Central America
“Illegal” migration of Central Americans and Chinandegans
What is the machinery that illegalizes migration all about?
Migratory policies are a sieve, not a dike. What do they strain out? The research and analysis below, aided by a census in Chinandega,
shows that there are cycles marked by geopolitical and other interests,
and that the foundational act of most Central American migrants’ relationship with the United States transgresses that country’s laws.
José Luis Rocha
Nicaraguans are the Latin Americans with the 12th greatest presence in the United States. They total 395,000, according to the latest Pew Hispanic Center counts, based on the 2011 American Community Survey released in June 2013.
What Nicaraguan migrants revealOf the almost 52 million Latinos living in the United States, eight in every thousand were born in Nicaragua or can trace their origins to Nicaraguan ancestors. But because Nicaraguans in the US have considerably less demographic weight than the almost 2 million Salvadorans (in 3rd place among Latinos), 1.2 million Guatemalans (in 6th place) and 702,000 Hondurans (in 9th place), Nicaraguan migration to the US hasn’t been in the academic spotlight as much. It has been less analyzed than the migration of other, more massive Central American groups.
This predilection for large numbers has resulted in certain findings drifting towards the half-table fallacy: generalizing to all what is in reality one group’s particularity or, conversely, believing traits to be particular to one group that, on more careful analysis, it shares with others. In this case, the fallacy grows out of the fact that the Central American core analysis is based on individuals from countries where the overwhelming majority migrate to the US, thus ignoring both the profile of Central Americans migrating to other countries—under what conditions they migrate—and what is really specific about Central American migration to the United States and the conditions under which is it undertaken.
As Nicaragua has a large number of emigrants to different migratory destinations of relatively important weight, it offers advantages to tracking the particularities of migration to the United States. Nicaraguans’ various destinations enable us to compare data about migration to the US with that of migration to Costa Rica, Spain and Panama, which, in that order, are Nicaraguans’ most frequented routes.
This strategy doesn’t escape the limitations of the half-table because I haven’t applied the same data-gathering instruments to Central American countries with greater northward migration: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. It would be unfortunate to attain the half-table of comparison with other destinations but miss the half of countries with greater migration to the US, but the abundance of literature disseminated by governmental and academic agencies about these countries’ migration flows enables me to venture certain generalizations based on Nicaragua. And, thanks to a migration census we’re now able to make a comparison with other migration destinations and thus delve into certain specificities that link to, induce, condition and/or encourage the American Dream and its nightmares.
Finally, a migration census manualThis migration census—the first—will be my main instrument in this inquiry. It was conducted by the Jesuit Service for Migrants of Nicaragua (SJM) in the city of Chinandega through the initiative of and with strong support from the Committees of Migrants and Their Relatives, founded in 2011 to defend the rights of migrants and channel issues concerning Chinandegan migrants and their families to government institutions in the countries of origin/return, transit/filter and deportation/destination.
The committees pitched their proposal for a migration census and provided valuable information in order to achieve almost exhaustive coverage of the city of Chinandega, capital of the municipality and department by the same name and only 10.5 miles from Corinto, Nicaragua’s largest port. Some of their members participated in designing and validating the census, thereby enriching the pertinence of the questions and initiating a process in which they are appropriating the results of what is now an ongoing investigation.
With the help of a geo-referenced map of the city provided by the Municipal Land Registry Office, it was possible to plan an exhaustive house-by-house and neighborhood-by-neighborhood coverage of households with migrants. The census went to 2,591 households and interviewed 2,636 people, obtaining information on 4,349 Chinandegans—2,280 women and 2,069 men—who migrated between 1955 and 2013, 3,569 of them still active migrants and 780 of whom have returned.
Chinandega, the location of the census According to the 2005 national census, the northwestern municipality of Chinandega has a total of 25,879 households: 20,362 urban and 5,517 rural. It’s one of the most urban municipalities in Nicaragua, with 78% city-dwellers, well above the national average of 56%. This is due to the demographic weight of the city of Chinandega, which has a population of 120,808 inhabitants (94,642 in the city and 26,166 in surrounding districts). The 49 neighborhoods of what has been called the “City of Oranges” are made up of 18,276 households. The SJM census visited 2,591 of the 3,296 households identified by the 2005 national census as having at least one member abroad.
The 2005 national census only had 13 variables on emigration and gathered data from 169,000 emigrants throughout Nicaragua. The SJM census included 106 questions and collected data from 4,349 migrants exclusively from the city of Chinandega. In short, the main limitation of the SJM census is its geographic concentration, compensated by what it gains in depth and intensity: it contains more information about each migrant and presumably covered nearly 80% of migrants in the area where it was applied, which is a gigantic leap in statistical representativeness.
