On 5 January, US President Joe Biden announced changes to immigration rules which extended Title 42 restrictions to people from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti, having applied it against migrants from Venezuela since last October, and implemented the ‘Safe Third Country’ policy for those seeking asylum. This essentially tightens the US southern border with Mexico against migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Title 42 is a clause in the 1944 Public Health Services Law, which allows the US government to prohibit people entering the country during public health emergencies. Former president Donald Trump invoked it against people arriving from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala (whom he had previously referred to as murderers and rapists) during the Covid-19 pandemic: a racist move from a president who was against all Covid-19 mitigation measures and promoted dangerous and false cures for it.
Biden made campaign promises to end Title 42 restrictions, and by March 2022 the Centres for Disease Control had said the restrictions were no longer needed. Medical experts and the United Nations had condemned Title 42, saying it exposed the migrants to danger after being expelled to Mexico, and that there was no scientific evidence to support its stated goal of limiting the virus. With little action being taken to remove the restrictions, the American Civil Liberties Union and groups on behalf of migrant families sought to take legal action to repeal it. They won, but this was challenged by a group of 19 Republican states at the Supreme Court, which ruled to keep Title 42 in place until it serves its judgement on this legal challenge, which is not expected until June 2023. The move is purely cynical: 12 of these Republican states are the same ones suing the federal government to lift all Covid-19 public health measures on the grounds that the pandemic is over.
The ‘Safe Third Country’ policy states that in order to apply for asylum in the US a person is required to show that they have already applied for asylum and been turned down in any ‘safe’ country they have transited through. This is a re-hash of a Trump-era policy which was added as an exception to the Immigration and Nationality Act, and which contravenes international treaties relating to refugees. To state that passage through places like El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Columbia, etc is safe for migrants and refugees is far from the reality in these countries.
Those who do manage to pass through these countries then face a highly militarised border. Of the 19,000 agents of the US Customs and Border protection, 16,000 are stationed in the states along the southern border with Mexico. They collaborate with the National Guard and armed vigilantes to stop desperate people gaining entry to the US. The Department for Homeland Security’s budget for border surveillance was over $16bn in 2022. Under Biden’s rule, in just one year from October 2021 to September 2022, 2.4 million people were detained crossing the border (up from 1.7 million the previous year), with 1.1 million quickly removed under Title 42 and the rest processed under the protracted Title 8 deportation statute.
With no repatriation deals with Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua in place, President Biden had meetings with the Mexican president to demand that Mexico take action to stop migrants going to the US border and thank him for receiving those expelled from the United States. As a sop to US liberal and opportunist currents, Biden bragged about the ‘tens of billions of dollars’ invested by the US in Latin America in the last 15 years and talked about the extension of his ‘humanitarian parole’ plan to cover people from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti, to add to the existing plan for Venezuelans.
The so-called ‘humanitarian plan’ allows 30,000 people a month to legally go to the US from these countries to live and work for two years, provided they can meet highly prohibitive conditions. They require a valid passport, to be able to fly to the US, be able to download an app and go through a vetting procedure, plus have a sponsor in the US. This is clearly aimed at the highly educated and middle classes, to encourage a ‘brain drain’ from the targeted countries to add to the imperialist sanctions and destabilisation aimed at them.
There is not an iota of humanitarian consideration by Democrats or Republicans for the people fleeing the worst effects of the capitalist crisis, increasingly detrimental climate and environmental conditions, sanctions, destabilisation, gangs and repressive governments, all of which bear heavy US imperialist responsibility. To the imperialists, migrants are just part of the international reserve army of labour, to be called upon to boost profits when required and be discarded during times of crisis.
David Hetfield
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 292, February/March 2023
