El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Progress for Hispanics in public life has been uneven. While there have been some high-profile gains, such as appointment to the Supreme Court in 2009 of Sonia Sotomayor, who was born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, the judiciary, Congress, and state and local politics do not have representation proportional to the size of the Hispanic community. For instance, a report in the Austin American-Statesman found that 1.3 million Hispanics in Texas—more than 10 percent of the overall Hispanic population—live in cities or counties with no Hispanic representation on the city or council commissions. Statewide, about 10 percent of mayors and county judges are Hispanic, although Hispanic people make up about 38 percent of the population of Texas.5

  Another study, by the California Latino Legislative Caucus and affiliated groups, found in 2015 that at 38.6 percent, “Latinos represent the most populous ethnic group” in California, but they made up only 19.6 percent of its registered voters. Latino political representation remains low as well, with the state assembly being 23.8 percent Latino and the state’s city councils 14.6 percent.6 There are some exceptions, such as Santa Ana in Orange County, California, which has a city council made up entirely of Hispanic officeholders, in a town where the population is 78 percent Hispanic.7

  Nationally, the 2016 election saw the first Hispanic woman to reach the Senate, Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, while the 115th Congress (January 2017–January 2019) can count a record forty-five Hispanic members: thirty-one Democrats and fourteen Republicans. They are 8.4 percent of Congress, though their numbers remain some way off the 17 percent of Hispanics nationally.8

  However active the Hispanic community was in the 2016 election and political life, what all Hispanic people—documented or not, U.S. citizens or not—face now is a climate of increasing hostility within the debate on immigration. Nativist ideas of the United States as a white, English-speaking country have resurfaced, as have economic anxieties, specifically that cheaper labor in Mexico is undercutting U.S. jobs, while fears about narco drug gangs permeate border communities and beyond. Trump’s wall has become a powerful symbol of an answer to these problems, whatever the demographic or economic reality that underpins it. In that sense, there are echoes of the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s, but the context is markedly different, not only because of the diversity of people from Central and South America who have emigrated to the United States—this issue now goes far beyond the United States and Mexico—but also because of the changes wrought by increased economic globalization and the rise of China’s industrial powerhouse.

  One particular irritant to Trump and many other people in the United States has been the North American Free Trade Agreement. Grumbling and at times strong disagreement over trade have long been a hallmark of U.S.-Mexican economic relations, which have not always run smoothly. The later decades of the twentieth century saw various experiments in trade, including the further cutting back of restrictions, in a border region that was familiar with pressures to lower tariffs, and the development of free trade zones long before the implementation of NAFTA in 1994.

  The maquiladoras (factories) that are now strung along the border had their start with the Border Industrialization Program of 1965, coming fast on the heels of the end of the bracero scheme. These plants imported, duty-free, materials that needed assembling, processing, or finishing into a final product, which was then shipped out of Mexico. The tariff on the product reflected the value of the labor, not the total value of the materials, and U.S firms were quick to utilize this scheme.9 The Mexican government at the time also thought that by putting these plants—and jobs—along the border, it could stop people from leaving the country. Well before NAFTA was signed, around 550,000 Mexicans were working in some two thousand maquiladoras. Besides an economic change, there was a significant gender shift, as many of the employees were women, who were deemed to be less likely to unionize.10

  Under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who came to power in 1988, Mexico had also experienced further economic reforms. Salinas lifted the conditions placed on foreign investment that had earlier been written into the 1917 constitution’s controversial Article 27, while also privatizing land held by the communal ejidos and selling off many of the state’s public services.11 By 1990, leaders in Mexico, the United States, and Canada agreed that a larger trade deal could benefit all three nations. There was an implication as well that such an arrangement could offer more domestic opportunities so Mexican citizens would stay home. That same year, the number of Mexican-Americans in the United States was around fifteen million, and the number of undocumented workers was between two million and three million.12

  As NAFTA came into force on January 1, 1994, a group of people in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, started a rebellion named in honor of the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), led by the balaclava-wearing, pipe-smoking Subcomandante Marcos, denounced NAFTA and pressed its case for land reform and indigenous rights.13 Marcos and the other Zapatistas feared that the reforms in the plan would affect the poor, mostly indigenous, farmers in the region. Marcos also wanted a fuller political inclusion of people who had continued to be marginalized—fellow citizens whose land and livelihoods were now at further risk as the country was opened to more foreign investment.

