Migration and the Right

or Nationalist Myopics and Political Bullshit Artists

Politics! Again! God damn!

I hate the way it distorts reality. AI and smart phones and the whole Baudrillardian matrix haven’t got shit on politics for the capacity to throw a smokescreen across reality. In war, I was schooled, you don’t have friends; you have associates. And allies. And enemies. Truth? Fuck the truth! If you want to win, because winning is what it’s all about, you’ll be needing that “bodyguard of lies.” And selective facts. And equivocations.

So, the truth is, as near as I can tell—and I’ll say it because I don’t like anything about war—is that Trump Republicans will sweep into office in 2024 in the good ol’ US of A, because when we had two populist alternatives to the neoliberal shit show that we call The Economy—left populist and right populist; and the fucking Democratic Party apparatus and its Wall Street backers and its media stenographers and its laptop retainer-class technocratic base used a combined arms assault on the left populist alternative to crush the left alternative, so what we’re now left with now is the right alternative, which the weaker former Republican Party failed to crush, and to which all its aspirants to political office must now demonstrate their obeisance by kissing the ring of it’s oily insane-clown monarch. («« Faulknerian length sentence there, laying out the background)

All the way back in the 2000s, I saw the handwriting on the wall about the political right and immigration. It started with the dough-faced provocateur CNN news anchor Lou Dobbs, with his nightly immigration-panic screeds (on Lou Dobbs Tonight). He eventually moved to Fox News (of course). He was a public promoter of the Obama birther bullshit, and he was one of the defendants named in Smartmatic and Dominion defamation lawsuits for publicly and repeatedly lying his ass off. He had a strong influence on Donald Trump, who came to adopt Dobbs’s pearl-clutching “invasion-panic” narrative with regard to the northern migration of Central- and Meso-Americans. I spotted Dobbs early, because then, as now, he often referred to immigration (documented and not) from Central America—specifically Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador (I’d also worked in Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru) where I’d had first hand experience from my days as “Special Operations” soldier. I worked in Mexico, too—in Xalapa, Coatepec, and Xico (Estado Veracruz)—but that was as a civilian after my Army career. At any rate, I had a lot of context that Dobbs had intentionally left out, and it was obvious to me (and many others) that he was as full of shit as a Christmas Turkey.

But fear and suspicion are easy to encourage in a society where the economic ethos is dog eat dog, the prevailing moral philosophy is self-centered loneliness, and public officials across the ideological spectrum are lying, manipulative sociopaths. Just add an historic economic crash, bail out the culprits and leave the rest to scramble for themselves . . . and stir with demagoguery.

This interlocution is not intended to promote this or that form of law and policy. In an ideal world—far, far away from where we are now—law and policy are the last act after rigorous study and sober reflection, not weaponized slogans in the electoral wars. My appeal is more modest, and in two parts. First, we acknowledge the humanity of migrants. Second, we try and ascertain why these fellow human beings—and not just the welcome immigrants who are fast tracked through the consulates with their money and degrees—would, in some cases, pick up with what they can carry on their backs, themselves and their children, and leave all that is familiar, and undertake an arduous and dangerous journey to a strange faraway land.

We’ll need some preliminary categories, because migration/immigration is undertaken for innumerable reasons, all complex, most personal/familial and particular, and some very singular. We can begin with the easiest distinction: legal and illegal, or documented and undocumented. Every nation-state polices its boundaries, and each does so based on a set of laws, policies, rules, and procedures. Some are more stringent than others. Some boundaries are policed extra-legally with unofficial systems of bribes. I once took myself and our two young sons on a military hop to Haiti when it was under US occupation. We disembarked and walked across a line of crushed down concertina wire and were in Haiti, our first stamp on our passports only when we crossed from Ouanaminthe in Haiti to Dajabon in the Dominican Republic, where the Dominican customs agent didn’t seem to notice we were leaving Haiti without a Haitian stamp on the passports. My wife and I, while residing in Costa Rica for a time, were required to leave the country for three days, whereupon we took the buses to Sixaola on the Panamanian border. Officials on both sides split a hundred dollars to stamp us dishonestly for the three days, as they did for many expats, while we spent about two hours on the Panamanian side having lunch. We then hung out in Cajuita, CR for two days (why waste the five hour bus trip) before returning to our little apartment in Grecia. We did this once in Nicaragua, too, but the Nicaraguans didn’t play that shit, and we spent a glorious three days in San Juan del Sur (an international surfers’ destination with frighteningly enormous waves that crest and crash down like bombs). When we visited one son and his family in Germany, everything was technically and legally dressed and covered, whereupon we took a drive to Lucerne, Switzerland (within the Eurozone) and only showed our passports when we got a room. Different strokes, different folks.

