Causes of migration rev4
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People move for a wide variety of individual reasons. But there have been two moments in U.S. history in which millions of people came to this country at the same time. What kinds of large-scale disruptions cause millions of people to move at the same time? These are both times of global economic upheaval. The industrial revolution caused a massive economic shift across the world, from agricultural economies to urban/industrial economies, realignments of global power, and millions of economic and political refugees.
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Causes of migration rev4
- 1. SOA Watch is an independent organization that seeks to close the US Army School of the Americas, through vigils and fasts, demonstrations and nonviolent protest, as well as media and legislative work. SOA Watch 5525 Illinois Ave. NW Washington, DC 20011 phone: 202-234-3440 email: INFO@SOAW.ORG WWW.SOAW.ORG
- 2. In 1980 Fr. Roy became involved in issues surrounding US policy in El Salvador after four US churchwomen--two of them friends of his-- were raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. Roy became an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America. Fr. Roy Bourgeois - SOA Watch Founder Born in Lutcher, Louisiana, Fr. Roy served as a Naval Officer for two years before entering the seminary of the Maryknoll Missionary Order. Ordained a Catholic priest in 1972, Roy went on to work with the poor of Bolivia for five years before being arrested and forced to leave the country, then under the repressive rule of dictator and SOA grad General Hugo Banzer
- 4. North Carolina/ El Salvador – The 1989 massacre of 16-year-old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos, and six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America (UCA) in El A United Nations Truth Commission cited 26 Salvadoran officers for the 1989 "execution-style" massacre. Nineteen of those were trained at the School of the Americas, renamed in 2001 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The SOA made headlines again in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution.
- 5. A Nation Built by Immigrants…. What do you know about your ancestors? Nation of origin?
- 6. 2 Large Waves of Immigration Source: Migration Policy Institute. Source: The 2011 and 2010 data are from the US Census Bureau's American Community Surveys, the 2000 data are from Census 2000 (see www.census.gov). All other data are from Gibson, Campbell and Emily Lennon, US Census Bureau, Working Paper No. 29 1860-1920 1970-2010
- 7. Why do People Move? “Push Factors” • War • Famine • Poverty • Persecution “Pull Factors” • Jobs • Land • Family ties • Security Or forced migration – slavery, trafficking
- 8. Coming “legally”: 1st Wave What was the official process for immigrating to the U.S. from 1790 – 1920? Varied, but in general: • Few Restrictions* • No Waiting for Entry • All Authorized to Work Immigration “legal” – union activities often “illegal” *Race-based restrictions by late 1800s*
- 9. In 1800s, Immigrants Recruited
- 11. U.S. International Trade Commission and Pew Hispanic Center data2 Mexican immigration to the United States doubled after NAFTA
- 13. Mexico – Millions Displaced – Estimated 1.5 to 2.5 million Mexicans forced off their farms – Extreme rural poverty rose from 35% to 55% NAFTA allowed subsidized U.S. agribusiness to flood Mexican market
- 14. Wages fell in cities, financial deregulation damaged economy Meanwhile, in the cities… • Falling wages as farmers flooded urban labor markets • Devalued peso from financial deregulation and speculation • Jobs shift to China in 2001, when it joins WTO • Unions and labor rights under attack by multinational corporations and government allies
- 15. CAFTA’s farmer-displacing rules feed Central America’s forced migration crisis
- 18. How many people have left the Northern Triangle in recent years? Beginning in October 2011, the U.S. Government recorded a dramatic rise – commonly referred to in the United States as “the surge” – in the number of unaccompanied and separated children arriving to the United States from these same three countries – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
- 21. Until around 1990 Colombian trade unions were among the strongest in Latin America. However the 1980s expansion of par militarism in Colombia saw trade union leaders and members increasingly targeted for assassination, and as a result Colombia has been the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists for several decades.
