Over The Borderline: The Root Causes of America’s Migration Crisis

In March of 2022 we published an episode and essay titled Immigration Nation: A Crisis of our Own Design. It spoke to the complexities of immigration policy in the United States, arguing that our current approaches are inadequate for addressing the challenges posed by mass migration, especially from Central America. The argument being that the only true solution to the backlog of cases, the so-called “Dreamers” in limbo and surge of new entrants across the southern border is a more nuanced and comprehensive strategy; one that considers the root causes of immigration and the broader impacts on society and the economy.

At the heart of the issue is the dichotomy between liberal and conservative approaches to immigration. The politicization of migrants has detached us from rational policy approaches. Liberals like to appear empathetic and advocate for more open borders and compassionate treatment of immigrants, while conservatives demonize and “other” those seeking a new life in the United States and emphasize border security while employing nativist rhetoric.

Miles of border walls, drones and radar technology won’t solve the underlying problems that drive people to migrate in the first place. And, by the way, neither will policy alone. We tend to look at immigration through the America-first lens, no matter whose view we adopt. What’s lost in the debate are the stories of those who seek refuge in the United States.

Many immigrants from Latin America are fleeing poverty, violence, and political instability in their home countries. The same is now true of a surge in refugees from Central Africa. Then there’s the influx of Chinese immigrants who have traveled to South America to traverse the well worn path of the U.S. southern border as well. Suddenly, things aren’t so simple.

It’s folly to think we can solve the world’s problems and abruptly halt the flow of immigration into the U.S. Also, this is just bad for business. Immigration is and has always been a vital part of the American story. Even those sympathetic to the cause of migrants—both those who take a favorable humanistic view and those who take a more cynical exploitative view—understand the benefits of a diverse and expanding population. Corporations want talent. Farms want experienced farmhands. Restaurants need labor. Hopefully we all want to save families who are literally starving or in danger. But there’s a balance.

But now the system is totally clogged. Students, asylum seekers, visa applicants, those going through the naturalization process—everything is delayed or intractably stuck. Any logical policy prescription must consider the root causes of net migration, why people are risking their lives to come here and what, if anything, we had to do with these circumstances.

As it is, the current immigration system is rife with inefficiencies and injustices. The backlog of immigration cases is staggering, with some immigrants waiting years or even decades for their cases to be resolved. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are more than 2 millions cases pending in the woefully understaffed and underfunded immigration courts as of the end of the year. That figure has tripled since 2017 and has only gotten worse since the beginning of 2024.

This backlog not only creates hardship for the individuals involved but also undermines the integrity of the immigration system as a whole. Delays in processing cases can lead to prolonged separation of families and uncertainty for individuals seeking legal status in the United States.

While Republicans ramp up their vicious attacks on immigrants in the runup to the election, exactly as they did in 2016 and 2020, The Biden Administration has sat with a thumb up its ass letting the problem get out of control. As a result, the attacks are striking nerves in more than just border towns.

Trump’s success in 2016 was more due to the antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, the slow and underwhelming recovery under Obama and a little bit of “this outta be interesting.” But the fact that he ran so hard on the border gave life to the idea that nativist campaign messaging might be a winning hand. But that came unraveled in 2020 when the nation threw up its hands in exhaustion and the Trump administration blew everything from the pandemic to promises made to the MAGA base.

But this time is different. We covered the numbers. On balance, there was little historical difference in attempted border crossings over several decades. Only the rhetoric had changed. The crisis that wasn’t in prior election years has actually developed into an authentic crisis that is very much a real thing today. It’s actually staggering how much things have worsened since we wrote that original piece. And it’s not just border states and towns that are waking up to this reality. It’s places like New York City, a sanctuary city with right to shelter laws in place. At this moment, city agencies estimate that more than 67,000 immigrants are still in the care of New York City and State with little federal assistance and little oversight from agencies stretched so thin other services are beginning to fall to pieces. No one is handling this well and it’s tearing us apart.

While some argue that immigrants take jobs away from American citizens and strain public resources, the reality is more nuanced. Immigrants contribute to the economy through their labor, entrepreneurship, and consumption. Studies have shown that immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans, creating jobs and stimulating economic growth.

We also demonstrated how even undocumented workers with falsified documents wind up contributing to the Social Security trust even though they’re ineligible for benefits. Basically helping to prop up the system through the underground economy. A dirty secret Washington doesn’t like to talk about.

Furthermore, immigrants often take on jobs that many Americans are unwilling to do, such as agricultural work and low-skilled labor. Without immigrant labor, certain industries would struggle to function, leading to higher prices for consumers and economic instability. We don’t have to like this but it’s true.

Given these complexities, it’s time for a more holistic approach to immigration policy. This includes not only addressing the root causes of migration but also reforming the legal immigration system to make it more efficient and humane. This could involve increasing the number of visas available for both high-skilled and low-skilled workers, as well as providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already living and working in the United States. But it also involves a coordinated foreign policy and economic development approach. It’s not enough to focus on the border and processing paperwork. There are fundamental economic and security issues in neighboring nations that must also be addressed as part of a comprehensive strategy.

And, yes, a more compassionate approach to immigration enforcement includes ensuring that immigrants are treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their legal status.

Over the next few episodes, we’re going to dig deeper into the nuances of immigration. The good, the bad, the ugly. The extraordinary and the human side. Personally, I have several burning questions that I can’t wait to answer. And there are perspectives that I’m curious to understand. If we think about the elements at play it’s a rich and troubling narrative. The undercurrent of racism and our nativist tendencies. The impact of climate change on migration patterns. The hangover of neoliberal policies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The housing shortage in the United States. The broken welfare system. The policy of criminalizing immigrants that was institutionalized in the 90s under the Clinton administration. The parallels and extremely poor reactions to the European migrant crisis. The exacerbated homeless crisis as a result of overpopulated shelters.

Then, of course, there’s the question of identity. Who are these people? Who are we? Are we a nation of immigrants on plaques and history books only? Why are we seemingly hardwired to slam the door behind us? To answer all of these questions and address the nuances, we have to look within ourselves and outside of ourselves.

I’ve mentioned recently that I’m fearful of what the next several months holds for us as a nation. The conservative playbook is quite clear and should scare the shit out of anyone with a heart. The liberal playbook is in reality more of the same but written in more flowery verses. But my fear is that the reality of the crisis is showing up in polling data, which means the party in power might overcorrect in a show of strength and hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose only crime is seeking the promise of a new life will be caught tragically in the middle. And, oh by the way, that promise? It’s one we made.

“Immigrants are ruining this country.”

Immigrants provide value with diverse backgrounds, culture and experience.

“They’re taking jobs from our workers. Stealing public benefits and welfare.”

Immigrants are vital to the health and growth of our economy.

“Immigrants are poisoning the blood of Americans.”

We have always been a nation of immigrants and this is the source of our power and strength as a nation.

Welcome to the first installment in our series “Over the Borderline” where we examine the plight of immigrant families, the socioeconomic and political conditions that drive people to migrate to the United States and the current crisis that has become a central talking point in the 2024 election. This first episode is a spotlight on New York City, which has been overwhelmed by a surge in migrant families being bused from border states as part of a political maneuver to deposit the immigration issue at the feet of leaders in Blue States. WNBC:

“They’re coming across the border from Venezuela into Texas and Arizona, and what’s different now is that they’re being sent to New York. So now suddenly New York is in the position of receiving…the number started about 10 days ago as a 2,800 estimate, and more recently Mayor Adams said it’s more like 4,000 of these migrants—many of them are families, some of them are single adults, and they are coming into our homeless shelter system which is already crowded. So it’s creating pressure on the city, on our social service systems. The families are not set up with regular food programs, they’re not entitled to food stamps or public assistance, even though they are here legally, so…it’s becoming a bit of a crisis”

In July of 2022, NBC New York’s government affairs reporter Melissa Russo began reporting on buses that were suddenly dropping migrants from Texas and Arizona on the streets of New York. Confused families were sometimes left at shelters, but oftentimes they wound up at random office buildings. It was soon revealed that governors from border states were behind this initiative with others like Ron DeSantis of Florida cashing in on the publicity and following suit.

Within a year, the situation developed into a full blown crisis with more than 4,000 migrants seeking shelter in New York City and putting tremendous pressure on city agencies. Since that time, the numbers have been staggering. According to the Associated Press,“More than 172,400 migrants have arrived and gone through the city’s intake system since the spring of 2022, Adams’ office said. The majority have since moved on to other places or become self-sufficient, but over 67,500 are currently in the city’s care.”

Migrants who find their way to the city have a few different paths to follow. In rare cases of single female travelers, there are two intake centers—one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx—that typically shelter homeless or abused women. Single men are routed through the men’s shelter on east 30th Street in Manhattan. And there are two family intake centers, one in Manhattan and another in the Bronx called Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH), and does most of the heavy lifting to welcome families.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the intake infrastructure for New York City. A city of more than 8 million people. A city that already has a homeless crisis. As a result, non-governmental organizations have rushed to fill the gaps and the city has pleaded with the state and federal governments to provide resources and funding. The whole affair has turned into a national media circus and provided fodder for conservative outlets to both gloat and scapegoat. And the Adam’s administration isn’t taking the criticism well. It even became the headline subject on the Daily Show recently:

Reporter: Buses arriving in New York City from Texas, one after another, filled with migrants seeking asylum.

 

Stewart: That’s all you got? Nice try Texas, but you heard the mayor, we’re New York fucking city. How dare you? No disrespect; but you are never going to change our values because you’re afraid. So keep sending those busloads, because we have plenty of room in our hearts and in this city.

 

Adams: We have no more room in the city. (Audience Laughs)

One of the reasons migrants are keen to make their way to New York is the concept of a sanctuary city, a phrase you’ve likely heard thrown around the media. The term itself, however, amounts to a collection of local policies rather than a legal designation. There’s actually no such thing as a sanctuary city, per se, but New York’s “right to shelter” policy and a decades old executive order by Mayor Ed Koch to protect the rights of privacy for immigrants combine to provide safe haven for those seeking to start a new life in the United States.

Both the Adams administration and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are attempting to alter the rules to exclude migrants from the crucial right to shelter policy, however. They argue that the surge is displacing native New Yorkers in need of temporary housing and assistance and making it impossible to track the movement and health and well being of the homeless population.

While there is a great deal of truth to their stance, most New Yorkers remain solidly in favor of the rules as they currently exist. This is despite the clear evidence of growing homelessness and the obvious presence of migrant families who have yet to find a more permanent living arrangement within the city or somewhere else.

In fact a recent poll conducted by the New York Immigration Coalition found that 80% of New Yorkers supported the right to shelter policy with 67% saying there were “more aligned with the view that migrants were fleeing ‘bad circumstances’ and seeking a better life as opposed to coming to New York City because it provides a ‘generous benefits system.’”

That’s not to say New Yorkers aren’t concerned about the influx of migrants. They’re visible on the streets, in hotels and the subways; masses of people just a bit out of step with the normal rhythms of the city. They cue up early at social services. The city is officially out of beds. Makeshift tent cities on Randall’s Island and the Bronx have become increasingly unsafe and unsanitary. And a couple of crimes and tense interactions with the NYPD have been blown wildly out of proportion in the conservative media giving outsiders the impression that New York City is a warzone. The statistics tell a different story.

The trending data show that violent crime continues to decline from pandemic era highs and have even reached a low point since the NYPD began recording this information. On the other hand, felony assaults and robbery remain high compared to historical data, along with grand larceny of motor vehicles. But violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter and rape are way down from historical highs in New York.

One area currently experiencing a starting increase in criminal behavior is the New York subway system, prompting governor Hochul to enlist the National Guard to increase the armed presence in the subways. But how much of current crime trends are attributed to migrant families in the city? Not much. In fact, given the volume of migration into the city one might assume that crime stats would be through the roof, not trending in the opposite direction.

The bottom line is that despite the massive influx of migrants into the city, there is no correlation to increases in reported crime data.