Why Chinandega? Statistical representativeness makes it possible to track migrations’ chronological evolution and delve deeper into characteristics by migratory destination. But restricting the census to a single area comes at a price, which can only be offset if that area is in some sense a privileged vantage point.
Why the city of Chinandega? The overwhelming weight of its urban population (78%) makes its municipality an ideal place to inquire about migration to the United States, as 75% of all Nicaraguan emigrants come from cities and 92% of Nicaraguans in the US come from urban areas. This is a marked difference with the more northern Central American countries, where migration to the US is predominant but more ruralized. For example, of the 97% Guatemalan migrants living in the US in 2008, 56% came from rural areas of the country, which has an urban population of 57%.
On the other hand, Chinandegan migrants headed for a variety of destinations in sufficient proportion to maintain statistical representativeness by destination, a feature that makes Chinandega one of the best posts for observing Nicaraguans’ international migration. Finally, the city of Chinandega is a place where the SJM has conducted most of the interviews in its previous research since 2006, thus providing material for interpreting the census data and moving to a level of analysis that goes beyond the mere facticity of the data. We don’t want to limit ourselves to presenting a juxtaposed succession of figures and mute crossovers of variables, but rather to offer explanations based on ethnographic fieldwork that included participatory observation and attention to the discourse of migrants and their relatives.
Other research looked atWith respect to depth, the value added of the SJM census isn’t just the quantity of information per person, but also—and principally—its slant: the issues it addresses.
The censuses and surveys conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses—now called the National Institute of Development Information (INIDE)—were content to ask about the migrants’ age, sex, destination, year of exit, educational level and a few more variables, important but insufficient to comprehend the range of migration’s diversity. The United Nations Population Fund and other multilateral agencies have only had this limited material available to them for their analyses, the majority of which—with notable exceptions—have focused on demographic and socio-demographic aspects of migration in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, surveys by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Inter-American Dialogue and other United Nations agencies have shown a preference for investigating remittances: how, how much, when, to whom and how they’re invested.
UN agencies have certain leitmotivs, not always as well versed as repeated. With studies that International Labor Organization researcher Piyasiri Wickramasekara dubbed “literature surveys and desk research,” the United Nations burns incense to aromatize the benefits of circular migration. But, even though national censuses and surveys are sponsored by these agencies, they contain no information about returnees, who are the very ones who could chronicle the miseries and grandeur of the circular migratory odyssey. Perhaps because they came back with skills but also with needs and complaints, returnees are the most invisible of migrants. The SJM census dedicated a whole section to returnee migration to learn about its dimensions and conditions.
The main goal of the SJM census was to at least penetrate the epidermus of migratory irregularity, with a view to subsequently going further into it with qualitative instruments. The questions primarily focused on inquiring about migration’s legal conditions and migrants’ human rights, but also addressed important issues that negligence and panic about the politically uncomfortable had swept under the carpet, such as information about missing and kidnapped migrants, which are barometers of the risk levels faced by those without documents.
Coincidences, differences, contrasts... The SJM migration census contains 106 variables. I’ll concentrate on certain socio-demographic features and, above all, migratory status and its causal factors and consequences, a field we could call “the juridical conditions of migration,” because it’s the legal area that has supported the oscillating but—in recent years—unstoppable tendency to outlaw migration, as affirmed by Daniel Kanstroom with overwhelming historiographic evidence in his Deportation nation: Outsiders in American history (2007) and Nicholas De Genova in Working the boundaries: Race, space and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago (2005).
The attempt to draw conclusions about Central American migration by means of a more detailed investigation into the Nicaraguan case must be done by comparing key indicators. Contrasts and coincidences must be made explicit and weighted.
The intersection of
foreign policy and asylum policyThe first divergence to be emphasized is that in the early 1980s Nicaraguan migration to the United States was largely by the upper and middle classes, which expanded with members of the working class at the end of that decade it. Salvadoran and Guatemalan migration, in contrast, began with poor refugees.
Moreoever, the first three waves of those Nicaraguan immigrants benefited from anti-Castro Cubans lobbying their Republican politician friends as an expression of solidarity toward those with whom they felt ideological affinity as opponents of the Sandinista regime. This was a pristine example of what Susan Gzesh, from the University of Chicago, called the intersection of foreign policy and asylum policy, which, in turn, is an example of how realpolitik conditions the various branches of governmental policy and how, as Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen explains, “…international migrations are a function of larger geopolitical and transnational economic dynamics.”
As a corollary, although migration policy has rarely been explicitly recognized as a component of US foreign policy, imperialism’s foreign aid and military ventures have had a wide-ranging impact on migration. The policy of welcoming Nicaraguan migrants was a domestic complement to the foreign policy of providing technical assistance and financial support to the armed counterrevolution actively undertaken by the Reagan administration in Nicaragua within the framework of the Cold War’s death throes.