  A trade deal as large as NAFTA had both positive and negative outcomes for the economies involved, though there have been some clear impacts on certain groups.14 For instance, NAFTA has been tough for Mexican farmers. Under NAFTA, U.S. farmers, who receive government subsidies, were able to undercut Mexicans by selling meat and grain below market price, including the staple commodity maize. This led to subsidized U.S. corn flooding the Mexican market, driving farmers to look for work elsewhere, including in the United States. Between 1993 and 2008, the number of Mexicans employed in agriculture dropped from 8.1 million to 5.8 million, leaving far more unemployed than could be absorbed by the factories along the border.15

  Throughout the 1990s, the way of life of many people changed beyond recognition, in rural hamlets and in the growing cities of the border. Women’s unpaid work was critical to households, but now many women were leaving home for jobs in factories, uprooting whole communities.16 As people moved north within Mexico, many decided to cross the border—legally or otherwise. The number of Mexican-born residents in the United States hit 12.6 million in 2009, up from 4.5 million in 1990.17 Many of these immigrants had good incentives to go across, not least because jobs in Mexico often paid less for a day’s work than what a U.S. worker could make in an hour. The industrial zones in Mexico had also become blighted by pollution, poverty, and violence: at least 370 female workers have been murdered around Ciudad Juárez and elsewhere along the border in the state of Chihuahua since 1993.

  Mexicans remain ambivalent about the positive impact of NAFTA, not least because 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, a figure that is more or less unchanged since the deal went into effect. A poll in 2016 found that only 20 percent of Mexicans felt that NAFTA had benefited them.18 A 2014 report from the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Economic and Policy Research documented that, twenty years on, the deal had indeed done little, on balance, to help Mexico, at least compared with the economies in the rest of Latin America. It explained that if NAFTA had worked as designed, and restored Mexican economic growth rates to pre-1980s levels, it “would be a relatively high income country, with income per person significantly higher than that of Portugal or Greece.” Instead, Mexico ranked eighteenth out of twenty Latin American nations for growth of real GDP (gross domestic product) per person.19

  The United States has also had its problems with NAFTA. Many people blame NAFTA for the decline of manufacturing and unskilled labor jobs in the United States, a constant theme during the 2016 presidential election campaign. However, a report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that overall the United States had gained from the deal b
ecause for every 100 jobs U.S. firms created in Mexico for manufacturing, they created 250 at their operations in the United States.20 In addition, U.S. unemployment has remained low in general since the enactment of NAFTA, though income inequality has worsened in both countries. Trump has pledged to renegotiate NAFTA or leave it altogether. The United States’ trade with Mexico and Canada is worth $1 trillion annually, or about 30 percent of total U.S. trade in 2016, and its leaving the agreement could send shock waves through the economies of all three members.21

  Related to the shifts brought about by NAFTA, perhaps no issue has been debated in the United States in recent years with such ferocity as that of immigration and the question of what to do about undocumented or unauthorized migrants. Attempts at immigration reform continued into the 1990s, with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996, which gave more funding to the Border Patrol and pressured employers to comply with the law by not hiring undocumented workers. At the end of 2005, a bill passed the House of Representatives that proposed measures to curb the number of migrants; the most controversial of these measures was to make it a felony to be in the United States illegally. In addition, anyone who hired or assisted an undocumented worker could face the same charge.22

  As the Senate met to discuss this bill, and other reforms on the table, lawmakers were taken by surprise by a wave of marches and protests that started in March 2006 in support of Hispanic immigrants, documented or not. Tens of thousands of people came together in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and Phoenix, and the marchers in Los Angeles were estimated to have numbered almost 1 million.23 The marches continued into April 2006, with some occurring in smaller cities, like Nashville, Tennessee, that had not had traditional associations with Hispanic populations. Then, on April 9–10, simultaneous rallies took place across the country, with a total estimated turnout of 1.3 million to 1.7 million.24 This culminated in another round on May 1, a day celebrated in other nations as a workers’ day, and this time many people went on strike. For the political establishment, it was an eye-opener. For many Anglos, it was the first time they had a sense of just how widespread Hispanic communities were across the nation. The bill was shelved. However, the anger from the Hispanic community and from supporters of immigration would lead to a backlash soon enough, as the tone of the debate about illegal immigration grew even shriller in the aftermath.

  The administration of George W. Bush made a final attempt to resolve some of the issues surrounding immigration in the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007. This plan stalled, in part owing to provisions that could have allowed a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented workers. The Republican-controlled Senate voted to end debate on it, and it died in Congress.

  Immigration remained an issue during the presidency of Barack Obama after he took office in 2008. Under his administration, deportations began to rise, reaching more than two million by 2015, this time in the context of policies that would make it almost impossible for a deportee to return to the United States. This made the most impact on people who had recently crossed over, as two-thirds of the people picked up were within 100 miles of the border. In the past, many of these apprehensions would have been considered “voluntary returns” and not counted as formal deportations or removals, but this system changed during the later part of George W Bush’s term. The change in classification—from return to removal—was intended to discourage people from making repeated attempts to enter the United States: having formal charges on their records would be a deterrent.25

  In November 2014, Obama passed a number of executive orders aimed at immigration, including the expansion of the number of people eligible for the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, so that it would include anyone who had entered the United States before the age of sixteen and had lived in the country since January 1, 2010. He also introduced the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, covering qualifying parents who had lived in the United States from January 1, 2010. Meanwhile, repeated attempts to pass a version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would give people who came over as undocumented minors a pathway to permanent residency, continued to fail. DACA, therefore was intended to provide temporary permission to work, to have access to a driver’s license, and to attend college and pay in-state tuition fees.