But you’d never know it by watching Fox News:

Jesse Watters: When I look at this, I see now what you’re allowed to do. You’re allowed to break into the country, they give you a free bus ticket to New York. If you come here you get a free hotel room, you get free cribbage, you get meals that are culturally appropriate. And then you could kick a cop in the head, get out of jail with no cash bail, and then skip town, drive drunk to California for a free sex change, and democrats won’t deport you.

 

Dana Perino: And the free healthcare.

 

Watters: And the—free reassignment surgery. Juan can become Juanita.

There’s your 2024 Republican campaign platform. Illegal immigrants are violent, drive drunk and get gender reassignment surgery on the taxpayer dime.

---

One of my closest friends is a guy I worked with in hospitality a lifetime ago. He’s still in the industry. And texted me recently with a genuine question. No malice behind it whatsoever. In the exchange he said that there is a line of job seekers at his door every day, whereas in the past he might see a handful in a given month. And he shared a story about a supplier of his who just lost a huge beverage contract at a hotel chain because the hotel had been converted into migrant housing. So his question was, “who the hell is paying for all of this?”

There are other implications behind that question that are worth exploring as well. Aside from who might be paying for all of this, another question is what happens to all the people who receive city services like food, housing and assistance if we’re running out and have to resort to putting people in hotels?

The quick answer to cost is simply that New York City is footing the bill. In fact, both the Adams and Hochul administrations have been pleading with the federal government to help offset the additional cost of housing and services. There are non governmental organizations, like the one you’re about to hear from, that are busy raising money to help fill in the gaps as well. But the whole thing is a budgetary disaster. A couple of people that I spoke with on background for this piece noted that one of the fatal flaws of New York’s strategy is that the Adams administration is so reactionary that it winds up wasting time and money, throwing good money and resources after bad. Starting and stopping initiatives and the like.

One example was an attempt to put an end date to housing, which led to a huge backlash from advocates who pointed out that this would only increase homelessness because migrant families are often sheltering while looking for work and applying for work papers. Throwing them on the street only complicates that process and leads to unintended consequences with the city’s existing homeless population that would have to be treated the same way by extension. In short, there are no good answers for this crisis at the moment.

To add some context and color to what’s happening on the ground we reached out to the New York Immigration Coalition, a policy and advocacy organization that represents over 200 immigrant and refugee rights groups throughout New York.

---

Max: And joining me now is Marlene Galaz, the New York Immigration Coalition’s Director of Immigrant Rights Policy. Marlene, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Marlene: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Max: So why don’t we start and just kind of set the table a little bit to talk about your organization specifically, because you’re a non-governmental organization, but you’re very much on the front lines of the immigration issue as it pertains to New York City in particular. So can you describe to us what NYIC does to secure and protect the rights of immigrants?

Marlene: Yeah. So the NYIC has been around for a little bit over 35 years. We are an umbrella policy and advocacy organization working with on the ground organizations that work on immigrant rights, refugee rights or rights of assay lease. We are mainly concerned with bettering the material conditions of immigrants in New York State. We have staff members and member organizations and partners across the state. So we’re not only focused on New York City. I am based in New York City, but we are also focused on the wellbeing of immigrants across the whole of New York. Our main focus is to pass laws or policies as well as budget initiatives to ensure the wellbeing of immigrants and as I mentioned before, bettering our material well being.

Max: Okay. So why don’t we get a little historical context as well because my understanding is that you were very much involved over your career in helping to shift our historical policy—and I’m speaking New York City centric at the moment—but our historical policy approach of incarcerating immigrants to where we are today with what appears to be more of a blended approach. So before we even talk about the surge over the past couple of years, can you talk about how the immigrant’s journey has changed and the policy towards that journey has changed over the past couple of decades?

Marlene: Yeah. So historically, most of the immigration, or most of the immigrants coming to the U.S. were single adults, mostly from Mexico or Central America. Most of whom were coming here for economic reasons, trying to work and send remittances to their families. Since I believe fiscal year 2023 we have been seeing a shift on that. We have been seeing an increase in families. We have been seeing an increase of people coming with like children, also unaccompanied children as well. That is something that we had seen before, but for the first time in fiscal year 23 we saw that there were more families coming than single adults.

Also the countries where people are coming from are a little bit different. Whereas before, as I mentioned, were Mexican and Central American nationals, now we have people coming from Ecuador, Haiti, China, India. Part of it is because of agreements between Mexico and Central America with the U.S., but also part of it is because of global conflict and just ongoing economic instability in the world.

Max: So, historically, though, before the surge, how did New York specifically tend to deal, let’s say 10, 20 years ago? How was the intake? How did the intake of immigrants differ then as it does now?

Marlene: Yeah, so New York has always been known for being a welcoming state. I think we’re going to talk about it later on, but for example some of our sanctuary laws we’ve had in place for over three decades. So New York really has a tradition of being very welcoming to our newest neighbors. Immigrants are an integral part of the fabric of society and they also do economic contributions and so on.

Even without going that far, in like 2020, 2021 when there were a lot of Ukrainian refugees being resettled here, the city set up specific programs for people who were in need, for these migrants. And we were actually a part of those programs. We had a Ukrainian resettlement fellow in contract with the city. So there has been a history in New York City with welcoming people from all over the world and setting up specific programs to do so.

Max: So when we think about the crisis today, the pressure that it’s put on different agencies, can you tell us—because I think there’s a lot of confusion around what happens when a family or even an individual who’s seeking work, when they actually get here, what happens? What’s their first point of contact? How does your organization get involved if at all with coordinating services to help support people in this sort of interim period before they are ultimately settled? What does the process look like from the migrant individual and family perspective?

Marlene: Yeah, so a lot of organizations, including the NYIC, have been on the ground. We have been seeing in New York City, states like Texas busing migrants from their state to the city. So the NYIC along with other organizations, many of our member organizations, have been literally on the bus stops waiting for people to arrive so we could support them in orienting them.

Other organizations such as African Communities Together, Mixteca, QDEP, have also been a point of contact or the initial point of contact. And a lot of migrants coming here, they talk, a lot of information travels through word of mouth. So many of these organizations are what’s called ethnic organizations. So, organizations that are focused on serving a specific demographic. They even have their own outreach programs or they help people and then the people that they helped tell other people. So it’s very grassroots. There’s a lot of community organizing happening that is not really supported, or not always supported by government funds, but it’s at the expense of our own communities.

Max: What does that mean, raising money within the communities?

Marlene: I mean a lot of these organizations are also nonprofits or community based, so they might have grants and they have their own grant writers. They might be asking for donations. They might have mutual aid as well. There’s a very wide range of the type of organizations. So some of them might be more nonprofit, traditional nonprofits, and some of them are very much just depending on mutual aid, doing clothes drives on Instagram. Yeah, just asking for donations generally. So there’s a wide range. But most of the work that gets done is on the organization’s own expense and capabilities.

Max: So let’s just say a few new busloads of families, maybe the country of origin is Venezuela, where the U.S. government actually has, I don’t even know what you would call it. It’s an agreement that is put in place to make sure that we single that population out specifically because we have some sort of understanding that there’s economic crisis, there maybe some political crisis there, and we’ve granted them some sort of status. So just using that example specifically, a busload of Venezuelan families arrives on the doorstep at the Port Authority in New York City. Where do they go? What happens next?

Marlene: Yeah, so for the most fortunate cases, there tends to be organizations already on the ground waiting for them and directing them where to go, giving them resources, telling them where the shelters are available for them. Some of the next steps, for example, the NYIC, along with some of our partners in Hispanic Federation and IARC, we also have had legal clinics to support people in filing for work permits, filing for their [Temporary Protected Status] TPS petitions and so on. So there’s usually organizations on the ground that are directing people to where shelters are, work clinics are and just having resources ready, whether that’s written—mostly written actually.

Max: So I think one of the misconceptions about—now if we go to the border, to the actual crossing, in the moment that they enter the United States, using that same busload example—there’s a misconception that there’s some giant opening at the border where people are just streaming across and then haphazardly finding their way across, into different counties and towns, and they’re being herded like cattle and stuck on buses. That’s really actually not the case.

I mean, because if they’re on buses and they’re coming into New York City and they are known, meaning somebody registered them at the border. That means that somebody presented themselves as seeking asylum and have registered, I guess with a federal agency, and that’s how we know they’re getting here? Is that how the line of communication goes? I’m trying to really understand what that journey looks like from a practical standpoint, from the family’s perspective.

Marlene: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So there are a couple of things here. So there are several ways of coming to the US. Some people can come through a port of entry, and there are some people who come between ports of entry. So let’s say like the Tijuana/San Diego border, like you make a line and then you present yourself and talk to a border agent. There are also people who might come in between ports of entry, so they’re not in a specific line, but rather; I guess what people generally know as like, the desert. There are also a lot of people who come by plane and then they might just present themselves there and ask for asylum.

I think something that gets lost in the conversation often is that asking for asylum as of right now, is completely legal. It’s part of a system internationally that protects vulnerable people. There have been very serious attempts to dismantle that system and actually criminalize that right to ask for asylum. But that’s a very long conversation that I’m happy to also get into.

But to answer your question, yes, anyone that presents themselves and talks to a border patrol officer telling them that they’re afraid for their lives, they have to have an interview with a federal agent. They go through what’s called a credible interview, and there are many steps to this process of asking for asylum. So 100% the federal government knows who is coming through and how many people.

That being said, a lot of people end in New York, because they might already have ties to the community here. They might have a cousin, or an uncle, or a friend that lives here. Also because New York City has a very long tradition of being multicultural and welcoming. So I actually think that it’s a good sign that people are coming to New York and knowing that this could be their new home, being that they’re very much ready to become part of our social fabric.

Max: So you mentioned the criminalization aspect. And I think it is a good thing for us to continue on that line of thinking, because if you’re not face to face with the surge in migration, and you are just absorbing the issue through the media landscape, there’s a sense that—of course you have one party right now that is basically building a national election platform, just as they have done in the past is nothing new, around fearmongering around a crisis.

So I want to make sure that we distinguish between the actual crisis, which is the sheer volume showing up and overwhelming service agencies, and the criminal justice system that may or may not be interacting with people when they get here. Is there an appreciable number of people, of migrants, coming into the country that do wind up interacting with the criminal justice system? And why might that be? What circumstances lead to that? Or is it really not happening? Is this really just conjecture and rhetoric?

Marlene: Yeah. So there are so many layers to that question, and I’m going to try to answer it as much as I can, but please ask me any follow-ups if I forget. I think first and foremost, something that I often think about is that there’s actually no like good and bad people when it comes—well, generally—but I don’t really follow the Republicans = bad, Democrats = good type of narrative for many reasons.

We are seeing that Republicans yes, have been very heavily been pushing for the criminalization of migrants, asylum seekers, even unaccompanied minors. But the Democrats have been, especially in this election cycle, also been playing very heavily into that playbook. Some of the proposals that they have been getting out are not really championing our community at all, but rather furthering this criminalization. So we have been really calling to people that are supposed to be our champions to actually stop acting like Trump had during 2016 because it has been really disturbing.

So that is the first thing that I wanted to mention. Then the second thing, in terms of like the narrative of criminality, I think most people might be better versed in terms of how Black communities are criminalized, Black and Brown communities are criminalized. I think a similar thing happens with immigrants as well, where there tends to be scapegoating of communities. We have Mayor Adams really putting a target on immigrants’ backs with his recent comments. And I apologize. I think that I totally lost my train of thoughts. If you want to edit that out, I can begin again [laughing].

Max: No you’re doing great because you’re reflecting what people are saying, that may or may not line up with the reality of what’s happening on the ground. But let’s stay on that for a moment because there’s a difference between scapegoating and then having actual policy that criminalizes behaviors or certain populations. And I think a great example of that might be stop and frisk. So we worked a long time to get rid of stop and frisk because we knew that it targeted specific populations to an extraordinary degree. And that’s one way where scapegoating and policy kind of meet in reality.