This geopolitical opportunity harvested beneficial conditions for the Nicaraguan immigrants with effects we can still trace today. We see the importance of a regularized initial migratory wave as a basis for future migrations in the fact that 70% of Nicaraguans who obtained permanent residency in 2012 did so by claiming immediate family ties with previously nationalized Nicaraguans. That step towards permanent residency was only used by 59% of Hondurans, 45% of Salvadorans and 43% of Guatemalans.
This long protective shadow of Nicaraguan migrations from the eighties has also had other visible impacts. For example, 20% of Nicaraguans in the United States aged 25 and older have a university degree, compared with 7% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and 8% of Hondurans; and 62% of Nicaraguans aged five and older speak fluent English, compared to 48% of Salvadorans, 47% of Hondurans and 43% of Guatemalans.
Nicaraguan “privileges” Although the Nicaraguans’ favorable situation in these indicators is partly due to their mostly urban and middle or upper class origins, Nicaraguans have tended to be less subjected to deportations and more likely to be granted permanent residence and citizenship, as the figures in the table on page 48 eloquently show.
There are two ways to demonstrate this relative privilege in proportional terms. The first is to expand the number of deported Nicaraguans in line with that of each of the other Central American nationalities’ residents. Applying a simple rule of three and taking into account the proportional number from each country living in the United States: 1,383 deported Nicaraguans in 2013 would be equivalent to 4,201 Guatemalans, 2,457 Hondurans and 7,000 Salvadorans being deported. But these numbers are in sharp contrast with the 47,769 Guatemalans, 37,049 Hondurans and 21,602 Salvadorans who actually were deported in 2013.
This indicator’s greatest explanatory weakness is that it doesn’t adjust for the dimensions of the current flow, as it is based on an aggregate over time that doesn’t necessarily coincide with today’s influx of migrants. Nor does it take into account any other immigrant policy apart from deportation, despite a legal environment where “illegal” and its complementary antithesis “regularized” are at play in the granting of residence and citizenship, and in the temporary protection and temporary workers programs, refugee and asylum-seeker quotas, etc.
The combination of these two limitations leaves this indicator based on a figure (the total of those currently living in the US) that is the result of policies, not a reflection of flow: if there are only 702,000 Hondurans in the US, it doesn’t mean that the flow of Hondurans has been just 35% of the flow of Salvadorans. The dimensions of the aggregate reflect a combination of factors: the size and longevity of its flow as well as selection and rejection policies. But even with these precautions, this indicator provides us some interesting pointers. There’s a clear disparity in the yardstick by which Nicaraguans and the other Central Americans are measured.
Accepted/residents vs. rejected/deporteesA second method of calculation, which attempts to overcome these weaknesses, is to compare the numbers of Central Americans who have been granted permanent residence with the number of deportees. This calculation can be complicated through the inclusion of those receiving temporary protection status, temporary worker programs, naturalizations, etc., but the contrast between the numbers of deportees and those receiving permanent residence is enough to give an idea of how the migration policy filter is treating each nationality at any given time.
This comparison is preferable because it measures the two extremes of the anti-migrant mood: the narrowing of acceptance (relative decline in residents) and the expansion of rejection (increase in deportees). And it has the advantage of sidestepping the thorny, hard-to-resolve issue of measuring the volume of migration flows, assuming that both positive and negative contact with migration authorities is proportional to the volume of migrants: the greater the flow, the more migrants in contact with migration authorities, both to regularize their status and for deportation.
Admittedly this contrast is impossible to measure “at a given moment.” Deportations are dealt with by only relatively expeditious processes, which could take a few days, months or even more than a year. The latter was the case with 3% of those detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009. Including the days before and after the deportation order, the whole process took 114 days on average in 2009.
On the other hand, the process of obtaining permanent residency often lasts several years and varies depending on the applicants’ virtues and defects: the way they enter, family ties with US citizens or residents, their work situation, their interests as an investor and their relationship with different US government bodies (especially the Army) and other background information.
Taking that time gap into account, my indicator contrasts the quotient of residencies granted in 1999 and deportations in 2002 with the quotient of deportations in 2013 and residencies issued in 2010. The results are reflected in this table, with Hondurans and Nicaraguans representing the two extremes.