- 22. Most of the violence committed against trade unionist has been directed at there leaders of unions of multinational corporations, reports that US corporations in Colombia have actively colluded with paramilitaries in order to reduce union activity. Besides acknowledged payments from multinationals to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) (Doe v. Chiquita Brands International), "Trade unionists have been particularly targeted by the paramilitaries3 years." Other sources give figures of around 4000 trade union members killed from the mid-1980s to 2008
- 23. Since the beginning of the year, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been rounding up and deporting dozens of members of Central American families seeking refuge from extreme violence and dire economic conditions in their communities of origin. Homeland Security Secretary Johnson has described the move as part of an effort to “secure” the U.S. border and has announced that “additional enforcement operations such as these will continue to occur as appropriate.”
- 24. Immigrants for Sale Countless lives of undocumented immigrants are being taken and sold for billions of dollars. Watch the disturbing details unfold and listen to the first- hand accounts of the real cost of private prisons. http://www.bravenewfilms.org/immigrantsforsale
- 25. At a time when refugees who are fleeing U.S.-sponsored violence are being branded as criminals, rapists and terrorists, and as anti- immigrant rhetoric continues to poison the public discourse in this election year, it is important for people of conscience to take a stand and to offer a different narrative. We are hoping to bring a large delegation this October 7-10, for our first bi-national convergence at the U.S./Mexico border to demand a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy.
- 26. Presenter : Jerry King SOA Watch Labor Caucus Email: Jking@UCNTC.ORG Phone: 313-784-8423
Editor's Notes
- SOA Watch is a nonviolent grassroots movement that works to stand in solidarity with the people of Latin America and the Caribbean, to close the SOA/WHINSEC and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents. We are grateful to our sisters and brothers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean for their inspiration and the invitation to join them in their struggle for economic and social justice. Staff Collective Our staff collective works out of Chile, the United States, Panama and Guatemala. We currently also have two SOA Watch working groups on the ground in Honduras. The SOA Watch national office is located in Washington, DC.
- Today, the SOA Watch movement is a large, diverse, grassroots movement rooted in solidarity with the people of Latin America. The goal of SOA Watch is to close the SOA and to change U.S. foreign policy in Latin America by educating the public, lobbying Congress and participating in creative, nonviolent resistance. The Pentagon has responded to the growing movement and Congress' near closure of the SOA with a PR campaign to give the SOA a new image. In an attempt to disassociate the school with its horrific past, the SOA was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in January of 2001.
- On Friday, February 5, 2016, a U.S. judge in North Carolina cleared the way for SOA graduate and retired Salvadoran Colonel, Inocente Orlando Montano, to be extradited to face charges in Spain. Col. Inocente Orlando Montano was trained by the U.S. military at the School of the Americas in 1970. On Saturday, February 06, 2016, El Salvador's national police force announced that four ex-soldiers, who were also involved in the massacre, were arrested at the behest of Interpol in an operation that began Friday night. The four former military officers arrested in El Salvador attended the Small Unit Training and Management course at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1988 and 1987 respectively, before allegedly participating in the brutal 1989 massacre. El Salvador's Supreme Court is expected to rule on their extraditions to Spain in the coming days. Twelve other former Salvadoran soldiers with international warrants in connection with the UCA massacre remain at large, and it is unknown whether they are in El Salvador or have fled the country.
- What traditions have you maintained from your ethnic heritage, if any? What did you or your relative(s) miss most about their homeland?
- People move for a wide variety of individual reasons. But there have been two moments in U.S. history in which millions of people came to this country at the same time. What kinds of large-scale disruptions cause millions of people to move at the same time? These are both times of global economic upheaval. The industrial revolution caused a massive economic shift across the world, from agricultural economies to urban/industrial economies, realignments of global power, and millions of economic and political refugees.
- Push factors Push factors are those that force the individual to move voluntarily, and in many cases, they are forced because the individual risk something if they stay. Push factors may include conflict, drought, famine, or extreme religious activity. Poor economic activity and lack of job opportunities are also strong push factors for migration. Other strong push factors include race and discriminating cultures, political intolerance and persecution of people who question the status quo. Pull Factors Pull factors are those factors in the destination country that attract the individual or group to leave their home. Those factors are known as place utility, which is the desirability of a place that attracts people. Better economic opportunities, more jobs, and the promise of a better life often pull people into new locations.