Where the immigrant population is concerned, we’ve seen images that blow up on TV and they’ll take a certain instance and then they’ll turn that into national news and say that this is endemic of everything that’s going on. In reality, my understanding is that’s not really the case of what’s happening. So my pointed question then is, do you find that there are immigrants being unfairly swept up into the criminal justice system to an overwhelming degree? Or is it business as usual right now, and in fact they’re just winding up in the social services system?

Marlene: Yeah. So I think there are a couple of things. I think there’s very real criminalization through policy. There’s also criminalization through narratives of the immigrant community. And then there’s also the fact that we should not be criminalizing our communities, whether they’re immigrants or not, but try to stay on the actual policy. In New York City, it’s actually really interesting. As I mentioned before, we have three decades of sanctuary city policies. And the fact that these narratives, with Mayor Adams saying that he wants to rescind that, that means that we are actually moving towards a point where immigrants are being more criminalized. They will be subject to additional punishment.

Often when we talk about sanctuary laws, we also talk about how, for someone who’s not a citizen going through the criminal justice system for example, they are punished twice. Because they have to go through the whole of their sentence if they have a sentence. And then after that, they also get punished by the immigration system.

So in New York City, for as long as three decades, we have been saying that the state should only be in charge of the state laws. And then we shouldn’t be collaborating with the federal.

There is also a lot of studies that say that jurisdictions with sanctuary laws are safer than jurisdictions without them. And there are less crimes per capita than jurisdictions without it. Also cities with more immigrants tend to be safer than those without them. So really we’re seeing that these narratives of immigrants bringing in crime are just completely unfounded and false.

Max: So that gets into a really good policy discussion about the concept of sanctuary cities. So, again, in my reading, my understanding is that there is no such thing as a sanctuary city as a legal doctrine. That’s not a thing. But it’s usually a group of policy initiatives that coalesce into this idea of a sanctuary city where you can find safe harbor for myriad reasons. The core of it in New York City—again just a spotlight on the city—the core of that seems to be the legal notion of right to shelter.

And I think that as you and I sort of move into the immediate discussion of the influx of migrants taxing city services and creating sort of a housing crisis and a shelter crisis, it’s that piece of the sanctuary city that is so vital to protecting people. The housing piece, the shelter piece. Not permanent housing, just a place to rest safely. A difference between an individual woman seeking shelter, an individual male seeking shelter and then families with children seeking shelter, and I know we have pathways to deal with each of those. Can you talk about the importance of just that concept alone, the right to shelter, and what that means and how important that is for immigrant families coming to New York?

Marlene: Yeah. So I will just add for the non-housing part and then I’ll talk a little bit about the housing part. I think another misconception is that the state, by having sanctuary laws, jurisdictions are not doing something that they’re supposed to. But as you mentioned, it’s not a legal doctrine, it’s just a specific set of laws aimed to protect our communities. In the case of New York City, all that it is is that after people have served their sentences on the criminal justice side, they will not be handed over to ICE. That is what makes New York City largely a sanctuary city, that they do not directly collaborate with ICE unless there’s a judicial warrant or something like that; which is what the Mayor is asking to rescind. He’s asking for localities to directly work with ICE in this way.

However, New York City has also been a pioneer in the shelter rule, for example. That is another thing that we’re also seeing rolled back. Right now we’re seeing exceptions being applied for migrants where there are 60 and 30 day rules or limitations on how long migrants specifically can stay in shelters. And that brings a whole array of problems. For example, for families whose children are going to school, if they have to after, I don’t know, 30 or 60 days, have to switch to a different shelter. That means that the kid is most likely going to have to switch schools as well, or have to have a very long journey or commute to their school.

And the same thing applies for adults as well. If we’re talking about self-sufficiency and autonomy as well, it’s very hard to keep a job when you are changing residents every 30 days, and where you have all of these rules of when you’re allowed to come and not come. So having proper housing for migrants is also a crucial piece in people being able to integrate into New York City. And by having these backwards limitations, hand in hand with the Mayor calling for more ICE collaboration, we’re seeing a very hostile environment for migrants.

Max: So let’s talk about the practical, internal discussions about coordinating between multiple agencies that has to occur in order to provide shelter and services to people that are coming to New York, brand new, and the homeless population that already exists. So we have a very large unhoused population. We’ve hit historic numbers sadly, over the past few years. I want to say that as of the end of the year in New York City, which for anybody not familiar—I think a lot of people outside of New York tend to think of New York City as Manhattan—but this is spread across the five boroughs. There are upwards of a hundred thousand people, still very hard to gauge, but still considered homeless in the city. And that is exclusive of migrant families coming in.

Now, when we talk about the influx of migrants, I think the number that the administration recently released was that they have processed upwards of 170,000 and 67,000 still remain. You can look at that as actually a success story in that, now more than 100,000 migrants have actually come in, been processed, been inside the system, found shelter, and moved on. So that’s actually a really good thing. But there are still 67,000 people that are in this sort of limbo on top of the 100,000 people who are unhoused at any given time.

So my understanding is that it is very difficult for agencies to coordinate, in the moment, who is going to be in need of a bed, who is going to be in need of a meal, who is going to be in need of perhaps medical attention. And then there’s the other ancillary, who’s going to school, who’s not, are we finding work and those other things. But just those core needs, where do you get involved? Where does NYIC, for example, get involved in helping to coordinate efforts between the multiple agencies that have to account for New York City’s existing extraordinary homeless population and the people that are seeking immediate shelter through migration?

Marlene: Yeah, so first of all, I want to just put out there, because I would be amazed if I don’t mention that what we’re seeing right now, it’s mostly an infrastructure crisis. This is something that advocates for unhoused people, immigrant advocates as well, have been calling for for years before this surge, before the summer. We know that there are thousands of empty office spaces across New York City. And if the city would’ve been actually working on adapting those for living, we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re now in. They should have acted years ago. And it’s really a failure of leadership. And it’s really enraging to hear the Mayor blame immigrants and vulnerable populations for failures of infrastructure and leadership.

But now to answer your actual question in terms of what the NYIC, what our role is. We work in several ways, one of which is, as I mentioned, we coordinate a lot of efforts. We don’t really provide a lot of direct services, but for example, we coordinate legal clinics so people can get their work permits, get their status, and as they get work permits they’re able to move out of the shelter system. Because honestly, no one wants to be in a shelter. People want homes and people want safety, which is why they came here to begin with.

In a different way however, we also do a lot of policy advocacy. So I am not our housing expert. My area of expertise is more detention and deportation as well as legal services. But we do have an in-house expert on housing and health. And we push for policies that will protect our communities at the city, state and sometimes federal level as well. So I would say it’s a combination of both on the ground coordination as well as pushing for policies that protect in the long term.

Max: Okay. So on the infrastructure issue, I do think that that’s a valid point. And that extends to more than just managing and absorbing an immigrant population for short-term, midterm, long-term, because we already have an affordable housing crisis and clearly we have a housing crisis period, because we have a large unhoused population. On the infrastructure side of things though, my understanding is that it’s—and I’m not trying to let this or prior administrations off the hook—but I do understand that we have given over most of the real estate in New York City to private interests. And to take a commercial facility as an example, retrofitting a commercial facility that has a central infrastructure, meaning the core of the building is where all the bathrooms are, and they don’t necessarily have showers, it’s just for regular bathroom facilities, because everything is meant to be on the exterior where the offices are, you can’t just put people there, much in the same way that hotels are not a great environment, as we’ve discovered for children.

They might be fine for an individual, but putting a family in a hotel really limits the amount of services required to help foster a healthy environment for a child. So there are no perfect scenarios yet because we have a private industry, a commercial industry that’s not willing to just hand over the keys to a building and allow the city to retrofit it, and who would pay for that anyway? So I agree with you that we have an infrastructure problem. I’m not sure where exactly to lay the blame other than this general sense of privatization that has occurred over multiple decades and just handing the keys over to commercial landlords. I mean, is that a fair assessment?

Marlene: I think that sounds right to me. As I mentioned, I’m not a housing expert, but what I do know is that the government in the city has very much focused on temporary solutions: 30 day, 60 day solutions. And some of our policy asks, for example, are for long-term voucher systems that actually allow people to live there for a year or longer. And it’s also way cheaper than just putting people in a shelter. And I have data, because again, I’m not an expert on this, but my colleagues are. A housing voucher for a family in a two-bedroom apartment is between $50 and $72 per night depending on the program and how many people there are. But right now we are seeing the city spending on average $383 per night in shelters.

Max: It sounds like New York.

Marlene: Yes, exactly. So it’s not only, yes, it’s a problem of infrastructure, it’s a problem of not being able to, or not being willing to make those investments early on. We’re seeing the consequences now that it’s, I think the city would save around—I’ll look at my data again—3 billion each year if they would’ve just made those sustainable.

Max: But Marlene, do you think that there would be pushback from let’s say the homeless services advocates who say, wait a minute, we’re going to give housing vouchers now to a migrant population coming in when we already have an unhoused population that’s blowing through any of the available beds that we have?

And that gets back to my question about how difficult and tricky it must be to coordinate between government agencies and the policy agencies, the non-governmental agencies like NYIC that exist on the outside trying to coordinate these efforts. It appears to me that because of the infrastructure issue that you acknowledged, that there is tension in these agencies and the homeless advocates are sitting out there saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if that’s an option, do it for everybody. So do you get that pushback? Does that tension really exist?

Marlene: I absolutely agree. Do it for everyone. I think one of the tensions that we see a lot, and beyond immigrant rights, I think generally human rights, is that there are a lot of conflicting asks and a general mentality of a zero sum. But really, when you strengthen the rights and protections for one group, you’re strengthening the rights and protections for all vulnerable groups. And the other way around as well. Like right now we’re seeing the limits on how much time migrants can stay in the shelter. So like 30, 60 day rules. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see that being extended to the general population as well, or limitations like that. I think we do, when we’re talking about housing for migrants, at least for me, it’s also talking about housing for everyone.

Migrants do tend to have a specific set of needs, like for example language needs and so on. But really what we are hoping for is that eventually it’s just a benefit for everyone. My particular area of focus, for example, is the extension of legal services for people going through deportation, who are in deportation proceedings. And I get that pushback as well of, why do immigrants get free lawyers when people who are going through like family court don’t always get that, or even tenant rights. And my answer is always, yes, we want that as well for you, and I really think that when one vulnerable group wins, everyone does, and we should be working together more in the expansion of rights instead of in opposition to each other. But the tension is there and it’s very real. And I think that is something that as a movement we should be working together in more collaboration and br more coordinated for sure.

Max: I’m going to switch gears for a second to talk about the practicality of dealing with different countries of origin. So my understanding, I had watched—I think it was NBC’s, Melissa Russo had really kind of broken this story, prior to it even being known that the Abbott administration was busing families into New York City. Just noticing that there were many, many new families and groups wandering around the city being dropped off at office building locations and not having any idea what to do next, or even how this happened. And that in the initial reporting, it seemed like the preponderance of families that were coming here were from Venezuela, which correlated with kind of an uptick in the political and economic crisis that was occurring in Venezuela.

But since that time, as you noted in the beginning, we’re seeing many, many different countries of origin. So it’s probably a good thing that we’re seeing an influx of Sudanese that are trying to escape the atrocities that are going on in Sudan right now. But how do you, from a practical standpoint, scale up to meet that population that has different dietary concerns, different language, different social structures and different norms? How do you meet the challenge of having a population come in that you weren’t aware was actually going to get here?

Marlene: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that is one of the wonderful things about living in New York City, which is already a city that has a very diverse population and a very diverse—this sounds like a contradiction—but a very diverse expertise, if that makes sense. So for example, in New York City some of our members are groups and organizations that have very narrow focus and very narrow service recipients.

So I mentioned Mixteca before, who is an organization that for many years have been working with people who have indigenous backgrounds from Mexico and Central America. So they have a lot of language expertise, they are familiar with the needs that they might have. Same is the case, for example, African Communities Together, who’s also an NYIC member. For many years they have been developing their expertise, they have been gathering resources, and they have been really meeting the demand in terms of languages, cultural competency and so on.