Double standards
favoring NicaraguansFrom 1999 to 2002, 1.2 Hondurans obtained residence for every 1 deported. From 2010 to 2013, the situation was reversed in which the implementation of migration policies resulted in 5.8 Hondurans deported for every 1 granted residence. At the other extreme are the Nicaraguans, who obtained 39 residences for every deportation in the first period. Their numbers never “went into the red” in the second period but they did drop to 2.5 residencies obtained for every deportation. This is the only nationality where the last column of the table continues to represent the number of residencies granted for every deportation. For their regional neighbors to the north, that column records deportations for every residency.
Although this rate is quite imprecise and may seem an exceedingly defective reflection of the effects of migration policies (among other reasons because of the elastic time gaps explained above), it is consistent with figures from the Pew Hispanic Center based on the 2011 American Community Survey’s tables: 53% of immigrants with Nicaraguan origins have US citizenship, a rate placing them far above Salvadorans (29%), Guatemalans (23%) and Hondurans (22%).
Consequently, as there’s a correlation, albeit surely ambiguous, between migration status and household income, it also needs to be looked at. The average annual income per household among Nicaraguans in the United States is $46,700. Although it doesn’t greatly exceed the $40,000 of Salvadorans, it leaves the Guatemalan $36,400 and Honduran $31,000 in the dust, and is close to the national average of $50,000. The poverty rate among Nicaraguans is 18%, over 10 points below Guatemalans (29%) and Salvadorans (33%). Finally, while 31% of Nicaraguans say they don’t have social security, 46% of Hondurans and Guatemalans say they don’t.
Anti-communist wheat separated
from revolutionary chaffThe roots of these double standards must be unearthed from the thorny ground of the eighties, which was fertilized by Cold War geopolitics. As with the Afghanis and Iraqis today, Nicaraguans in the eighties benefited from adhering to the Republican government’s anti-communist creed. The Salvadorans and Guate¬malans who began to arrive as refugees weren’t as well received because the Reagan administration reckoned, rightly so, that most of them didn’t share its belief. Furthermore, admitting as citizens the refugees from countries whose governments were receiving US military and economic support would have been a tacit admission that the Reagan administration had established alliances with human rights violators.
In Nations of Emigrants: Shifting boundaries of citizenship in El Salvador and the United States, the much published socio-cultural anthropologist, Susan Bibler Coutin Ph.D., points out: “The State Department, which was required to weigh in on asylum cases, routinely advised INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] district directors to deny Salvadorans and Guatemalans asylum cases. These recommendations were generally followed.”
As with migrations by other Latin Americans, Central American migrations were, as investigative journalist Juan González noted so well in Harvest of Empire: A history of Latinos in America, the harvest of an Empire’s major intervention in the economic, political and military of the Central American countries’ affairs, in which the migration policies were responsible for separating the anti-Sandinista wheat from the revolutionary chaff. Salvadorans, lacking sponsors, hardly obtained 2-3% approval rates from their asylum applications. Guatemalans were even a percentage point lower. Nicaraguans, on the other hand, were rewarded with high approval rates, reaching a peak of 84% in 1987.
A State Department spokesperson backed this prerogative by stating: “The Sandinistas, however, have developed Nicaragua’s legal system, mass organizations and armed forces into instruments of repression. The State Security Directorate in the Ministry of Interior has institutionalized human rights abuse with the national police system and the security prisons.” These substantial approval rates were reduced to a meager 19% in 1990, as soon as government officials noticed that the new applicants were “only” fleeing economic conditions or seeking family reunification. In fact, the attitude was modified by the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat and the change in the Nicaraguan government’s political-ideological model.
The United States has
three migration modelsMigration expert and professor at Georgetown, Susan F. Martin, states in A Nation of Immigrants that the United States was populated during British colonization using three different migration models that persist right up to today. In the Virginia colony immigration was equivalent to the arrival of workers, who had few recognized rights. Massachusetts received with open arms those who shared the same religious vision as the founders but excluded all those whose beliefs challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. Pennsylvania, in contrast, had a high regard for pluralism, a trait that made it the most diverse colony with respect to religion, language and culture. US migration policies in the eighties followed a secular version of the the migration selection model applied in Massachusetts. It was Reagan’s sieve, which strained out rebels and welcomed fugitives from communist regimes.
Privileges end
and the funnel narrowsBesides the contrast between nationalities, recent figures also show a marked descent from the pedestal on which migration policies had earlier placed Nicaraguans and a deteriorated situation for all Central Americans. Nicaraguan deportations went from 468 in 2002 to 1,383 in 2013. In the same period they made an Olympic leap from 5,396 to 47,769 for Guatemalans, from 4,946 to 37,049 for Hondurans and from 4,066 to 21,602 for Salvadorans. In total, deportations from these Central Americans countries went from 14,876 to 107,803.