- The impacts of Bad Trade Deals That Only Benefit The Transnational Corporations. Fleeing Violence State, Gangs, Domestic Family Ties
- Immigration from Mexico to the United States was stable before NAFTA was implemented. Millions of Mexican families lived in rural villages farming plots of land called “ejidos” that had been made available through the Mexican Revolution’s land reforms. This land could not be sold or seized for debt. But NAFTA required changes to the Mexican Constitution to allow sale and consolidation of this land into large farms that could be purchased by foreign firms. At the same time, NAFTA eliminated Mexico’s tariffs on corn.
- U.S. trade policies have caused massive displacement of small farmers in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Indeed, many of the policymakers most of whom, have focused on “closing” the U.S. border were the very same ones who supported U.S. trade policies that have caused the economic crises that destroyed livelihoods and devastated communities throughout Latin America – creating powerful incentives for people desperate for new livelihoods to migrate to America.
- Before NAFTA, Mexico only imported corn when a drought or other problems left domestic supplies short. After NAFTA slashed Mexico’s corn tariffs, but left U.S. farm subsidies intact, imported U.S. corn flooded Mexican markets. Within several years, the price paid to Mexican farmers for the corn they produced plummeted by 66 percent, forcing many to abandon farming. As an exposé in the New Republic put it, “as cheap American foodstuffs flooded Mexico’s markets and as U.S. agribusiness moved in, 1.1 million small farmers – and 1.4 million other Mexicans dependent upon the farm sector – were driven out of work between 1993 and 2005. Wages dropped so precipitously that today the income of a farm laborer is one-third that of what it was before NAFTA. As jobs disappeared and wages sank, many of these rural Mexicans emigrated, swelling the ranks of the 12 million illegal immigrants living incognito and competing for low-wage jobs in the United States.”
- While most of us were losers under NAFTA, those big pharmaceutical, agribusiness, oil and retail corporations that reaped increased profits under the model wanted more. Most of Latin America rejected the failed NAFTA model, as evidenced by the 2003 demise of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a proposed hemisphere-wide NAFTA expansion. Plan B for the Bush II administration was to seek NAFTA-clone deals with the remaining “coalition of the willing.” First came CAFTA. It included the same devastating NAFTA-style agricultural provisions. Oxfam predicted that up to 1.5 million people whose livelihoods are connected to Central American rice production alone could face displacement as CAFTA’s agriculture terms were implemented. Oxfam Who we are Together we can achieve a fairer world without poverty Oxfam is an international confederation of 18 organizations working together with partners and local communities in more than 90 countries. One person in three in the world lives in poverty. Oxfam is determined to change that world by mobilizing the power of people against poverty. Around the globe, Oxfam works to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive. We save lives and help rebuild livelihoods when crisis strikes. And we campaign so that the voices of the poor influence the local and global decisions that affect them. In all we do, Oxfam works with partner organizations and alongside vulnerable women and men to end the injustices that cause poverty.
- Today the world is witness to a global refugee crisis of proportions not seen since World War II. While most of the international media attention is on the refugees arriving in Europe – from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan – there is another protection crisis unfolding in Central America. Tens of thousands of women – travelling alone or together with their children or other family members – are fleeing a surging tide of violence in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and parts of Mexico.
- Nearly 10 percent of the Northern Triangle countries’ thirty million residents have left, mostly for the United States. In 2013, as many as 2.7 million people born in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were living in the United States, up from an estimated 1.5 million people in 2000. Nearly one hundred thousand unaccompanied minors arrived to the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras between October 2013 and July 2015, drawing attention to the region’s broader emigration trend. At the United States' urging, Mexico stepped up enforcement along its southern border, apprehending70 percent more Central Americans in 2015 than it did in the year before. Beginning in October 2011, the U.S. Government recorded a dramatic rise – commonly referred to in the United States as “the surge” – in the number of unaccompanied and separated children arriving to the United States from these same three countries – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
- The major gangs operating in Central America with ties to the United States are the “18th Street” gang (also known as M-18), and their main rival, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The 18th Street gang was formed by Mexican youth in the Rampart section of Los Angeles in the 1960s who were not accepted into existing Hispanic gangs. It was the first Hispanic gang to accept members from all races and to recruit members from other states. MS-13 was created during the 1980s by Salvadorans in Los Angeles who had fled the country’s civil conflict. Both gangs later expanded their operations to Central America. This process accelerated after the United States began deporting illegal immigrants, many with criminal convictions, back to the region after the passage of the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996. Many contend that gang-deportees “exported” a Los Angeles gang culture to Central America and recruited new members from among the local populations.