That is not to say that everything is perfect. And for example, one of my other colleagues here at NYIC, Taina and K’Sisay, they work specifically on a campaign for language access that is trying to develop a pipeline between the teacher—I’m not the expert on this campaign—but pretty much like a pipeline to get people who speak less frequent languages or languages that are not Spanish and French for example, or Portuguese, to be able to work for the government to have those skills. So it’s also about having very intentional efforts because New York City, we already have a lot of that expertise. It’s the matter of actually using and elevating those organizations and those people that have those skills, so they can use it professionally and to support immigrants that are just arriving.

Max: That’s interesting. Some of what I hear, when we go back to the physical experience of what people are going through right now, part of the response that New York City implemented was to create these large tent cities. I believe the first was on Randall’s Island, and then I think there’s a second one in Brooklyn. And they’ve been taking a brunt of the, not families from what I understand. but a lot of the single individuals that are coming across the border and through multiple pathways. And that the conditions there are deteriorating quite rapidly and it’s been a very difficult winter. Do you have boots on the ground in these places trying to determine the health and the mental wellbeing of people that have already actually probably gone through a relatively traumatic experience in even just getting here? Do you provide those types of services and try to keep an eye on people that are living in those conditions right now?

Marlene: So as I mentioned before, the NYIC is a place of a more coordinating role, we work with a lot of our members to do that type of work. And actually in my previous answer I should’ve mentioned QDEP, which is the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, because they are amazing and I think everyone should go support them. For example, some of their expertise and some of their work that they do on the ground around shelters, but also people who have been here for a number of years, they have a lot of knowledge on LGBTQ+ issues. Specifically, for example, providing necessary medications for transitioning or HIV and so on.

So, unfortunately what we have been seeing is that it is very much so, for civil society to react to this type of needs, we do have some efforts. I’m not the person that does that, I’m more of a policy person here at NYIC, but we do have coordinated efforts on the ground, including more on the legal services side, but also coordinating workshops and coordinating services for mental health or whatever needs arise.

Max: When we talk about policy and we talk about working with state and federal governments, I think you rightly noted that the Democratic Party might be taking a softer, rhetorical stance. But in practicality, some of the bills, even the most recent bill that was put across had some trap doors in it that were pretty dangerous for the immigrant population. And there were a lot of advocates looking at that saying, there’s no safe haven in either party right now, we just have a bad take on this. And one of the things that I’ve been saying recently, is that my fear over the next few months is that the Democratic Party in power right now from the executive perspective, is going to overcorrect and take a much harsher stance on border crossings in order to stave off defeat in November. So it’s sort of like frying pan into the fire.

In the event of a Trump second term, knowing that they’re running on this issue as probably the top issue in the campaign, I think that’s fair to say that at this point the border is the big issue. How do you prepare for that potential outcome. Are you having policy discussions internally? Are you creating and are you preparing for these outcomes?

Again I know this is a long-winded way of asking you this, but my impression is that the Democrat establishment might be harsh in this immediate, next few months in order to display some power. But the Republicans are looking to really execute on that power and change the scenario post election. So how are you thinking about this moment in time and preparing for either outcome come November? Are you concerned, are you worried?

Marlene: I am very concerned. I’m also very tired, because these issues are always—and I think for people that are listening to this and also generally following immigration conversations, it tends to be like, this is an emergency and then a day after, like now this is an emergency. And it’s like an ongoing state of emergency and attacks. And it is actually how it has been. It has been very concerning.

One of the things that we have been seeing, and I believe I’ve mentioned this, is the proposals are very permanent changes on the asylum system, or the qualification into law of programs that were before temporary, like remain in Mexico, which are things that we have known had very severe humanitarian consequences that are now being discussed as being permanent and codified into law. And this is not only by Republicans, this has been across the board.

We are preparing as best as we can. I often think about NYIC as being a statewide organization. Our focus is New York. Hence the NY of NYIC. However, we are also very aware that immigration tends to be very affected, it’s always going to be very affected by what’s going on at the federal [level]. And New York, for better or worse, also has a leadership role to play at the federal level. So we are very much engaged with what’s happening at the federal level, both for those reasons and also because a lot of our member organizations are not as aware of what’s going on at the federal level. So we’re acting as that bridge. So we are preparing, as most nonprofits are, we are always under resourced and understaffed. So we’re preparing as best as we can and trying to have a strategy in both cases.

But also, even if there is not a Trump administration, as we have been seeing, that doesn’t mean that our communities are safe necessarily. So we will continue working towards the safety of our communities. But just a very short answer, yes, I’m concerned, but we are not going to back down and we’re going to continue doing what we’ve been doing because our communities are worth it.

Max: So can you just explain to me in legal policy terms, what is a bad outcome? What is it that you’re trying to prevent from, I guess a legislative or an executive order perspective? What is a bad outcome, what does that look like?

Marlene: Yeah, so some of the provisions that we’ve been seeing that are very concerning and this has been—I think for someone who’s not in the weeds, it’s really hard to keep track, because, the border supplemental, for example, came through and it was really bad, but then it didn’t pass. But those same provisions are being recycled over and over again.

So what I’m about to speak about right now is not necessarily one policy proposal or one bill, but rather the pattern that we’re seeing, what our representatives are trying to push forward. So just clarifying that.

One of the things that we’re seeing is a proposal for an increase of detention. And not only increase of detention, but rather mandatory detention across the board. So for people who might be arrested, and that doesn’t mean charged just arrested, immediate detention.

People who are coming through—I don’t want to get too into the weeds, but there’s this term, mandatory detention, which is like people who have to be detained no matter what and they will not be released. There is no discretion there. That is being proposed to be expanded.

The standards for someone to qualify for asylum or to even begin the process of asylum, Republicans are proposing to really elevate those to a point where it will not really even be possible that most people that now have asylum could have asylum. We are seeing the indiscriminate expansion of ICE, like way more money to ICE, giving them more discretion. I think one of the things that is most concerning also is that there is a proposal to take the asylum system out of the courts. So someone that’s seeking asylum will never see a judge, and taking it into [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] USCIS. So it’s what we call asylum officers. So employees of USCIS making determinations of whether or not someone should get asylum.

Max: That’s a real thing that’s happening, that’s a proposal?

Marlene: That is a proposal. That’s part of the series of proposals that are being made and recycled over and over again.

Max: Was that part of the big January bill?

Marlene: No, that was part of the proposal for the budget supplemental that didn’t pass in February. We’re right now in a continued resolution. But we’re seeing Republicans introducing copycat bills to try to pass this right now.

Max: That is a substantial change of civil rights policy.

Marlene: Right. That’s why we are really concerned, because we are talking about completely destroying the asylum system and taking it out of the judicial system. So it is very concerning.

Max: Marlene, can you describe the difference between—again, just reflecting back some conversations, some discourse that you hear through the news media or even anecdotally when people say, hey, I have no problem with people who are seeking asylum because they’re in danger. What I have a problem with is people that are coming across because they think they can just improve their life here. We don’t want those people because they’re not coming here fairly or legally. Can you address that type of pushback? What are the talking points around that? Because I hear that all the time.

Marlene: Yeah, well, I do hear that all the time as well. And I think what people might fail to understand is that we don’t have a fair immigration system. People often say like, get in line. There is no line for people to get in. And much less so now that we’re seeing these types of attacks, like it will become even harder.

My personal belief—and that doesn’t necessarily reflect what the NYIC beliefs say—what I believe also is that I think that we should be welcoming and caring people who are going to be contributing to the wonderful city that New York is, regardless of if someone is being persecuted, 100% we should be caring for people’s safety. But I think we should be welcoming people that are just trying to be part of the city, even if it’s just for economic reasons. Because honestly, immigrants contribute so much economically to New York City, to the country, but particularly New York City. One third of our business owners are immigrants. We bring billions in revenue and in tax income as well. And that’s billions with a B. I often find it really interesting when people are upset by immigrants coming for economic reasons, when we benefit so much when they come for economic reasons as well.

Max: Is there a limit? I come at this from a very progressive angle, but I think it’s always fair to ask those questions. It can’t be unlimited. Our participation in climate change, in destroying economic circumstances and environmental circumstances around the world is, I think, pretty well documented. And so there’s an argument that says that we should do whatever we can to help absorb populations because we’ve kind of contributed to the decline of many societies.

That being said, there are practical aspects just like from an infrastructure standpoint, like you say, like, we all have to be able to flush the toilet and expect that it goes somewhere. And we have [only] so much food and so many roads and so many places for people to go and beds and houses and schools and classrooms and all those things. So I mean, how do you respond when people say, yeah, but I mean, at some point there’s got to be a limit, right?

Marlene: Yeah. Usually what I respond to that is with data about Mexican immigrants. So there are more Americans coming to Mexico than Mexicans coming to the U.S.

Max: Is that right?

Marlene: Yes, that’s right. And this became worse when the border became stronger, because most Mexicans before this like demographic changed in terms of who came and whatnot, came to work for a period of time and then they left. And then they wanted to just be with their families and so on. And right now, well, we can get into how many Americans are in Mexico City at another time.

Max: Oh, I know. And they’re not happy about it [laughing].

Marlene: No, they’re not [laughing]. But yeah, we can talk about the impacts of gentrification and different things. And again I don’t want to gloss over the fact that it’s also been because Mexico has different agreements with the U.S. and whatnot. But when thinking about, like, is there a limit? I always try to think about how, for some people, they do stay here. They want to, they set roots here. They live the rest of their lives here and this is home. But some people might go back whenever their country conditions stabilize. Some people might go back whenever their economic conditions stabilize as well. I do think it’s a little bit of American exceptionalism when we think that everyone wants to come because this is the greatest country in the world. And I don’t particularly think that’s true.

Max: You brought up something really important that I haven’t heard in the discussion recently, at least. And we had done an episode about two years ago on sort of the mischaracterizations of immigration policy. And one of the things that we leaned on was the Clinton-era criminalization of immigrant status in the United States. And something that I hadn’t thought about before, until we’d done the research, is not criminalizing your existence here but criminalizing it on the other side. Meaning if you’re found to be here as an undocumented person, you would then be subject to deportation, and then you can’t return for five years. That was an enormous shift in cultural and economic norms because of the pattern of migration that you just spoke about.

The fact that we always had a give and take with Mexico in particular, but other Central American countries for sure, and then it almost created the reverse incentive. So if you came here to work, I better not leave. I might not get back. And if I get found trying to cross going the other way and they send me out, I’ve got to wait five years or I could wind up in prison in the United States coming back. It was such an obvious outcome that people would just try to surge and stay rather than go back and forth. But I don’t hear anybody talking about fixing that piece of it. Is that ever in the discussion?

Marlene: Yeah, that’s a great question and I actually want to correct myself. I meant to say there are more Mexicans leaving than coming in. But the problem with Americans in Mexico City still stands. But I just wanted to correct myself there because I don’t want to be saying inaccurate things.

And then in terms of your question, I think in the immigrant rights space, it is seen as a tipping point. And that’s why a lot of immigrant rights professionals or advocates are very, very critical about Clinton because he actually, it’s five, ten or life punishment that people cannot come back. So it’s not only five years, it could be ten or for life you can never come back. Also under his administration, a lot of prisons expanded, there were a lot of built up prisons, but that also extended to immigration detention centers or prisons.

I think honestly we have been so exhausted by putting out fires that I haven’t seen a very strong effort to tackle that. There might be that I’m not aware of—

Max: That’s interesting.

Marlene: Because I’m very focused on putting out fires. There are very strong movements towards legalization, like the registry campaign or a pathway to citizenship for DACA or TPS and whatnot. But to my knowledge, I haven’t seen something with real momentum come out. But I agree. I think it will make a huge difference, because it’s one of the many ways in which immigration has become from a civil—like technically it is a civil procedure, but it is so entangled with the criminal justice system now, or at least like treated as a criminal thing; a lot of people in their minds conflate a lot of these narratives and they equal immigrants with criminals.