And those figures aren’t about a greater flow producing more deportations. With more migrants, proportionally fewer residence applications were successful, falling from 56,271 to 38,667. At each end of the funnel, migration policies exacerbated its dominant traits: narrower to enter and wider to expel. The decline of the “Massachusetts model” didn’t clear the way for a more balanced model with policies less welcoming to Nicaraguans and less antagonistic to Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans. Rather it was replaced by the “Virginia model,” that of workers with very few rights, applied with indiscriminate severity.
The NACARA and ABC lawsNicaraguans stopped being pampered by migration policies. Despite what the figures indicate at first glance, they are now as hard hit as the region’s other nationalities.
The positive indicator of 2.5 residents for every deportee only expresses inertial movement: a relatively high volume of legal migration has been maintained through family reunification based on a large group of previously established, authorized migrants. Among all admission categories, authorized migrants’ family members represented about 66% of those admitted as permanent residents for all nationalities in the broad span between 2002 and 2012. This means that today’s migrants are reaping the fruits sown by previous migrations. That’s why Hondurans seem to be the most affected by deportations and have less access to residence.
Unlike Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, Hondurans weren’t included in the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997, better known as the NACARA law. Nor were they included in the ABC law, so called because it derived from American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, the suit the Baptist Churches won in 1990 against the US attorney general and the INS director for violating national and international laws by denying asylum to Salvadorans and Guatemalans who arrived in the US fleeing political repression in the eighties.
The ABC ruling ipso facto stopped deportation of these nationalities, benefiting those who hadn’t been included in the amnesty known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. It covered some 190,000 Salvadorans and 50,000 Guatemalans.
Hondurans the hardest hitABC and NACARA were forms of amnesty, belligerent regularization processes that between 1990 and 2000 officially reduced the number of undocumented Nicaraguans from 50,000 to 21,000 and of Salvadorans from 298,000 to 189,000. The arrival of new migrants, however, increased the net number of undocumented Guatemalans from 118,000 to 144,000 in that same time period, while the number of undocumented Hondurans, excluded from these initiatives, jumped from 42,000 to 138,000.
We can hypothesize from these figures that the policies are no longer favoring Nicaraguans, even in an attenuated way, are moderately affecting Salvadorans and Guatemalans and hitting Hondurans the hardest. While some deportations may be proportional to the flow and have some chance of regularization depending on the situation each nationality’s migrants have accumulated over time, the United States, simply put, didn’t want to pay, in migration legislation, for the services Honduras provided as a military base during the eighties.
As the operational base and R&R area for US soldiers and armed anti-Sandinista counterrevolutionaries, Honduras didn’t figure as a war zone. Today, its migrants are at a relative disadvantage as the residue of geopolitical-migratory history. Certain nationalities are less affected due to favorable remnants: established migrants on which family reunification can be built, greater familiarity with bureaucratic procedures and greater networks to communicate this knowledge. Countering disproportionate faith in public policies, it is due far less than assumed to their governments lobbying US politicians.
Undocumented migrants over time:
Contrasting US and Costa RicaIf migration policies applied to Central Americans converge in the “Virginia model,” the SJM Census—a magnifying glass for observing unnoticed details—contains some enlightening input on how migrations are “illegalized” over time and how we can assume that has happened to the different Central American nationalities.
In the eighties, more than half the people of Chinandega (almost 54%) who went to the United States traveled with a visa. This dropped to 48% in the 1990s, continued falling to 45.7% in the first five years of the new century and reached its lowest point (37%) in the 2005-2009 period.
Significantly, 2005 was the year when more Central American migrants were deported from the US and from Mexico than any other nationality. That year probably produced a combination of policies adverse to migration: a lower rate of visa approvals and greater hunt for undocu¬mented persons. We do know that visa quotas were restricted, but that doesn’t have such an important immediate impact on “illegality” because the first option of undocumented migrants isn’t usually to go to the Consulate and apply for a visa. More important was the resurgence of Operation Gatekeeper combined with an increase in the number of migrants.
In contrast, “illegal” migration to Costa Rica portrays a rather more consistent pattern without an increase. Starting with only 51% of Nicaraguans with visas during the turbulent years of 1980 to 1984, the number of visa-holders underwent a sustained increase until stabilizing—with very slight ups and downs—at 66% from 1995 to the present.
Another angle to view this perverse evolution is from changes in migration status. Between 20% and 25% of Chinandegans who entered the US in the eighties have citizenship today. This figure drops to 7% for the 1990s and to 2.5% for the 2000-2004 period. The number of US residencies granted or pending fell during those same periods after reaching a peak of 72.8% among those arriving between 1991 and 1994; a period when the sum of residencies and citizenships totaled almost 80%, a figure only surpassed in the eighties.