  A few months earlier, in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration had faced a perfect storm, of drugs, gangs, and immigration along the southern border. Women and children fled Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador to escape the mounting violence perpetrated by the narcotraficantes in these countries where governments were too weak or corrupt to protect the public. Mexico, too, had spent much of the 1990s battling the rise of the drug cartels and continued to do so through the 2000s. The center of the drug world had shifted north from Colombia over those years, heading toward the border, in part because the main market for illegal drugs remains the United States. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have been racked by gang violence related to the cartels. Anxious to make sure their children were safe, many parents had a coyote (smuggler) take them across the border. Some teenage boys were sent on their own by their families to get them away from the gangs, whose power in some places is so strong that they can recruit or strong-arm members straight from the school classroom.

  The particular surge in the summer of 2014 was fueled in part by a rumor, which started in Central America, that women and children who made it across the border would be allowed to stay, something U.S. officials took pains to correct. The confusion lay in people’s thinking that being allowed to stay with relatives rather than in a detention facility meant they could remain in the United States. Federal law mandated that there must be attempts to find and send children to relatives living in the United States while the children awaited immigration hearings, but they still faced the prospect of deportation.26 Nevertheless, tens of thousands of people arrived that summer and temporary accommodation had to be set up for them.27 Warehouses, military bases, and other makeshift spaces along the border filled up in those summer months. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, in the fiscal year ending in 2013, 5,990 “unaccompanied alien children” arrived from El Salvador; 8,068 from Guatemala; and 6,747 from Honduras. The numbers for the end of 2014 had more than doubled to 16,404; 17,057; and 18,244, respectively.28

  Vice President Joe Biden met with the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador and high-ranking Honduran and Mexican officials in 2014, pressuring them to address the root causes of this wave of immigration, though part of the problem originated in the United States.29 A United Nations report noted that the presence of one of the biggest street gangs in El Salvador, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), “is almost certainly a result of the wave of criminal deportations … after 1996.”30 The gangs were born on the streets of Los Angeles, formed by young people who had left—or whose parents had fled—El Salvador in the 1980s. Some of them ended up in prison and were later deported to El Salvador, where they could reestablish their gangs. Their involvement in the global drug trade means they have evolved to be more a military force than a street gang, now spreading terror and violence, driving more people to make the dangerous crossing into the United States.

  Within the United States, the media raged with a polarized debate on whether the children involved should be considered “refugees,” and public sympathy was mixed. An editorial in the New York Times summed up the hysteria:

  In Congress, which gave up on creating an orderly immigration system, Republicans are watching President Obama struggle to get a handle on the problem, and trying very hard not to help. Their reaction is one part panic, two parts glee. Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia is warning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about migrants carrying the Ebola virus. For Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, it’s H1N1 flu virus. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is using the crisis to demand an
end to President Obama’s program deferring deportations of young people known as Dreamers. There is no time like a crisis to blow up earlier efforts to fix the system’s failures.31

  Refugees continued to flow north, and from October 2015 to May 2016, around 120,700 people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were stopped at the Mexican border. Figures from the U.S. Border Patrol put total apprehensions for the fiscal year (FY) 2016 (October 2015–September 2016) at 408,870, with just under 60,000 being unaccompanied children, for the most part from Central America.32 Thousands more were turned back before they could even attempt to cross, as Mexican officials stepped up their vigilance, encouraged in part by U.S. pressure and extra funding; in 2016, Mexico deported around 177,000 Central Americans. In FY 2017, the numbers dropped by more than 20 percent, with total apprehensions of 310,531 and 41,435 apprehensions of unaccompanied children.33 However, earlier in 2017 the Mexican government—now antagonized by the Trump administration over the border wall—said it would not cooperate with any plans to deport apprehended non-Mexicans to Mexico.34

  Another related issue that emerged during the Obama years and the run-up to the 2016 presidential election was that of the so-called anchor babies, a loaded term used to describe children born to foreigners in the United States; these children are entitled to citizenship. According to the Pew Research Center, three hundred thousand children a year are born to unauthorized immigrants. A common misconception is that giving birth to a baby in the United States entitles an undocumented parent to remain in the country, but it does not. The question of what happens to children when a parent is deported has taken on a new urgency since Trump came to office, and in 2017 it was a problem faced by an estimated five million children, who have at least one undocumented parent.35