The US-Mexico border is the deadliest land crossing in the world, according to the UN’s International Migration Organisation. At least 782 people have died attempting to cross since 1 October 2021, accounting for the majority of the 1,238 recorded annual deaths during migration within the Americas. The death toll is the highest since records began in 1998. The real figure is certainly higher since these deaths are only those confirmed by border agencies. At the beginning of September, 13 bodies including a pregnant woman were pulled from the Rio Grande river, just three months after 51 people including five children suffocated inside a packed 18-wheeled truck in 40 degree heat in Texas. This is the brutal consequence of a lack of safe legal migration routes into the US.
The issue of migration reflects imperialist power relations between the US and Mexico. In his 2015 election campaign Former US President Trump pledged to build a border wall and ‘make Mexico pay’. His administration subsequently erected 455 miles of barrier. In 2019 Trump enacted the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), the notorious ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, deporting selected non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico for the duration of their immigration proceedings. Since then, 75,000 people, predominantly from Spanish speaking countries, have been deported, including 13,000 children. Left without shelter or subsistence, these asylum seekers have been stranded in makeshift camps in border towns and cities, with many experiencing violence, kidnapping and sexual exploitation. In 2020, despite regarding Covid-19 as ‘flu’ and opposing lock-down measures, Trump used the pandemic to tighten immigration controls further, closing the border under ‘Title 42’ and enabling automatic deportation for anyone apprehended crossing the border irregularly. Unlike MPP, those expelled under Title 42 have no legal recourse to claim asylum. Title 42 has generated over two million deportations.
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) pledged he would not do the US’ dirty work by policing the regular caravans of Central American migrants on their way to the US border. His election campaign promised to honour Mexico’s status as a ‘country of refuge’, granting visas and passage for all. Following his 2018 inauguration, AMLO unveiled a humanitarian visa scheme allowing migrants passing through Mexico to receive IDs and work visas. However the Mexican state was unable to process the deluge of claims and, following Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on all Mexican imports to the US, AMLO capitulated, got his hands dirty and deployed 30,000 National Guard to the border. These militarised forces detained 307,000 last year. Under Title 42, AMLO agreed to accept deportations not only of Mexicans but of nationals from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the so-called ‘violent northern triangle’ wracked with insecurity following decades of US-stoked civil war. As deportations for migrants of other origins involve costly flights, Mexico’s agreement to accept deportations of Central Americans has effectively allowed for the selective application of Title 42. Mexicans and Central Americans are deported south of the border whilst migrants from South America, Africa and beyond are detained but granted entry whilst their claims are processed. This forces Central American migrants to use riskier crossings through deserts and rivers.
Chasing progressive votes in the 2020 election, US President Biden pledged to reverse Trump’s migration policies, promising to halt construction on the wall and end MPP ‘on day one’. This was just posturing. Whilst initially cancelling funding for the wall, in July 2022 Biden announced plans to ‘fill in’ four gaps in the border wall around Yuma, Arizona. On paper, MPP was suspended upon Biden taking office in 2021, however a Trump-appointed federal judge blocked the ending of the order whilst the Republican run states of Texas and Missouri sued the Democrat government. Texas has sent thousands of migrants by bus to New York and Washington in protest. MPP was reinstated in December 2021 and it took a ruling by the US Supreme Court this June to confirm Biden’s authority to end MPP before action was taken to suspend it again. During this time over 5,000 people were deported under the protocols. Meanwhile a further court case is blocking the end of Title 42 which expired in May 2022. Ostensibly, Biden is committed to lifting Title 42; however, a meeting between US and Mexican officials in September revealed his administration is pressuring Mexico to additionally accept deportations of Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals. So far Mexico has resisted this measure.
Whilst people from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras still account for the majority of those detained at the border (59%), a quarter of arrests in 2022 were of Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan nationals. Migration from these countries has spiked due to the ratcheting up of imperialist US sanctions causing scarcity and economic strife. These US interventions target Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua precisely because of their anti-imperialist stand and commitment to struggle for socialism in the region. However the consequent breakdown of diplomatic relations means the US cannot easily deport nationals from these countries.
AMLO has welcomed the end of MPP declaring ‘It is an internal decision of the US government. We never accepted turning ourselves into a so-called third country, a migrant camp for waiting until things are resolved in the United States,’ After taking a principled stand by boycotting June’s Summit of the Americas in protest at the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, AMLO has called for the lifting of sanctions against these countries to help address the causes of migration. The litmus test will be his government’s treatment of the 1,000-strong caravan of migrants that left Mexico’s southern city of Tapachula in August on the long trail to the US border. Will the migrants be offered work and residency visas or be left without subsistence? Will they be granted passage to the US border or detained by the Mexican National Guard?
The United States has destabilised huge swathes of the Americas, overthrowing many progressive and socialist governments that could have begun to address the huge inequalities driving migration. What hypocrisy then, with US midterm elections looming, that we are once again seeing fearmongering over migrants ‘invading’ the US border being used to whip up racist support for harsher measures.
Solidarity with the caravanas! No one is illegal!
Sam McGill