Chinandegans who migrated in the eighties benefited from the 1986 IRCA amnesty and other provisions, and those who entered from 1991 to 1994 were among the last to benefit from NACARA, which regularizes those who can demonstrate five years continuous US residence starting on December 1, 1995. Afterwards, the percentage of residencies falls to 42.3% (2005-2009). In this and the following periods the sum of residencies and citizenships barely reached 44.3% and 47.7%, respectively. On the other hand, the percentage of unauthorized Chinandegans rose from 6.8% (1985-1990) to 47% (2005-2009), with a slight drop in the last period, perhaps due to the number of migrants seeking protection in family reunification.
When Chinandegans migrate to Costa RicaThe migration of Chinandegans to Costa Rica has evolved with more complexity. It began in the early eighties with a high number of unauthorized migrants, fell to negligible levels between 1985 and1999, then experienced phased rises and between 2010 and 2012 reached almost 41%. The key to interpreting this upward trend is the growing prevalence of Nicaraguans’ pendular migration to Costa Rica. This escalated from the nineties following the failed economic insertion of veterans from both sides of the war as well as of refugees in Costa Rica, who had returned with the expectation of a political-economic shift that would favor them. Most migrants are young males of between 20 and 26 years of age.
From the demand side, in which the need for labor is most pressing in rural Costa Rica, this seasonal migration is explained by a decline in the growth of Costa Rica’s rural population—from 2.4% in 1960-80 to 1.8% in 1980-2000—as well as in the economically active rural population from 33.5% to 27.4% over those two periods combined.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Costa Rican Labor Ministry agree that approximately 100,000 Nicaraguans arrive in Costa Rica every year for seasonal work. Visa procedures for many of these migrants are very cumbersome and the costs are huge, especially for the vast majority that lives far from the three Costa Rican consulates, located in Rivas, Chinandega and Managua.
The escalation of the percentage in the 2010-2012 period could indicate a predominance of temporary migrants evading migration bureaucracy, but that increased propensity for evasion is more likely motivated by the implementation of the new General Law on Migration and Aliens No. 8764 of 2010. It significantly raised the costs of fines and permit extensions (a change of migration status costs US$200, almost a month’s minimum wage) and introduced or reinforced onerous requirements (all changes of address to be communicated in writing).
Such legal hindrances and omnipresent authentication requirements created a very profitable ecological niche for process agents, pen-pushers and lawyers who Jesuit martyr Ignacio Ellacuría called the vultures of society: the more corruption there is, the fatter they get. Just as in the United States, Costa Rican migration containment policies haven’t managed to contain but they have moved the line between welcome and unwelcome.
Migration policies have, however, had an impact in both cases. The range of measures aimed at making migrants illegal has mainly increased the number of those entering the US and Costa Rica under the stigma of “illegality.” But that increase in “illegal” migration isn’t always proportionate to the volume of expulsions, because the severity of the “letter” of the policies doesn’t necessarily coincide with the rigor of their application. Although more undocumented migrants entered Costa Rica in the 2008-2012 period, deportations were only 45% of those from the preceding five years. In fact, the numbers deported from Costa Rica in that period represent just 1.57% of the repatriations. Most undocumented migrants are simply “returned,” a legal category that doesn’t even have administrative consequences. “Returnees” often re-enter the very next day. Another obvious contrast with US policies is the 8,256 residencies Costa Rica granted Nicaraguan migrants in this same period, giving an average of 21 residencies granted for every deportation.
The biggest filter is in the NorthThe true dimensions of the US migratory filter can only be comprehended if we add those deported from Mexico to those deported directly from the US, as Mexico serves to stretch that filter out vertically. This perception is based on verification by the Mexican Government’s National Institute of Migration that Central Americans “returned” from that country are on their way to the United States and their stay in Mexico doesn’t exceed 30 days.
The SJM census shows that deportees represent 26.5% of those returning from the United States. But if we add deportees from Mexico, their relative weight hits 28%, which is 26 points more than deportees as a percentage of returnees from Costa Rica.
A more relevant country for comparative purposes with the US is Spain, as the weight of the returnees has a certain relationship with the distance of the destination country. The percentage of deportees from Spain is 9.5 points above that of returnees, with only 6.4% of those who have migrated to Spain having been returned. The United States is the single destination with the next lowest weight in returnees at 11%.
Adding deportees from Mexico to those from the US changes the chart comparing residencies and deportations to more realistic dimensions because they take into account the “achievements” of both US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and outsourcing to Mexico’s migration authorities.