A lot of people think that if someone is undocumented, they must 100% have committed a crime, which is not necessarily true. A lot of people fall out of status. And that is not a crime, that is a civil thing. And that is not to say that we should be throwing people under the bus who do have criminal histories. But I think it’s just a very large misconception of how immigration actually works.

Max: The people that fall out of status, my understanding is that the issue with people falling out of status is that it suddenly disqualifies them for a lot of normal life activities: car insurance, a mortgage. Suddenly a lot of these things that might have been within reach or just doable to fit into the economic norms that we have in this country to kind of keep the engine running. That when somebody falls out of status or they’re here or they’re undocumented, you always hear the stories of, oh, some guy, an undocumented worker hit my car and they weren’t insured obviously. So my insurance company had to pick it up and is suing somebody, and now no one will ever see the money, blah, blah, blah.

But that’s a real thing. And I think that’s also one of the dangers of having such an understaffed and underfunded system, where people can’t simply and easily renew. I take your point that we’re so busy putting out fires that there’s just nobody minding the store and thinking logically and critically from a humanistic, but also pragmatic economic standpoint, that it’s so much easier and beneficial to just renew that person’s application to work here. Try to get them a pathway to citizenship. They’re here, they’re doing the work, they’re contributing to society. They might not have a mortgage, but they’re paying somebody rent, and that person is paying taxes on their home with the money that they’re getting from rent. It all works. But we have such procedural barriers to allowing it to work to the extent that it would benefit everybody.

And it’s one of those frustrating situations where somebody—I think the anecdotal fight always supersedes the practical. Meaning that guy was undocumented, he hit my car, everybody needs to get out of the country. Or, this person is taking the spot of somebody sleeping in a homeless shelter without asking a question: why do we have so many homeless people? So all of these things tend to bubble up. And it is, to your point, originally, it’s really easy to scapegoat the others, the people that just got here and say, you’re taking somebody’s spot, go away, without realizing that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Marlene: Yeah. 100%. I think there is an intentional pitting against each other that is happening. I often like to remind people, one thing that undocumented immigrants can do, or anyone, regardless of status can do, is pay taxes. And a lot of people do. But I should also mention that while it has been true that at the federal level, not a lot has moved—I mean, there’s like the odd bill here and there that moves, the most recent one is related to taxes and tax credit. That seems to be the ones that move.

The state has such fertile ground to protect the rights of their residents or their constituents, whether they have citizenship or not. And for example, to your point of driving and safety, New York State passed, the Green Light campaign. This was before my time. And the NYIC was in the front of that, which pretty much is what allows people, regardless of status, to get a driver’s license here. So undocumented people can have a license here, and it’s better and it’s safer for everyone to have a license while they’re driving. We’re also working on—

Max: I don’t know, my kids both have licenses and they drive and it’s not safer for anybody [laughing]. So anyway, continue.

Marlene: I do not have a license, but because I don’t know how to drive and that’s also safer for everyone, especially in the city [laughing]. But that is all to say that there is a lot of work being done at the state and local levels. There have been, not only here, not only in New York, but also for example, California passed a law to extend medical to people regardless of their status. So undocumented people can have access to insurance right now, and there is no age limit. [Well] there are, it’s like a patchwork of different laws, [but] in a practical sense, there aren’t. So there is a lot of work that can be done.

I think while I have been very disappointed with the federal work, which is a large chunk of what I do professionally, the states have been at the forefront of protecting their communities and really recognizing that immigrants are part of who they are, and their residents, and states, what they are. So it’s been really encouraging to see them protecting immigrants, human and civil rights.

Max: Alright. Last question before I let you go. What are you working on right now that gives you some optimism, and that you’re really taking some pride in that there’s some momentum on?

Marlene: That is a wonderful question, because I think that especially in the immigrant rights space, we tend to be again, putting out fires and just really sad about attacks and whatnot. But at the NYIC, we have, usually I believe, about five campaigns going on, five state campaigns going on. And I really like them all. My particular campaigns are the Access to Representation Act and the New York for All Act, both of which are trying to expand rights to immigrants. And I am not allowed to pick favorites, so I’m not going to do that. I’ll just talk a little bit about both.

The Access to Representation Act gives me a lot of hope because that is an area where we have been winning a lot over the past year. So the Access Representation Act, what it’s trying to do is to pretty much guarantees the right to counsel to anyone going to deportation proceedings, whether they are detained or not; because right now people who are going to the petition proceedings, they do not have the guarantee of an attorney. They don’t have the right to an attorney. So if they can afford one, they do have to represent themselves against a government attorney.

So I mean, I went to grad school and everything, but I cannot imagine myself representing myself against like a trained attorney. And that’s what we’re asking people who might not even dominate the language yet, or understand the system yet to do. And over the past few years, we haven’t been able to pass that law. Hopefully this is the year. But what we have been able to do is to win money for that purpose, for the purpose of legal services. So two years ago we got $20 million, this past year we got $60 million. And this year we’re hoping we get $150 million for legal services, but also building infrastructure, which has been a recurring theme in this conversation. It’s really important that we’re making long-term investments.

And then New York For All, we also kind of touched on this, is a campaign that will pretty much prohibit the state from collaborating with ICE, and [will] allow people in New York to really live without fear if they have to talk to the police, if they’re stopped for a traffic reason, if they are victims of domestic violence or whatnot.

And the reason why I really like these campaigns is because they have a very strong community engagement component. So we have lobby days and we organize, for example, for the ARA, we had a booth and it was Valentine’s Day themed, and it was like, don’t break our hearts. And it was just beautiful to bring people from all over the state to Albany. And it was really encouraging to see people demanding for their rights to be expanded. So I think, yes, I love my campaigns, but what I love the most and what gives me the most hope is to see people walking the house of Albany, demanding for things, asking for things that they believe in and strengthening their rights.

Max: I’m going to let you get away with using beautiful and Albany in the same sentence.

Marlene: Fair [laughing].

Max: I lived upstate for a while, so I get to make that joke. But this has been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate it. If our listeners have follow-up questions or responses, which they always do, I’ll make sure to aggregate them and send them in so that you can have a voice in response to them, because people do have a lot of very well intentioned and meaningful questions about this because of the confusion that is often on display, again, in the media landscape and then of course, anecdotally. So you’ve helped clear up a lot of things for me today. I’m sure there will be follow-up questions, but I really just wanted to thank you for your time.

Marlene: Yeah, thank you so much for hosting this conversation. And yeah, let me know if you have any questions, folks should feel free to go to our website. I can also send you a couple of book recommendations if you’re interested in the crimmigration part of it. I’m always happy to be a resource.

Max: That’s awesome. Thanks so much for your time today, Marlene.

Marlene: Thank you.

Welcome to Part Two in our series, “Over the Borderline.” In Part One we spoke with Marlene Galaz from the New York Immigration Coalition about the influx of migrants into New York City and the pressure it has placed on city agencies. In today’s episode, we head to the border and below to examine the root causes and circumstances that factor into immigration patterns, from economic opportunity to asylum. Max speaks with Maureen Meyer from The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a D.C. based organization that advocates for human rights in the Americas. Meyer serves as WOLA’s Vice President for Programs, working with senior staff to develop policy priorities and strategies to advance human rights and social justice in Latin America.

---

“They’re sending prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists—the worst they have in every country. All over the world, this isn’t just in South America, they’re coming from the Congo, from Yemen, from Somalia, from Syria, they come from all over the world. China. They, many of them, are military age, which is a very strange. You don’t see very many women coming in and you see a lot of them coming in they’re about 19 to 25, 26 years old and especially from China, we have 29,000 over the last few months, 29,000 from China and they all seem to be uh perfectly fit for military service. Ready for military service. It’s crazy. This is country-changing. It’s country-threatening and it’s country-wrecking. They have wrecked our country.”
-Former President Donald Trump

I recently listened to WNYC’s new feature Suds and Civics where the host talks politics with New Yorkers in laundromats to find out what’s on people’s minds. They were talking about immigration and the two people they interviewed perfectly encapsulated the complexity of this issue and their conversations serve as a useful bridge from our first episode that centered on New York City.

The first conversation was with a Colombian woman who migrated several years ago to the U.S. In Spanish she expressed her admiration for Donald Trump and said there were too many new people trying to get into the U.S. The next interview was with a Salvadoran woman who lamented the way that migrants were denigrated in the national media.

Immigrants aren’t monolithic. And neither are the countries they come from. From economic policies and political parties to the individuals and families they impact, it’s impossible and irresponsible to reduce the immigration narrative to bumper sticker terms like “open borders,” “migrant crime” and “catch and release.”

For example, here’s a twist most people probably haven’t considered. A former White House economist named Ernie Tedeschi published a report recently that found the post-pandemic influx of immigration responsible for at least 20% of the increase in U.S. GDP. But wait, it gets better. Another Brookings report claims that the surge in migrant workers helped close the hiring gap, which in turn likely helped suppress inflationary pressures. Essentially, more people filling low wage jobs and curtailing the need to increase wages. Taken together, these economists are essentially saying that one of the key reasons we have outperformed the entire world in terms of reining in inflation and growing GDP figures is the increase in immigration.

There’s a lot to unpack there. There’s also a lot for both sides of the political aisle to like and hate about these proclamations. I mean, if you’re a Republican you hate that immigrants are contributing to growth but you have to love the access to cheap labor domestically. Dirty little secret time. If you’re a Democrat it’s the ultimate double edged sword. On the one hand, the Biden administration looks completely disorganized on border policy and that’s biting them in the ass right now. On the other hand, if immigrant workers are helping to cool inflation and lead to a faster recovery then…well…Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s not like Biden can take to the podium and say, “I know they’re undocumented but at least you get to abuse their labor and they spread their low wages around on consumer products.” It’s a bad look all around.

This is just one of the complicating factors the major political parties are running up against or running with, depending upon the strategy to win the election. In any normal off-election year, the volume of migrant activity would be of grave concern. It’s unmanageable in the best of circumstances and we haven’t exactly created anything remotely close to the best circumstances. In fact, our immigration policy is so fundamentally flawed it’s hard to envision anything but a complete reimagining of the process having any sort of impact.

But in typical American fashion, we only focus on the optics and the obvious. Of course, there’s a much bigger part of this story and that’s the stories of the migrants themselves and the countries they’re fleeing. Sure, there are passing references to root causes of migration and some news outlets will go the extra mile to contextualize what’s occurring below the southern border. But inevitably the more regional and immediate sensationalism wins the prime slot at the top of the hour.

This may come as a surprise, but the people coming across the border are coming from countries that have been around for a long time. Real places with their own economies, political economies, cultures, traditions and values. And they’re not coming here because the streets are fucking paved with gold. Sure, some are coming for opportunistic reasons to better their financial circumstances. But many are coming to be with family. Or they’re fleeing persecution, environmental disasters, political instability or life threatening danger. Every asylum seeker, every migrant worker, every family, every individual has a story. And every country of origin does as well.

Moreover, the United States isn’t always the end game. Sometimes it’s a stop on a journey. Perhaps they were turned away from their first choice. There are countries in Latin America that have a much larger surge in immigration for all the same reasons. But it’s not like us to look past ourselves to ask what’s happening in other places. And that’s fair. That’s human nature, and certainly American nature. So this isn’t an attempt to chastise or criticize our collective myopia on this issue. It’s an attempt to contextualize the issue so that we can take a wider and clearer view of the root causes of immigration and better position ourselves to find solutions and restore some balance to the conversation.

---

Re-Humanizing the Dehumanized

Isolating immigration to simply a border crisis story robs us the ability to view the tributaries that flow from it. Scratch the surface and you’ll get to political and economic policies that have a broad impact. Ours and those of our neighbors and partners.

• Climate change. Neoliberal economic policies. Affordable housing shortages.
• Labor and taxes. Human trafficking. Exploitation and wage theft.
• Welfare and criminal justice reform. Foreign policy. Trade agreements.
• Industrialization, mining, fossil fuel extraction, agriculture, deforestation.
• Drug cartels and criminal syndicates.

