The US GOP is Attempting to Assassinate the International Right to Asylum... Again
Which will only further embolden human traffickers and transnational organized crime
Right now, the GOP — and some Democrats, quite frankly — are holding further funding for Ukraine hostage to a host of permanent, draconian immigration policy changes that would end the right to asylum as we know it. This is not just a Trumpian maneuver. It isn’t even new. It is the reflection of a legacy mentality steeped in dehumanization that believes corporate capitalists, and the US lawmakers that serve them, can do as they please in Central America and the Caribbean, without regard to the human fallout. It is time we push back against that centuries-old trend. Hard.
The stakes have never been higher.
For context…
More than 40 years ago, in the early 1980s, the GOP had the opportunity to do the right thing: offer refuge to Central Americans and Haitians fleeing harm. Guatemalans were fleeing a brutal genocide birthed by McCarthy-era US State Department and CIA meddling on behalf of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita). Salvadorans were fleeing bombing and strafing and the death squads of a right-wing military dictatorship propped up and funded by the Reagan-Bush administration. Haitians were fleeing crippling poverty and the barbaric wrath of paramilitary forces assembled to kept successive US-backed dictatorships alive.
That is when the GOP — and the Democrats, quite frankly — might have said, Enough is enough. No more taxpayer dollars will be paid to fund Dirty Wars that terrorize civilian populations, forcing displacement, and creating refugees.
But they did not. Instead, they continued to appropriate billions to fuel genocide. And torture. And needless, endless war.
When journalists called them out, they lied about US involvement in Central America and the Caribbean, or they justified the rising civilian death tolls by playing on the public’s panic over the “communist threat on our doorstep.” And when the US government’s crimes against humanity resulted in refugees arriving on the country’s southern doorstep, the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations called them “economic migrants coming to steal US jobs” and slammed the doors shut on them. They detained the very safety seekers they created. They pushed the vulnerable back to their own peril, or deported them to the harms they fled — harms that the US had created.
It was a vicious cycle 100% Made in the USA.
Those seeking safety from US-engendered violence were put into an administrative “Check” that forced them to “Checkmate” US government intransigence. They had no other choice: it was either go around the authorities intent on stopping them, or be shackled and thrown back into the jaws of the beast. The workaround required the aid of good folks who, in condemnation of US government criminality, were happy to smuggle people in need of safety across the line and provide them sanctuary once on US soil. A movement sprang from the dry Arizona desert that spread across the 50 states and into Canada intent on shielding the Reagan-Bush Dirty War refugees from arrest and deportation while aiding them in pursuing their asylum claims.
The first human smugglers were altruistic. However, a new market opportunity was revealed. Human smuggling in the interest of the common good met a new rival: Human trafficking in the interest of personal economic gain.
It is now a vicious cycle 100% Made in the USA that preys on innocent people worldwide.
Over the last four decades, the market in human trafficking has been encouraged, and made more dangerous, by continued GOP resistance — as well as that of Democrats, quite frankly — to see people in flight as human beings in need. It has been made more widespread, and more costly, by continued resistance to recognize that such flight is a humanitarian issue, not a security threat to be solved with higher, angrier, more violent walls, more surveillance tools, and more law enforcement impunity fueled by full-throttled US military might.
Which brings us back to today…
The same legacy GOP that created the need for human trafficking in the first place is right now attempting to combat that specter by ending the international right to seek safe haven from persecution. They — and the Democrats, quite frankly — are holding further funding for Ukraine hostage to a host of permanent, draconian immigration policy changes that would end the right to asylum as we know it — and ultimately further embolden organized crime and human trafficking markets worldwide.
In this interview for my former podcast, Witness Radio, undertaken while conducting research for my forthcoming book, Crossing the Line, Dora Rodriguez, a 1980s Salvadoran Dirty War refugee, reveals how US border management policies nearly killed her, and how they gave rise to the scourge of human trafficking that is today committing mass murder against stateless people on the move: a potential genocide 100% Made in the USA.
Dora and I hope you’ll listen to her tale of survival, resilience, and giving back…
…and that in listening you’ll be convinced to call your members of Congress today and tell them: The right way to promote order at the US southern border is
to confront the pressures produced by the one-sided US economic policies in the region that drive wages to the bottom and put zero brakes on environmental and community degradation; and
to make more accessible, safe, and legal pathways to migrate, not less, which history shows only throws vulnerable people made more vulnerable by our economic policies into the mouths of wolves.
The GOP — and the Democrats, quite frankly — created the market in human trafficking, promulgated through decades of foreign policy mandates steeped in dehumanization and a mentality that believes corporate capitalists, and the US lawmakers that serve them, can do as they please in Central America and the Caribbean, without regard to the human fallout. It is time we finally push back against that trend. Hard.
The stakes have never been higher.