As can be seen in the table on the previous page, the situation of all nationalities is worse both at the beginning of the period looked at (1999-2002) and the most recent period (2010-2013). Guatemala and Honduras were already “in the red” in 1999-2002, with 6.1 and 6.5 deportations for every residency. In 2010-2013 all nationalities except Nicaraguans were in the red. In the extreme case of Hondurans, the figures represent almost 11 deportees for each residency granted. On average we have 5, not 3, Central Americans deported for every new resident. It’s patently clear that being undocumented doesn’t have the same dimensions, significance and consequences in Costa Rica as it has in the United States.
When Spain is the destinationAn inevitable question arises here: If migration policies haven’t been able to curb migration, but only “illegalize” it, are there structural factors that undermine migration and affect its massive illegality? According to the SJM census, the US and Spain are the destinations with the greatest decline in migration in the three-year period 2010-2012, with decreases of 43% and 40% compared to 29% and 12% in the five-year period 2005-2009 that preceded it.
Even with those sizable drops in migration, both Spain and the United States remain the most popular destinations after Costa Rica, which absorbs 32% of Chinandega’s migrants. Although just 1.8% of Nicaragua’s population lived in the city of Chinandega in 2005, 4.6% of all Nicaraguan immigrants residing in Spain in 2013 came from there. With 12% of all Nicaraguan migrants, Spain is the third destination of numerical importance in Chinandegan migration and undoubtedly one of the most recent. It may also be the most ephemeral, due to the economic crisis that has reversed Spain’s migration status, turning what was a receptor nation in the two decades before 2008 into an emitting country today.
Five times more Chinandegans migrated to Spain in 2000 than in 1999. This volume was maintained and reached a resounding 100% increase in 2004 and grew another 75% the following year. It rose nearly 30% between 2006 and 2007 and jumped another 57% the following year. But since 2008, with the fangs of the crisis locked into the peninsula, the flow began to decline: by 57% in 2008, 41% in 2010 and 63% in 2012, with small rises in 2009 and 2011, insufficient to offset its decreases.
Do economic crises matter? Migration to the United States itself began to decline in 2009, the year after the onset of the financial crisis and what has been called “the job drought.” But that decline has been less drastic, fluctuating between 26% and 32% a year.
In February 2011, identifying a migration trend similar to the Spanish case, researchers from the Pew Hispanic Center talked about a decline in the number of undocumented migrants, attributed to a fall in Mexican migration. A year later they spoke about “zero migration” of Mexicans and a slowdown in Central American migration. The Mexican Interior Ministry’s National Institute of Migration said the flow of Central Americans was stabilizing, which it attributed to the effect of restrictive policies.
Anti-migrant policies, specifically the implementation of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities Program,” were identified as the decline’s causal elements. The volume of deportations had allegedly reached a historic peak of 395,000 in 2009. The economic crisis was also assumed to have given potential newcomers negative signals and encouraged their voluntary return, according to findings from a workshop on economic cycles, demographic change and migrations that the International Organization for Migration quickly put together.
The findings offered by the Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen, in her book Guests and Aliens appear to be based on certain assumptions: “The Western European experience also shows that most migrations end. Most cross-border migrations in Europe took place within the duration of twenty years. One of the reasons for this is that migrations tend to be embedded in the cycles and phases of the receiving areas (…). Today, when Italians and Spaniards are free to move within Europe, there is almost no new migration. That particular phase of labor migration, embedded as it was in the postwar reconstruction of Europe and then in the expansion of the 1960s, came to an end when these conditions no longer held.”
But the fact that things have often been a certain way doesn’t prove that they’ll continue being so, or even that that they are so right now, or are so for the same reasons. Above all, it’s possible that cycles will repeat themselves. In fact, Spaniards have embarked on a new migratory venture to the more prosperous parts of Europe and America, replicating a toned-down version of the flow they staged in the mid-20th century.
Regarding migration to the United States, subsequent evidence showed that Central American migration to this country had not necessarily begun a new cycle but rather had perhaps entered a small depression within the great, long and ascending, migration wave. In September 2013 the Pew Hispanic Center released a new report in which it announced a migration surge of undocumented non-Mexican groups in 2011 and 2012, with a strong presence of Central Americans. This was due to the economic crisis motivating migration through its effects on Central American countries, whose economies are dependent on the US; especially El Salvador, whose symbiosis with the US economy has been firmly fixed by dollarization of its currency since 2001.
Violence at home is shown to be a factorAnother spur to migration was shown to be the growing levels of violence in Honduras and El Salvador, statistically associated with intentions to emigrate.
A December 2013 survey by the Jesuit’s Reflection, Research and Communication Team (ERIC) in Honduras revealed that 36% of those interviewed wanted to emigrate. In Nicaragua, where political violence along with the country’s lack of employment opportunities arouse intentions to migrate, a survey by M&R Consultants, also in late 2013, showed that 54.5% of Nicaraguans would like to leave the country, 39% to the United States.