Speaking for the US, legal/documented immigration—permanent or temporary—begins with a visa, a travel document issued by the State Department. There are all kinds of visas, and prospective travelers can pick them up at the consular section of the US Embassy in their home country. The State Department’s web site details the kinds of visas: visitors’ visas, study/exchange visas, business visas, employment visas, and immigration visas. Immigration visas include “family” visas (green cards, (permanent) employment visas, and a few very selective “diversity” visas.

There are two ways in which on can become an extralegal or “illegal” foreign national in the US: entering without a visa and overstaying a visa. Moreover, there are among these foreign nationals immigrants (those intending to stay) and non-immigrants (those intending to return to their countries of origin).

Less than 15 percent of the US population overall is foreign-born, around 48.8 million or so, mostly concentrated in California, New York, and Florida, though every state has citizens and non-citizens who are foreign-born.

23.1 million are naturalized citizens. 1.8 million are temporary and lawful. So, legal immigrants are 78 percent of the total. Only 22 percent (10.5 million) are unlawfully here.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, as of July 2023, of that “unlawfully here” number, around 42 percent are visa overstays (around 5 million total, by 2023). Between one and two percent of visas overall are overstayed, and many of the overstays are inadvertent. The most common overstays have been tourist and business visa overstays from Venezuela. Student overstays come in second, the most frequent overstay students being Chinese (16 percent of student/exchange visa overstays).

We’ll need to stop and introduce another category here: Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. This allows foreign nationals from twenty-one countries to visit for 90 days without a visa (using instead an ESTA, or electronic system for travel authorization), provided they haven’t violated certain rules (visiting “hostile” nations, e.g.). Most of these VWP nationals are tourists and business people. While they don’t technically have visas (they have ESTAs), just under 100,000 a year overstay their ESTAs.

So when some demagogic Republican official conflates anecdotal crimes committed by “illegals” (immigrants, documented and undocumented have much lower crime rates that we citizens . . . more on that below) with the overbroad category of “illegal immigrants” (most visa overstays are non-immigrants ^^^), then fallaciously suggests that, given visa overstays are a substantial portion of unlawful residence, visa overstays constitute the threat of hostile invasion, he or she is being dishonest and/or stupid (a combination of the two is not unusual among elected officials from both parties). A visa overstay (including ESTA overstays) is far more likely to be a photo-happy Japanese dad with his brood in tow, an intensely studious Chinese undergrad, or an entitled-ass Venezuelan rico/a hanging out in some posh hotel. The calculated numbers of overstays are tricky statistics, because ESTAs and some visas are authorized for up to three times annually. If a businessman from Israel or Ireland or Sweden comes three times, and overstays by one day on one occasion, that has to be counted as one-third of an overstay for that individual. Yeah, bureaucratic math.

Both parties have, for decades, voiced concern about non-immigrant overstays (NIOs). The majority of non-immigrant visas granted for the US are, not surprisingly, from our two nearest neighbors: Canada and Mexico. One reason NIOs are hard to track is that Congress has had trouble tweaking the electronic tracking after multiple attempts. Then there are the limits in tracking and enforcement personnel, which require prioritization of which NIOs upon which to follow up. After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, for example, three of the 19 attackers were overstays. The response was to crack down on student/exchange visas. The current tracking method is the automated entry-exit system, implemented in 1996, after a huge wave of immigration from the South came in response to NAFTA-adjacent policies, like usurious IMF loans and agricultural dumping further immiserated Latin America, especially Mexico, and simultaneously loosened border controls to facilitate business exchanges dominated by American corporations. The main problem with “systems” is that once a person is stamped and granted entry, they don’t wear an ankle monitor (sarcasm, not a suggestion ffs). That is, they are allowed, in “the land of the free,” to go where they will.

