate the immigration discourse and want the issue to disappear, but it is not going to go away. The conversation about immigration has moved to the right and Democrats are desperate.
Q. The book tells the story of Kelly, one of the first mothers who was separated from her children at the border.
R. She was then one of the first mothers to travel to the United States, during the Biden administration, to reunite with her family. There are still families that remain separated, no longer thousands, but possibly hundreds. We have not yet talked about all the emotional and human damage of that policy. Some families were separated for years.
Q. Do you think Trump would try something like that again if he were president again?
R. Yes, I think we run the risk of his second administration being worse, in ways we can’t even imagine yet. There are people who float the idea of there being camps to intern migrants, or mass deportations. All of this must be analyzed calmly because many of these populist proposals from the right are fantasies, legally impossible. But I don’t really know what to expect from all this, it seems like a horrible possibility to me.
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