- Estimates of the overall number of gang members in Central America vary widely, with a top State Department official recently estimating that there may be 85,000 MS-13 and 18th Street gang members in the northern triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). In 2012, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated total MS-13 and M-18 membership in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras at a more modest 54,000. According to UNODC, in 2012 there are roughly 20,000 gang members in El Salvador, 12,000 in Honduras, and 22,000 in Guatemala. El Salvador has the highest concentration of gang members, with some 323 mareros (gang members) for every 100,000 citizens, double the level of Guatemala and Honduras. In comparison, in 2007, UNODC cited country membership totals of 10,500 in El Salvador, 36,000 in Honduras, and 14,000 in Guatemala.12 While MS-13 and M-18 began as loosely structured street gangs, there is some evidence that both gangs, but particularly the MS-13, have expanded geographically and become more organized and sophisticated.
- The U.S. has long exercised control of Central America through military interventions or the financing, arming, and training of pro-U.S. local elites and their armed forces. In 1823, President Monroe declared the U.S. the sole commercial and political power throughout the Western Hemisphere. By the 1880s, many Central American and Caribbean republics were reduced to “protectorates or in effect client states” of the U.S., according to historian John Coatsworth. During the Banana Wars, the U.S. military intervened in Honduras seven times between 1903 and 1925. The 1954 CIA-orchestrated Guatemalan coup effectively sparked their civil war. It would cruelly last until 1996. In the 1980s, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were inundated with U.S. military aid and advisers. The “Banana Republic” of Honduras became a staging ground for U.S. trained armed forces fighting leftists in the three countries it borders and so earned a new nickname – the “U.S.S. Honduras”.
- The School of the Americas (SOA) is the embodiment of the U.S.’s traditional policy towards Central America – pretending to apply military solutions to social and economic problems. Established in 1946, the SOA remains the only U.S. military institute dedicated to training the security forces of one specific region of the world. During the Cold War, its curriculum was designed to “thwart armed communist insurgencies.” It continues to equate democracy with “free markets.” Graduates of the SOA include the most notorious Central American human rights violators: members of the Battalion 316 in Honduras; the murderers of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the four U.S. churchwomen, and over 900 civilians at El Mozote in El Salvador; and the former and current Presidents of Guatemala (Efrain Rios Montt and Otto Perez Molina) connected to genocidal military campaigns in that country. Despite the Pentagon’s claims of change and transparency, they have refused to release the names of SOA graduates for the last 10 years. Be it Cold War or Drug War, the SOA continues to be part of the apparatus that enables U.S. allies to commit human rights violations in the name of democracy.
- These raids are the latest chapter of what can only be described as a prolonged U.S. government war on migrant families, and specifically those coming from the most dangerous and economically deprived parts of Central America. Following the public outcry generated by the mass detention of child migrants from Central America during the summer of 2014, the U.S. government enlisted Mexico’s security forces to carry out the dirty work of aggressively apprehending and repatriating migrants fleeing rampant violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (collectively referred to as the “Northern Triangle”). With promises of economic assistance, the U.S. then successfully lobbied Northern Triangle governments to use their security forces to further suppress migration towards the United States
- First 2:00 minutes of video
- Beginning in the Spring of 2015, we began a discussion focused on moving the annual vigil to the U.S./Mexico border in order to expand our focus and shine a light on the many human rights violations caused by destructive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents. Our border mobilization in Nogales is one more way to fight for the closure of the School of the Americas, and to work towards a world that is free of suffering and violence. We cannot forget that many of our immigrant brothers and sisters are survivors of U.S.-sponsored atrocities in Latin America. In calling attention to the militarization of the border, we continue to demand an end to state-sponsored terrorism and violence against our communities on both sides of the border.