From 2016 until 2022, annual overstays averaged about 720,000, a figure thrown off by Covid-19, which knocked the numbers back dramatically for months, and a subsequent spike to 853,955 (partly a surge from travel postponed during Covid) in 2022. Again, the biggest NIO plurality was from Venezuela, most of whom were granted waivers from the State Department called a Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) and Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—so, again, lumping them in with “illegal immigrants” (they were neither) is just political bombast. Eighty-three percent of overstays were businesspeople and tourists, not criminals or terrorists or even the mostly docile laborers that constitute the majority (and an essential element for the US economy) of visa holders. The majority overstayers by nationality—by a big margin—are those crafty, violent Canadians.

Thee US has debated policies about DED, TPS, and other “amnesty,” naturalization, and asylum programs, for decades; and the debates have always been influenced by a combination of business needs and political posturing. The biggest single amnesty program was implemented by the Holy Fucking Ronald Reagan (3 million in one fell swoop) at the behest of business lobbies who needed dirt cheap labor (The Immigration Reform and Control Act, 1986).

The problem with my own distinction between lawful and unlawful is that, in reality, these are hard to separate. Starting with the fact that around half of the unlawful are the overstays, and ending with the fact that in many cases, both lawful and unlawful migrants (immigrants and non-immigrants) are living in the same households.

Now to that politically potent and media-visible category of unlawful migration, border crossers. After NAFTA (1994), the surge from the South started for reasons stated above. Originally, the majority of migrants from Meso- and Central America were Mexicans. In recent years, the numbers have increased dramatically from the “triangle” mentioned above, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—all countries were the US once trained and financed coups and death squads and ran puppet governments.

It’s no coincidence that I was in these places as a member of the US Army’s Special Forces. Another (smaller) surge has been from Haiti, where I “served” between two US directed coups, and where the US had serially destabilized the country with inept and often brutal puppet governments . . . I have stories.

But enough of my reminiscing. Let us just review one example: Honduras.

It all started with industrially grown bananas. Honduras was the original “banana republic,” a term coined by the short story writer “O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter). He was living in Honduras in the 1890s and early 1900s as a reporter for the Houston Post, but his real motive was to evade arrest for embezzlement in North Carolina. Whole different story.

American entrepreneurs saw Honduras as a business opportunity, so they bribed the corrupt government, wrangled together enough investors, then formed some combined railroad and export companies to “develop” Honduras’s Caribbean coast. First they clear cut the mahogany forests, then invested some of the profits in converting that land to high intensity fruit production—coconut and citrus, but mostly bananas. Honduras became the largest banana exporter in the world, and its economy came to depend absolutely on banana exports. The two corporate giants that ran it all came to be called United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company.

Popular discontent against the exploitative and environmentally devastating enterprises was crushed by series of corrupt and violent caudillos, and when they weren’t up to the job, by American supported coups. Honduras, in other words, became a US client state, and it has remained such into the present. We can begin our story on Honduras with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan and his once Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte.

I don’t know how commonly understood the term “death squads” is today, but back in my day it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue in any discussion of Latin America. “Escuadrones de Muerto” or death squads were small formations of mostly “off-duty” and former soldiers, police, and security agents who conducted extrajudicial murders, kidnappings (with murders) called “disappearances,” and other forms of terror campaigns on behalf of sitting governments.

Later, the same term would be applied to narco enforcers, but, in our context, death squads were groups employed against any group who was suspected of, for any reason, opposing these governments. Three countries with which I became familiar back in the day—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—made extensive use of death squads with a wink and a nod from the Reagan government. When John Negroponte was Ambassador to Honduras (1981-85), death squad activity shot through the roof with a massive increase in US military aid to the Honduran government: from $4 million a year to $77.4 million a year, which included a host of US military advisors (as I was when I was there). This increase in aid to the violent and thoroughly corrupt Paz Garcia government was in exchange for the support of that government—including allowing US advisors to the Contra terrorists—for the US effort to overthrow a popular leftist government in Nicaragua, which has itself overthrown a violent and corrupt US government client government there.