It’s possible that return migration by Mexicans will free up places for Central Americans, maintaining an ethnic niche for a demand that has entered a recessive phase. In any case, the history of the upturn in Central American migration to the US shows that the conditions in the countries of origin are more of a conditioning element for migrations than Sassen alleges in Guests and Aliens.
The contrast of declining migration to Spain is related to the illegalization implemented by Spanish migration policies in the context of the crisis. Immigration can grow in industrialized destination countries with economic crises but that growth is limited to unauthorized migration even more than in ordinary times. Migration slows down where that growth margin is so restricted, as in Spain’s case, because illegality basically depends on violating the expiration date of the stay permit. In short, undocumented persons sustain migration where the geographical conditions and means of communication aren’t allies of the anti-migration policies.
Also the studiesIf the illegalizing machinery fails to stem migration even in times of crisis, what does it achieve? Policies are a sieve, not a dike. What do they strain out and what do they let through?
The SJM census can help us visualize some of the criteria of this filter. Among the Chinandegans who have naturalized as US citizens, 78% have secondary or university education and 43% are professionals. Among the 36% of Chinandegans in the United States who have permanent residence, 76% have secondary or university education. However, among the undocumented migrants, 26% have only primary education, a negligible number in the other categories, 67% have secondary or higher education and just 20% are professionals.
The figures in Costa Rica show less contrast for the same variables: 37% of the residents and 31% of the undocumented migrants only have primary education while the residents and undocumented migrants with university education are only 9% and 8%, respectively. Only residents with secondary education (47%) far outstrip the undocumented migrants (17%). The same is true in this and other variables, such as occupation in country of origin and of destination in comparison with other destinations.
How do the filters work?
Who do they strain out? There are clear indications that there’s a filter, but we don’t know how much systemic/automatic premeditation and/or malice aforethought is embodied in the policies. Does the destination impose a requirement that means only those who can afford a coyote’s expensive services and, therefore, those who have had access to more education tend to go to the US? Or does illegality work like a “scarlet letter” limiting access to better paid neighborhoods, schools, incomes and occupations? We need more information from the field to find the answers.
This survey does show that there was a filter with ideological criteria in the eighties: an open door to those who shared the same beliefs. Geopolitical criteria continue to be applied to nations at war, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and are blatantly flaunted in the expedited path to residence for Iraqi or Afghani interpreters who assisted US officials and those employed by the US government for at least one year since 2001 (for the Afghanis) or since 2003 (for the Iraqis), as established in the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 and the National Defense Authorization Act, a federal law stipulated in the Defense Department’s budget.
But this filter has ceased to be applied to Central Americans, whose “illegalization” or acceptance has undergone an ideological change in migration policy: From a geopolitical to a nationalist/racist focal point? To a focus on class? To the “Virginia model,” where the market imposes its demand for labor or for “clients” in private migrant detention centers?
Assuming and defying “illegality”
is a foundational actAn increase in undocumented migrants is connected to a shift in the legality line, reflected in chronological evolution. The dark side to the increase in undocumented migrants is that it provides an opportunity for big capital to avail itself of a reserve army while holding down salaries. As anthropologist Nicholas De Genova pointed out, the “illegal alien” classification is enormously profitable because it serves to provide cheap labor. This crucial finding is so well established it’s irrefutable, but in itself, this isn’t enough because it doesn’t examine—and therefore normalizes—the origin of this legal status, which De Genova calls the “illegalization” of the migrant.
This illegalization also has a flip side: it increases the number of those who defy the State, with the census revealing that Nicaraguan migrants react by assuming illegality, not avoiding it. In this illegalization process, migrants have assumed illegality, with all its risks and challenges. Some experts’ appeals for universal citizenship, and the semantic battle attempting to eliminate—or delegitimize, so showing its spurious origin—the stigma of “illegal” that the State stamps on undocumented migrants can’t erase the fact that the foundational act in the relationship of most Central American migrants with the United States is a transgression of that country’s laws.
Do these migrants opt for a future as citizens based on how the State of the American Union works? What do migrants know about how that State works and what loopholes they can slip through, protected by state heterogeneity, political diversity and the work of activists?
The SJM census gathered information about 5 kidnappings and 144 missing persons, which represents 13% of the Chinandegans who migrated to the United States and Mexico. It’s a big figure. What other dangerous consequences are there for undocumented migrants, limiting the exercise of citizenship and respect for human rights? To know this, we must go beyond this census and do research in the field. While we have certain leads, many question marks hang in the air. To answer them we must get in touch with the migrants’ world.
José Luis Rocha, a member of the envío editorial council, directed the SJM of Nicaragua for nine years and designed the census whose results he analyzes here.
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