The list goes on and on but at its core, immigration is a human story. Why would someone risk life and limb to uproot themselves or their families to take part in a wholly unfamiliar culture? Ask yourself what could happen in your life that would prompt you to leave behind all that you’ve ever known—language, music, culture, work, loved ones, the food you love and the streets you know. The answer is likely found in the multitude of life altering issues we listed above. Maybe one of them, perhaps a confluence.

To understand the nature of migration, it’s important to use a shared language. To level set on definitions and a little history. The goal today is to set the table from a political and policy perspective. Then, in the third installment, we’ll talk about economic trends and models that undergird the larger narrative.

In a way, we’re working backwards from our New York City immigration episode and how an influx of migrants challenged a proud sanctuary city and brought what is typically considered a border story to the streets of the most famous city in the world. A situation that pit governors and states against one another and forced the gateway to the New World, proud home to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to confront uncomfortable realities. Realities that bent social services but didn’t buckle them. Realities that have tested the moral and ethical resolve of one of the most diverse communities on the planet, but haven’t broken its spirit.

So let’s level-set with a little Q&A.

Where are people coming from?

The largest inflow to the United States through ports of entry as reported by the Customs and Border Protection agency, or CBP, remains Mexico. In 2023, the number of encounters (we’ll talk about that in a moment) with Mexican immigrants was 717,000. That close to, but still greater than, the total number of encounters from what’s referred to as the “Northern Triangle” in Central America—Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

A handful of others for context we have Venezuela at 266,000, Colombia at 160,000, Cuba at a surprising 142,000, Nicaragua 99,000, and Haiti and Peru each with 76,000. Other countries made up about 389,000 for a total of 2.4 million “encounters.”

Importantly, the term “encounters” is a little opaque. And I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here, but it’s important to briefly explore what this means. These are people who have a documented interaction with border patrol. Hold that thought. There is obviously another subset of migrants that evade authorities and do not self report at the border. Now, liberal media likes to overlook this while it’s all conservative media tends to harp on. But because we have robust census data, boots on the ground with agencies that service undocumented people, and technology to track movement, we know that the percentage of purely illegal crossings are far lower than these so-called encounters.

Another aspect of the counting here is that there are those who make multiple attempts for a variety of reasons, which we dig into a bit more in our interview today. And this is on top of what officials estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million undocumented people living in the United States in some state of citizenship limbo.

How do we have so much information on border crossings?

This is actually an interesting question that itself dismantles some of the primary talking points about the crisis. If you casually digest mainstream media, it’s easy to come away with the impression that waves of humanity have toppled fences and are storming the country with guns, knives and bats and have ill intent toward us.

That would be the white American patriots on January 6.

Look, this happens in certain areas. There are people undertaking incredibly dangerous journeys to cross the border illegally and undetected. But again, we have a lot more information from census data and technology that paints a slightly different picture. The vast majority of migrants are presenting themselves to border patrol agents and applying for asylum.

What’s different today is that they register through what’s called the CBP One app, which has a website companion immigrants can use to register with the federal government. According to the Immigration Council, “CBP One users must provide email addresses, create passwords, and—in some cases—enter phone numbers to create their Login.gov accounts. Once users have created their Login.gov profiles, they can enter information into the app and access its different functions based on each user’s particular needs.”

The rollout of the app went as smoothly as Obama’s healthcare exchange rollout. And that’s the least problematic part of the program, which we’ll get into later. But this is how we have so much data and information on asylum seekers, their whereabouts and application status. The important takeaway here is that most people aren’t trying to hide from the government or sneak across the border. In other words, they’re following the legal pathway of migration. The whole notion of illegal immigration is a tired trope. The United States is an asylum nation with very specific rules and decades of precedent that most immigrants are abiding by. So when you’re in a discussion with someone who says, “I don’t mind immigrants, I just think they should come here legally,” that’s what they’re doing.

How does Title 42 explain the difference between Trump and Biden’s approach to the border?

Title 42 is an old provision dating back to 1944 that allows the government to expel someone who had recently been to a country where there was a communicable disease outbreak or concern. The Trump administration enacted it at the start of the pandemic, which seriously curtailed the number of people entering the country. It remained in force in the first two years of the Biden administration even as COVID testing became available at the border, but enforcement was gradually eased on a case by case basis. For example, Biden crafted an exclusion to Title 42 for Ukranians seeking asylum at the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.

Alternately, Biden also weaponized Title 42 to expel Venezuelans to Mexico for a brief period, though he was heavily criticized for it. The provision was lifted in May of 2023 around the time that CBP One was publicly released. The confluence of a shaky app rollout, the lifting of Title 42 and a worsening of the situation in Venezuela caused the unprecedented surge in asylum seekers in 2023 that put border towns and the Biden administration in a tight spot. According to Human Rights Watch, “Over 440,000 Venezuelans crossed the Darién Gap between January 2022 and October 2023.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the post-Title 42 era has significantly altered the reality on the ground.

“In lifting the Title 42 public health order that permitted nearly 3 million expulsions over slightly more than three years, the administration issued an innovative set of policies seeking to discourage irregular crossings and encourage scheduled entries at ports of entry, using the CBP One app to schedule an appointment. This carrot-and-stick approach, which includes a rule that presumes people ineligible for asylum if they cross the border illegally, is part of a new chapter in border enforcement: A strategy to disincentivize irregular crossings while incentivizing orderly arrivals by creating or expanding access to legal pathways. These pathways include new and expanded immigration parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, permitting temporary stays in the United States and access to work authorization for more than 240,000 people to date. Applicants must have a U.S. sponsor and apply outside of the country for authorization to present themselves at a port of entry in the U.S. interior.”

We’ll talk more about this in our interview with Maureen Meyer from WOLA, but I find it fascinating how little of this context makes it into the public discourse. Like so many other Biden initiatives, there is a ton of movement on policy and people who are extremely committed to trying, failing and adjusting but the numbers bely the effort. And perhaps so much so that it will contribute to Biden’s undoing in November.

---

Below the Borderline

Before we dig into our discussion with Maureen, I think it’s important to speak briefly to what’s happening in the countries of origin. We’ll unpack some historical “whys” and “wherefores” in the next episode, particularly from an economic and trade perspective, but from a purely political standpoint it takes two to tango.

The political factors that shape migration decisions in Venezuela are wholly separate from the countries that comprise the Northern Triangle. And even within those three nations, there are vastly different political circumstances. We’ve spoken about Bukele at length already and how his heavy handed war on local gangs has severely curtailed the number of people looking to flee the country. But is all what it seems? The Bukele effect has spread to South America with President Noboa of Ecuador taking a page out of Bukele’s book. There’s a terrific piece in the Baffler that describes the Ecuadorian predicament that led Noboa down this path.

“Between 2009 and 2017, there was a reorganization of the cocaine trade that made Ecuador’s ports the principal point of departure for the drug, both for Mexican cartels shipping to the United States and for Albanian cartels selling in Europe… The principal organized crime groups in Ecuador were born in the 1990s as common street gangs, but in the early 2000s, when large international cartels landed in the country and money laundering was facilitated by the dollarization of the economy, they began to specialize in protecting kingpins and trafficking drugs under the aegis of the cartels.”

The piece continues by noting, “The shadow of Nayib Bukele is hovering over Ecuador as over all of Latin America as a harbinger of stable and lasting political hegemony. And Noboa is betting on it.”

In Argentina, hyperinflation and consistent fiscal mismanagement paved the way for Javier Milei and his wildly libertarian world view. How that ends is anyone’s guess but whatever Argentina was doing before sure wasn’t working. Of course, there’s the political turbulence in big brother Brazil that mirrored the January 6 fiasco in the United States. Except they actually pressed charges against Bolsonaro for trying to overthrow the government instead of giving him a chance to run it again. The re-emergence of Lula, though a more pragmatic and corporatist Lula thus far, has led to a realignment with democratic socialist Xiomara Castro in Honduras who herself re-established ties with Venezuela.

The point of this isn’t to name drop and fact dump but to reveal the vast differences between political parties and issues in Latin America. And that doesn’t even touch on the Caribbean nations such as Haiti and Cuba that together accounted for more than 200,000 encounters at the border. When you consider population size and the difficult journey from island nations to the southern border, this is an astonishing number.

To break this all down further and provide some incredible insight, I sat down with Maureen Meyer from WOLA. Maureen is an absolute encyclopedia and really helped clarify both U.S. policy in the LAC region and the conditions within the LAC nations.

---

Max: Maureen, thank you so much for joining us today on UNFTR. We appreciate you taking the time.

Maureen: My pleasure.

Max: So I found it interesting that the roots of WOLA actually can be found in something that we’ve covered before, which is the original 9/11, the Chilean coup in 1973. This is primarily a socioeconomic show, and we do a lot of work talking about the neoliberal experiment over the last 50 years and the results of that, particularly through the work of the Chicago School of Economics and how that has impacted foreign policy, domestic policy, etc.

So I think it’s just an interesting place for us to start to talk about the roots of WOLA and how the organization got involved as the bridge to Washington for the LAC nation. So if you could just kind of give us a little bit of the origin story and backstory to WOLA, that would be great.

Maureen: Sure, and actually we are celebrating obviously our 50th anniversary because the 50th anniversary of the coup was last September 11th. And that, as you said, led to the origins of WOLA in part because there were, in this case, religious workers, volunteers and others in Chile at the time who saw firsthand the impact of the coup on human rights, on their friends in Chile, and realized pretty quickly the impact of the U.S. support for the Pinochet regime was not getting to U.S. policymakers in terms of what that meant for human rights.

So the massive abuses that we saw in the aftermath of the coup in terms of disappearances, torture, executions, and the U.S. role in all of that; the U.S. active support for the Pinochet regime and other military dictatorships that were flourishing in parts of Latin America at the time. So WOLA was really created to serve, to bring, to work with partners in the region and bring those concerns and those policy proposals to U.S. policymakers here between the U.S. Congress and the administration. And that’s clearly evolved. In the years between the Central America decade in the ‘80s of war and the U.S. supporting and training death squads to, you know, I would say more recent years, which is much more on the war on drugs and the impact of security cooperation in different countries in Latin America, but certainly really looking to work with partners in the region to bring their voices, their concerns, their priorities to our government here.

Max: But it seems like in your role as well—and I’m looking specifically at some of your writings and some of the interviews that you’ve done—that you actually have a focus within those countries as well. So it seems to be more than just advocacy with a glorified lobbying organization in D.C. to bring forward the causes of LAC nations. But you’re actually doing work on the ground in Latin America. Is that accurate to say?

Maureen: Yeah, and I think none of our work is really just WOLA on our own. We rely a lot on partnerships with local human rights organizations, local activists, academics—different actors—to really influence and inform what we do. We do travel quite frequently to Latin American countries to meet with partners on the ground to do, in the case of migration, field research. So looking at border regions and understanding what those dynamics look like, talking to migrants and asylum seekers themselves, and then bringing that information to the U.S. government, but also to how we do our research and advocacy. And so I think that is somewhat unique, that we really ground our work on partnerships and what people on the ground are telling us about what they’re seeing, and how we can bring them to actually speak sometimes to U.S. policymakers here in D.C.

Max: As an aside, I always find it fascinating to see the work that NGOs are doing in lieu of what you would imagine governments are doing. The reason that I got to you actually is because we interviewed Marlene Galaz from the New York Immigration Coalition. And she is a big fan of your work and the interviews that you’ve given, because you’re able to really contextualize the migrant crisis from a way that impacts the work that they do. And so you see this sort of cascading nature of partnerships to carry communication, but also maybe streamline policy to help people get on board.

And that’s stuff that we normally think is just government activity and people aren’t involved in it, but it really does take so much to try and coordinate efforts to represent such a significant part of the world. So in the work that you do—what’s interesting about the time that we’re in right now, and I’m curious about how you and your organization are viewing the migration crisis, the border crisis. Are you surprised at the level of attention that it is getting in this election cycle? Is this different, in some way, than your experience?