Eventually, the whole sordid affair came out—thanks to a number of intrepid pre-Assange journalists, but especially Gary Webb, who the government then (like Assange) set out to destroy. It was a tremendous scandal. The Reagan government was conducting massive off-the-books covert operations from Honduras into Nicaragua using funds secured by secretly selling weapons to the government of Iran, a putative US enemy, while the CIA’s Contra clients were financing operations with cocaine exports to the US . . . which resulted in the crack epidemic, first in Los Angeles, but which then spread throughout the whole country. You can look it up if this is new to you; it was called the Iran-Contra scandal.

The US political establishment (Republican and Democrat) is still trying to cover up and make excuses, but the evidence was overwhelming.

Anyway, Negroponte secured a reputation as the guy who ran interference on behalf of Honduran and Contra death squads, during which time he developed long lasting relationships with Honduras’s oligarchic families and “security” people.

I mention all this because we haven’t seen the last of John Negroponte yet, and he has a role to play as we jump forward to the Obama administration, which denies having anything to do with the 2009 coup in Honduras against the popular and legitimately elected Zelaya government. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was (and remains) a foreign policy neoconservative in the mold of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for whom Negroponte served as Director of National Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of State. Clinton hired Negroponte as a private advisor before, during, and after the June 28, 2009 coup against Zelaya.

While I don’t want to dive too far down this complex rabbit hole—which I may do at some later date—we also have to introduce a guy named Lanny Davis. Just to make the short case against the official line that the US was not involved in the planning of the coup and that it opposed it afterward (which it did verbally, even as its actions ran counter to its claims). Davis was a long time Clinton lawyer and confidante, who hired himself out to El Consejo Empresarial de América Latina (CEAL, “Business Council of Latin America”), the Honduran branch, and became their American coup apologist, portaying it as a “constitutional crisis”—something the US mainstream press took up like good little doggies.

So, Clinton has her political advisor (on the books) and her propaganda hatchet man (off the books), and suddenly (the Obama administration gasped in mock surprise) the legitimately elected and popular President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, is hauled off in the middle of the night by armed thugs wearing nothing but his tighty-whities.

Again, there’s a much longer story here, but I’ll just recount this one key piece of it: Zelaya, the prisoner, was flown out of the country in the middle of the night from a US Air Base called Sotocano. My experience with the US Air Force and US foreign bases is that nobody does anything on a semi-secret US military installation without the full knowledge of the US government. They don’t enter the base with a cohort of armed men escorting prisoners without prior and high-level approval, and they don’t fly out without someone checking the flight manifest. Does. Not Happen. So you’ll forgive my skepticism about the sincerity of the Obama administration’s rather soft public denunciations, given that I know Sotocano very well from first hand experience, and the fact that the Obama administration wasted no time in supporting the coup government, including having Zelaya held against his will in Costa Rica and forbidden from returning to Honduras.

“We didn’t support the non-coup/constitutional crisis in Honduras, but we are doing everything we can to consolidate it. Excuse us while we piss on your collective leg and tell you it’s raining.”

Zelaya’s sin? He questioned the international neoliberal consensus which held Honduras in perpetual poverty and dependency via US-IMF loan-sharking and “structural adjustment.”

In the wake of that coup. things went downhill for Honduras very quickly. Death squads again roamed the country. The homicide rate in Honduras, which was already the highest in the world, doubled by 2011, when Honduras had become most dangerous nation in the world for journalists, too. Under the deeply corrupt post-coup governments, organized crime flourished. The military and police acted with absolute impunity. Massive numbers of Honduran families were “internally displaced.” This provoked the first part of the northbound Honduran migrant wave that continues to this day. If any country’s situation called out justification for asylum status, it was Honduras. Still true today.

