Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump exhibited the most blatant example of political hypocrisy when he told FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday that the “unbelievable humanitarian problem” of the current migration crisis gripping the EU would force even him to take action if he were president.
When O’Reilly asked Trump if he would oppose people from the Middle East and Africa from seeking refuge in the United States, Trump said, “I hate the concept of it, but on a humanitarian basis, with what’s happening, you have to.” He closed with this: “You know, it’s living in hell in Syria, there’s no question about it. They’re living in hell.”
Ironically, there are many others in this world – specifically, people from Mexico and Central America – “living in hell”, yet, in a Trump administration, those individuals would just be “criminals” who must be deported and could never be classified as “refugees”. Americans like Trump can show begrudging compassion towards migrants entering Germany, but they continue to have an aversion to an ongoing crisis that has seen thousands of children and families detained at the southern border since 2013.
This week a report from the Migration Policy Institute said:
Together, the United States and Mexico have apprehended almost 1 million people who originated from the Northern Triangle of Central America in the past five years, and have deported more than 800,000 of them. Many of these were children. Between 2010 and 2014, around 130,000 minors were apprehended and more than 40,000 deported back to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the three countries that constitute the Northern Triangle.
For Trump and his supporters – as well as the Obama administration, which is carrying out a record number of deportations right now – these almost 1 million people were not “refugees”, despite the fact, as Pedro Moreno Vasquez summarized In XpatNation, the core reasons behind the southern migrant crisis aren’t dissimilar from the one in Europe: Guatemalans experienced an earthquake in 2012; Honduras continues to be plagued by violence; and El Salvador is witnessing its bloodiest year in a decade.
Even with the violence occurring in Central America and a lost Drug War in Mexico, the 2013 US admission ceiling for refugees for Latin American and the Caribbean was only 4,400, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Cuba almost filled that quota alone with 4,205 refugees in 2013. When it came to asylum seekers, Venezuela was the top Latin American country with 687 asylees, while Haiti was the top Caribbean nation with 496. The data is clear: certain individuals, no matter if they are “living in hell”, are just not welcome in the United States.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stated that any foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere would be seen as a direct threat to the US, is still alive in Central America; now, it simply hides behind security initiatives and economic development programs that solely benefit the region’s elite and US interests. Destabilization, whether in the form of civil wars in which the US took sides based on its political ideology or a US deportation policy that created the very gang problems plaguing countries like El Salvador, has been go-to policy in the US for decades.
But Americans would rather ignore that our own policies are the root causes of our migration crisis and blindly declare that we are being “invaded” from our southern borders. It would be too hard to admit that our immigration crisis is a result of our own policy failures, and it is easier to look at a refugee crisis in the EU from afar and decide that we should help those people who are thousands of miles away and deport en masse those that are here now.
These days, candidates like Trump have tapped into the fear of the US being overrun by immigrants from Central America to justify the immediate need for mass deportation – and that messaging seems to be working, as a recent Iowa poll stated that close to half of the state’s Republicans (and almost 75% of Trump supporters) would want to deport all non-citizens. Why would it matter to Republicans that families are still being detained in “family residential centers” or that there is a humanitarian crisis in the US when it comes to how these families are being treated? Send them home.
Even images of small children facing deprivation aren’t enough to stir compassion in some Americans, if those children are Latin American: last summer after leaked images of children in US Border Patrol processing centers went viral, immigration opponents tried to stop buses filled with families in Murrieta, California, shouting with hatred at those inside. Trump may now be willing to accept some Syrian refugees on American soil now but, given how at least some of his supporters have greeted immigrants from Central America, Syrians would be right to wonder how long the welcome would last.