Maureen: I think certainly it’s gotten, I would say, an unprecedented level of attention. And the media feeds into that right, like, how do you frame what is happening at the border, including calling it a crisis? It’s really not a crisis as much as an administrative challenge of, how can the U.S. more effectively process people coming and provide them with pathways to find shelter in the United States to connect them to where they want to go, so it doesn’t look like you’re overwhelming a local government or a local border community, for example.

The media certainly has played a role in that. I mean, the reality is there is a significant number of people that have been crossing into the United States in record numbers. And not only that, but from countries that wouldn’t be considered traditional migration. And I think that’s important to look at in terms of how much migration flows have changed since we started this work in 2010, which was at the time high levels of migration, but mostly Mexican migration and primarily for economic reasons and mostly single individuals; single male, women, people coming here either for work or for family reunification, right? People had been deported from the United States and were trying to desperately get back to their loved ones in the country.

And what we’ve seen since then is 2012, ‘13, ‘14, a real shift to having high levels of migration from Central America. We can remember the unaccompanied migrants that started to come also for family reunification reasons. Their parents had fled the civil wars in Central America earlier and are now trying to bring their children here to be with them, to what we see now, which is yes, a significant number of Mexicans and Central American migrants from Northern Central America coming, but also migrants from throughout the hemisphere: Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, you could name many others. And a number of what you can term extra continental migrants, migrants from Africa, Asia, Central Europe. We met someone on the border in Honduras from Uzbekistan. And I think a lot of nationalities are starting to use Latin America as a route to get to the United States and then present themselves at the border, mostly requesting protection.

Max: Do you consider it a crisis?

Maureen: I think it is something that needs to be managed better, but I don’t think we would term it a crisis. If there’s a crisis in the United States on immigration, it’s that the system is broken, that there has not been the investment that we need to create a more effective system that can go through the backlog of almost 3 million pending cases. And that looks at this not just from a migration point of view, but also how do you support people that want to reunite with their families here, or to address the labor needs that the United States has. And so I think it’s not necessarily a crisis as much as not having the resources, and then not allocating and prioritizing the resources necessary to address it that way.

And let alone the fact that we still have 10, 11 million undocumented people in the United States that have not had any real discussion of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress for over a decade.

Max: So I’m glad you made a distinction between the patterns of migration and the rationale for migration over the decades, because I think that there’s a great level of confusion about the reasons. And we’ll talk about root causes in a moment, because I think that’s an important piece of certainly what the Biden administration is attempting to address, for better or for worse, with shortcomings here and there.

When we talk about the reasons and the pathways for migration, people coming to this country, can you sort of give a very general framework and an understanding for people about, I guess, how people get registered at the border, CBP1, the different avenues for registering people; because if you’re just a casual observer of media, I think the feeling is there are certain parts of the border, they’re just wide open, and hundreds of thousands of people are just streaming across and we have no idea where they went to. Which is really not the case. There is actually a system in place. And I imagine that people are getting through that haven’t actually gone through a process and are untraced and untracked. But is it the case that the preponderance of people that come in are actually known?

Maureen: I think for what we know, yes. I mean, if you look at CBP numbers, those numbers that they release every month are the numbers of known encounters they call them, of people that they have encountered, either who have presented themselves at the ports of entry, or who turned themselves into Border Patrol somewhere in the desert in Arizona or brushland in Texas. So people that are actively approaching U.S. agents to ask for asylum, in these cases in the United States.

And so I think, what does this look like on the Mexican side? And I think it is still somewhat chaotic—maybe not chaotic—disorganized, and with a huge backlog. So if you look at the current policy, which, the one legal way for an asylum seeker to come to the United States is mostly through getting lucky and having the ability to make an appointment through the CBP1 app, which has been known to be very flawed in terms of facial recognition, particularly for African migrants. But language barriers, if you don’t speak Spanish, English, or Creole, they’re sort of out of luck, or hopefully you can find a service provider that can help you make the appointment and hopefully have a good enough phone to make the appointment.

So if you are lucky enough to get an appointment, there’s only 1,450 appointments available every day. So you’re thinking the number of people coming wanting to seek protection, I’d say it certainly does not match that.

Max: Maureen, what do these appointments look like? What happens? Who are they speaking with?

Maureen: You’re in an app. It’s an application on your phone that you process, you put your photo in, everything. And then if you’re lucky, you get an appointment and it says you need to present yourself at the port of entry six months from now, sometimes, to enter the United States. The application, the app on the phones work anywhere from Mexico City northward. So you can’t be in Central America and make an appointment. You have to be at least in Mexico City. The idea of geolocation, the phone knows where you are. So that would be the right way currently. But what that means is that if you can’t get an appointment or you feel you can’t be waiting six months in very dangerous, oftentimes Mexican border towns—for example, we just issued a report on the high level of kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo, for example, and in Tamaulipas, which is bordering Brownsville, Texas. I mean, there’s a lot of challenges for people.

So what happens is the other sort of ways people decide to cross. One, you may approach a port of entry and get an exception, get paroled in with a level of coordination between Mexican authorities and the U.S., particularly vulnerable groups. So that’s another venue. It’s also a wait list. People wait to try to desperately get in without making the application appointment either because they couldn’t or they can’t wait: medical emergencies, critically vulnerable populations. And I think this is what we see when you look at these images of, oh my gosh so many people are coming to the border, are people that couldn’t really afford to wait or who—smugglers have directed people to cross in between the desert, for example, in the San Diego sector in California, or the Arizona desert. So you have people that are oftentimes in remote areas being directed to cross and then waiting in the cold at this point, or in the summer be in the heat, for a border patrol agent to pick them up. And that’s where they would be saying, I want to ask for protection.

I think it’s important to just clarify, requesting asylum is a right that people have. So you’re not trying to come in here illegally and game the system. You are exercising your right that’s in international law and U.S. law to request asylum. And that right doesn’t say you have to cross legally into the United States. In fact, some of the legal challenges from previous attempts from the Trump administration to restrict access to asylum at the border said you can’t prohibit people from crossing irregularly to request asylum. And so I think that is where you have people desperately trying to get to the United States and yes, a very overwhelmed system once they get to the U.S. side of the border, because there are high numbers of people crossing and particularly in these remote areas where you don’t have as much infrastructure to support them.

Max: So when we think about executive authority and we think about how the different administrations have treated migration across the southern border—so Title 42 was an important piece of the puzzle from the pandemic forward, right? So we have under Title 42—which, I don’t know when that existed or when that was created, but I assume it’s a very old provision in the law—you’re allowed to expel people under what is deemed to be a health crisis in the country of origin. Title 42 has been extended though, it seems. Can you tell people exactly what Title 42 is, what it did under the Trump administration, and then how the Biden administration interpreted it and either maintained pieces of it or has not?

Maureen: So Title 42 was—I think you’re right—it’s a public health restriction that was, I think, 1942, predates many decades, that was put into place in March 2020 from the Trump administration at the onset of the pandemic, as a way to limit who could come into the country, and enabled the U.S. to basically expel, in most cases back to Mexico, individuals seeking asylum, under the guise of it’s a public health crisis, we can do this. And so that meant that, contrary to what we saw with what was previous to that, which was the migrant protection protocols—you may remember that the Trump administration had started with a way to meter coming into the United States. So you could come in, request asylum, and then you were sent back to Mexico to wait for your immigration hearings. So what the MPP did was give you a pathway, very limited, to request asylum in the United States, but you had to wait in Mexico for your immigration hearings, which could mean a couple hearings back and forth, and where we saw multiple cases of kidnappings and other risks and crimes against the asylum seekers that were waiting.

Title 42 pretty much almost eliminated the ability to ask for asylum, as compared to the MPP because it was just rapidly expelling people without processing them. So you were being sent back to Mexico and that could mean you could just try again and keep trying and hopefully get through, but also it really restricted who could access asylum. And so then you saw who would be able to access were particularly vulnerable groups that would approach a port of entry in coordination, again, with local service providers, government officials to to come in. And I think what also happened, was a system which was accepting people and processing them based more on nationality, than any protection need.

So who was being returned under Title 42, based on agreements with the Mexican government, were Mexicans, because that’s sending them back home, and citizens of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Also high numbers of people crossing, but where they were getting quickly sent back to Mexican border towns; at times actually flown all the way back to southern Mexico without being processed and then invited to be self-deported back to Guatemala or elsewhere. And so who was admitted were people from other nationalities, farther away places, or where the U.S. had real restrictions on returning people, which included particularly Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans. Countries who either don’t have relations with the United States or accept very few return flights.

And so Title 42 created this sort of mixed system where there were lots of limits on people from certain nationalities coming in, and where others were being admitted because of other complications that the Biden administration was facing. Title 42 was ended finally last year and replaced by the CBP—actually two years ago, sorry. Thinking dates, it’s always a long time for these things to happen. [It was] replaced by the CBP1 app, which was then deemed to be the right way to do it. And if you don’t do that and you do cross in between, it’s sometimes harder for you to qualify for protection because the screening is stricter, and there could be more restrictions on you being able to proceed with an immigration hearing in the United States.

So all of these have really meant to, in the end, restrict how many people are coming, either based on quickly expelling everybody or certain nationalities, or just making it sort of a wait that is so long that people get desperate and either try to cross undetected, take very dangerous routes, or some of them are actually staying in Mexico or deciding to just wait it out and see if there’s any changes in U.S. policy. So it hasn’t really been effective. And what we’ve seen is all of these policies have really resulted in grave harm to migrants and asylum seekers, denying them the ability to ask for protection. You hear multiple times of Mexicans being told by U.S. agents, “Mexicans don’t qualify for asylum, asylum doesn’t exist for you,” to being subjected to brutal crimes while you’re waiting in Mexico.

Max: I guess we’ll stay on Mexico. I was thinking that we would finish up with it because I feel like we don’t talk enough about what’s happening in Mexico; politically, economically, in terms of crime syndicates that are there, the challenges that Mexico faces. And we’re going to be talking a lot more about that, I believe, next week when we talk about foreign direct investment and some of the missed opportunities that Mexico has had over the past couple of decades, to basically increase infrastructure, organization, reduce corruption, have a better system of industrialization, that will provide different levels of employment. So we’re going to hit that, I think, a little bit more from an economic perspective. But from a political perspective—we have a number of listeners in Mexico, and there are mixed feelings about Obrador—most of our people come from a left viewpoint, so I think that they see Obrador favorably recognize that he’s in a rather difficult position with the big brother up north and our political circumstances that have been unusual, to say the least, over the past decade.

So when Mexico looks to create policies and effectuate policy over a long period of time when you have the neighbor up north who’s really completely chaotic, in terms of our relationship with Mexico right now, how is the Mexican government interpreting this moment and this crisis, and what is it trying to do from a political standpoint to absorb the influx, to curb the migration routes, and to curb the social justice issues that are impacting so many of the people that are flooding in, but then they’re also their citizens themselves. What’s the political moment like for Obrador?

Maureen: I would say in the most part, doing what the U.S. is asking them to do on immigration. And you can see that clearly in the past few months, where, if you look at just what happened in December at the border—and you mentioned the scenes of large numbers of migrants crossing, border communities feeling overwhelmed with high numbers of crossing, to have a post-Christmas visit of two secretaries, the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security, and other top officials to Mexico, I think December 27th. Let’s talk more about how we can work on migration and then seeing Mexico have, I would say, historic numbers of detentions, apprehensions. It went over to about over 100,000 for the month of January/February or February/March—I need to think about the numbers—historic numbers. That’s like what you used to see in Mexico as a year of encounters with migrants. So Mexico stepped up and really dropped who’s at least arriving at the U.S. border.