Then climate shock hit Honduras with special force. But before we detail some of these climate shocks, I’ll remind readers that there is not clear boundary between climate disruptions, climactic events, and human social activity. I wrote a piece about this last year after the Maui fires here. One of the biggest causes of “internal displacement” is land loss from foreclosure (as a form of enclosure) in the service of “joining field to field” for agribusiness, like banana plantations and other environmentally stressful agribusiness . . . palm oil plantations are the big thing in Honduras now. These poison water and leave already fragile tropical soils even more vulnerable through chemical inputs and further deforestation. Add to this the expansion of mining, with its toxification of the surround, and hydroelectric dams. Activism against these environmental insults has also been met with violence and even imprisonment, including the targeted assassination of environmental leaders like Berta Cáceres. Then came tropical storms of unprecedented duration, and the alternation of devastating floods and severe multi-annual droughts.

Rural residents (around forty percent of the country) have seen up to 80 percent of their ground water disappear—sucked up by agri-business, their surface water contaminated by mining, topsoil loss, landslides, and economic catastrophe from floods, and serial crop failures from droughts. Coastal communities have been affected not only by tropical storms and floods, but by rising sea level with its saline infiltration and coastal erosion. In Honduras we’re gaining a glimpse of a future in which more and more involuntary migration will come in the form of climate refugees.

Which is all to say—accounts of migration from the perspective of the migrants are absent in racializing right-wing “immigration” rhetoric. Instead we get the lie that a few criminal incidents involving “illegal immigrants” are representative of the realities of migration. It’s always easy to pick on the most vulnerable and to mobilize uninformed hatred against an abstract other for political gain.

To make the journey North, the first thing migrants have to do is cobble together their life savings and then some. The poorest and most desperate in places like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have no means to migrate, and so they become the ever more abject reserve army of servants (and sometimes, yes, petty criminals) in their home countries. Those who can find the $6,000 or thereabouts to pay people smugglers (“coyotes”) to cross first the Mexican, then the American borders, are at the mercy of said coyotes who are often enough not above beating, raping, and prostituting migrants, or—in emergencies—abandoning them to die in shipping containers. The introduction of the “Trump wall” along certain corridors, controlled by the Sinaloa cartel, has added an extortion “tax,” which a few migrants have been forced to pay by acting—against their will—as drug mules.

Which brings us to the question of crime.

The crime rate among the undocumented in the US is 60 percent lower than that for US citizens. This figure includes Assault, Battery, Domestic Violence, Burglary, Robbery, Larceny, Theft, Fraud, Driving Under the Influence, Homicide, Manslaughter, Illegal Drug Possession, Drug Trafficking, Illegal Weapons Possession, Transport, Weapons Trafficking, and Sexual Offenses.

In other words, the claim that increased migration/immigration leads to an increase in crime rates is unadulterated bullshit. A study from the libertarian Cato Institute summarized it thus:

If native-born Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as illegal immigrants, about 930,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated. Conversely, if natives were incarcerated at the same rate as legal immigrants, about 1.5 million fewer natives would be in adult correctional facilities.

But as we noted, a few migrants are forced, by cartel-associated coyotes, to carry relatively small quantities of drugs across the border. This is easily over-estimated, however, as more than 95 percent of the cocaine and heroin crossing the border is coming in by boat, airplane, truck, and (now) even mini-submarines constructed solely for the purpose of smuggling. Migrants aren’t buying airplanes, speedboats, tractor-trailer trucks, and submersibles.

Certainly, there’s a lot more to say on this matter, but as I said above, my intent here is first to provide a few facts, some context and nuance, and then to acknowledge the humanity of migrants and explain why some of these fellow human beings would pick up with what they can carry on their backs, themselves and their children, and leave all that is familiar, and undertake an arduous and dangerous journey to a strange faraway land.

I write these cases out so that rather than engage in frustratingly repetitious debates with people about controversial topics that seem to come up a lot, I can just send them the link and let them do with it what they will. If you find this case convincing as a small antidote to jingo nationalism and political bullshit artistry, you’re welcome to do the same.

Peace.