Which is interesting, too, because if you look at the numbers of people crossing the Darién Gap through Panama, more than numbers the Honduran government reports because they keep pretty good track of who’s going through their country, there’s more people crossing than are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, which suggests a lot of people are pretty much being bottled up and bussed around different parts of Mexico. That’s the past few months. But I think we can even look over the past decade—from when President Obama asked Mexican President Peña Nieto, do more to work with us to stop migration or reduce the levels of migration coming to the border—that the Mexican government has continuously worked with the U.S. to stem the flow of people coming to the United States. This could mean between the southern border program, which Peña Nieto did to López Obrador’s decision to deploy the National Guard—the newly created military security force—to Mexico’s southern border after meeting with U.S. officials, which was in the context of the Trump administration threatening Mexico with tariffs if they didn’t do more to stop migrants from coming up to the border—and so you could deploy soldiers basically to your southern border—to the current policies, which have accepted a lot of people from non-Mexicans to be returned back to Mexico, to kind of containing a lot of people in Mexico.

And so I think the primary policy of the Mexican government has been to work with the United States on this for probably two reasons. One, there are members of the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s office and others that believe that having harsher policies, and having the idea that you can get sent back to Mexico, even if you’re not a Mexican, all these different things, or that it’s pretty dangerous to get to the border, might deter more people from coming, which hasn’t really been the case. And the second is, what does Mexico get out of this? And what they’ve gotten is a lot of the U.S. continuing to work with them on other areas of priority, including on migration. López Obrador wanted to invest more in central Mexico, southern Mexico on economic projects, the U.S—and development agency USAID is networking with the Mexican development agency on that—but also U.S. silence on other big issues in Mexico.

So you can be concerned about the withering away of checks and balances on executive power in Mexico, the proposed attack on judicial independence, on the court system, on the electoral system, and the U.S. is either silent on that, or you look at press reports that even say “Mexico is a vibrant democracy.” So certainly, you know, not wanting to criticize that in Mexico, and even more so not criticizing the militarization that we’ve seen in Mexico under López Obrador, who has beyond the creation of the National Guard, basically dismantled any federal civilian police force in the country and relied on the military for part of immigration enforcement, but also infrastructure projects and many other civilian tasks And U.S. officials who are asked repeatedly, “aren’t you concerned about the expansion of Mexico’s military role in Mexico?” will avoid the question or talk about how important their cooperation is with the military.

Max: So is there, I guess, a rift between our understanding of what the Mexican administration has done from a social democracy perspective and social programs, versus how it is beginning to behave on the military side of things? Is it taking a hardline militaristic stance in some of the executive authority, but still continuing to do the on the ground social programs that really benefit people? What is your impression of the political situation currently there?

Maureen: I think Obrador certainly has promoted different economic programs on raising the minimum wage, on different subsidies that are meant to support economic development or support young people so they could hopefully not work in organized criminal organizations, but really have an apprenticeship or a different career. So certainly an important discourse on addressing poverty and inequality in Mexico, and also certain programs that I think still need to measure the impact that they’ve had. But yes, the flip side is there has been a significant expansion of the role of the Mexican military in not just public security, but anything from airport administration—if you arrive at the airport in Mexico City who may be checking your immigration papers are the Mexican Marines, they’re in charge of security there. They’ve built development banks, they’re sort of the go-to agency for any of the president’s infrastructure projects.

And so I think the broader concern there is, one, on security, having the military tasked with policing tasks sometimes can lead to incidents of excessive use of force, extrajudicial killings, two a history within the Mexican military of committing human rights violations with impunity. And so I think there’s a lot of concern on the human rights side of the military’s role. But on the other is, if you dismantle so many domestic institutions between your customs agency to airport administration, etc., how do you rebuild that later? And are you giving the armed forces too much power?

Max: Are you surprised at this turn of events down there?

Maureen: I think most organizations would be surprised of how during Obrador’s administration, he’s really relied more and more on the military as a candidate who came in saying, “we need to return the military to its barracks.” And now that is very far from being the case. And he’s even tried to reform the constitution to solidify the armed forces role in security to give the army control over the National Guard. So really, I think surprising given where he was a candidate, not surprising given how much we’ve seen in the past six years, this growing role that the military has been given during his government.

Max: So that’s a really great bridge to talk about something that has become kind of a fascination of mine which I’m calling the Bukele effect all throughout Latin America. So I’m in a part of the country, in New york, where we have mostly, I would say, Central American migration. So there are migrant workers in the community, certainly that I live in, typically from El Salvador and Honduras primarily, Guatemala as well. So the very classic Northern Triangle type of migration into the area of New York that I’m in. And, every day I’m talking to people, just because I’m that weird person that asks them about, “what do you think of Bukele,” and they’re like, “why are you even bringing this up to me white guy, that’s a very strange question.”

I imagine the lens that they’re looking through is different than other parts of the country, but also different from people native to El Salvador. But right now, the feeling toward Bukele is so unbelievably positive, like he is some sort of deity because “everything has changed. Everything is better. Can’t wait to go home. I can talk to my family. My family, they take walks in the park now. The economic circumstances haven’t really turned around.” But just that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, that feeling of safety has returned to El Salvador. And now we see Noboa maybe borrowing a page from that and starting to say, “okay, I need to clamp down. I need to get control of security concerns first and foremost, because everything flows from that.”

And so one of the things that I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around right now is, from a leftist perspective, which is what we are, from somebody who favors social democracy policies, I know it can work if we look at the Morales miracle in Bolivia. If we look at the experiments in an isolated case, we know that these types of policies can work. They can be really beneficial for people. You can achieve both safety and economic security and social justice if you have policies that are good. But then you have areas that have spun completely out of control. And I think it’s fair to characterize El Salvador as a place that was largely insecure, that had tremendous security concerns, and the population was constantly under threat or felt under threat. What is the balance? Because my fear now, Maureen, is that Bukele is setting an extreme example and being seen as a success, not just by Trump acolytes in this country, but by other neighboring LAC nations that are saying, “oh, okay, well. I guess that’s going to have to be the path of resistance now because that’s what people are demanding of me. And I’m only going to stay in power if I act similarly.”

Is there the potential of a domino theory in Latin American countries where you see that extreme example of strength coming from somebody like Bukele, inspiring other nations and the people of those nations to vote out maybe more favorable governments from a leftist perspective, and starting to bring in more authoritarian governments like a Milei in Argentina.

Maureen: I think overall—and just you just mentioned Milei, right—what you’re seeing is populations that are willing to elect leaders that are mostly undemocratic or certainly made lots of undemocratic statements, or in Bukele’s case maneuvers—including unconstitutionally running for president again—because they’re satisfying some of their basic needs that they felt democracy was failing to deliver on them, for example. I think there’s a lot to still unpack about the Bukele model. We did a very interesting podcast and my colleague, Adam Isaacson, did a great interview with Doug Farah, who’s a former journalist and security expert on unpack[ing] what the Bukele model is. And we’ve also written about, why this shouldn’t be a model for Ecuador.

I think some important things, just top line, homicides started dropping in El Salvador before Bukele was even president. So, you know, we have to take that into consideration. And both Bukele and his predecessors had—one of the main reasons violence had dramatically dropped beforehand was they were negotiating with the gangs. In even the U.S. government, there’s DOJ sanctions on Bukele officials for proven evidence of how they were negotiating with and working with gang members. That said—

Max: I did see that. but I also had a lot of trouble verifying what was really going on there. Because it seemed to me that it was—the rumors are that the Bukele administration is negotiating with the gangs and that there was some sort of detente in place there before the mass incarceration movement. But I was unable to really kind of verify that. So I wonder if you could just stay on that for a minute.

Maureen: So, I mean, obviously the U.S. doesn’t issue sanctions lately. And so I think there was a lot of intelligence and information that would show that top Bukele officials were working with gang leaders. El Faro—which was an El Salvador based investigative journalism outlet that actually had to leave the country fiscally, now they operate fiscally out of Costa Rica because of repression in El Salvador and attacks against them by Bukele—have done a lot. They have recordings of some officials talking to gang members. And so there’s a lot of evidence of this. But the other is, as homicide rates were going down, what prompted the state of exception declaration in March two years ago was just a huge rash of killings in a few days, in part with the understanding that some of those agreements had been broken. There’s a lot of looking at what was the violence actually prior to the state of exception to what it is currently. It’s undoubtable that people feel safer in El Salvador. And we hear that as well. And we hear that even from U.S. officials in terms of their ability to travel in the country as well. That’s true.

What it’s been at the cost of is human rights, and any due process guarantees for the people that are being detained. So there’s over 77,000 people in mass prisons in El Salvador that are going through—

Max: I can’t even begin to imagine the conditions.

Maureen: And there’s, you know, cases of torture—I can’t remember the number of how many people have died in custody, it’s over 100—cases of torture, mistreatment and lack of food. Families are basically having to bring in most of the food to support their loved ones. A lot of allegations of arbitrary detentions, people just getting picked up, young people because they had tattoos and, “oh, you must be a gang member.” There’s so much to unpack of why this has been risky. And a lot of family members that I think—[it’s] very clear that these people have nothing to do with gangs and they’re innocent. And there’s no chance to really prove that in a lot of cases.

But the other is El Salvador’s economic challenges currently. There is a huge increase in food scarcity or people unable to access basic needs. Bukele’s experiment with Bitcoin hasn’t gone as he had hoped to. And a lot of concerns of massive corruption within his government. If you look at the discussions of whether El Salvador is going to qualify for a new IMF loan, which they’ve been negotiating for two years, in part it’s out of concern, not about the human rights/democracy part as much as good governments, lack of transparency, how much the Bukele administration has dismantled the fiscal transparency, public access to information, the anti-corruption mechanisms that existed previously are not there. So a lot of you know concerns about situation in El Salvador, but I think the reality is too that there needs to be different policy proposals out there of, how can you control a very dire security situation in the short to medium term, and that does show results for a population without leading to these mass arrests and declarations of.

I mean, Noboa’s case as well. He declared the 22 criminal groups as terrorist organizations and sort of beyond a state of exception, a state of conflict or war in his country. So it’s a real concern. I think the challenge is sometimes there’s not the short term quick solutions. What you can say and what we know—I’ve been working on Mexico for two decades. I think that the biggest challenge is, how do you, in the short term—if you’re going to deploy, your security forces, for example, and if you’re going to look at like mass detentions, for example—how do you pair that with the longer term institutional reforms you need to help better effective police, a more effective judicial system that actually prosecutes the people responsible for crimes, and a government that’s free from corruption? And so I think there’s a lot that still needs to be discussed about this.

You can’t model what happened in El Salvador with Ecuador, even by the sheer size of the country and the dynamics of groups. Ecuador has transnational criminal organizations working with local gangs. They’re from Mexico, they’re from Colombia, they’re from Albania, working with Ecuadorian groups. El Salvador is a gang situation, which, most of its profits came from local extortion. So even just the scenario is different, the size of the countries are different. Sadly, though, the impact on human rights could be the same, which is more and more willingness to disregard human rights concerns or democratic norms or due process guarantees in the name of providing safety. That’s not sustainable in the long term.

Max: I think one of the things I was responding to—this was a few weeks ago—but when Bukele came and spoke at CPAC, These are soft metrics, but I was like, “oh, that’s interesting. Okay, let me go and check who else was on the slate and who else spoke at it.” And went across the board, a lot of the usual suspects. Bukele’s numbers, just on YouTube alone, for how many people went in and viewed it, were staggering. The reception that he received was so outsized for the role that he plays in the world. And I guess it got me thinking about like, “okay, If we are to have Trump 2.0, there’s no question that there will be a cozying up to that authoritarian style leadership.” Where the administration—I could see a Trump administration essentially punting on any of the work that is being done and saying, “no, no, no, we’re just gonna encourage everybody to do the Bukele model, because that’s how we stem the tide of immigration. We want people to stay right where they are, how do we do that, make them feel safe in their own countries, so we’re going to just export more arms to these countries.” Forget humanitarian need, they already want to rip USAID apart anyway so, it just feels like that’s the potential crisis that isn’t being spoken about, that our diplomatic war machine funding stance could change on a dime, and any of the work that’s being done right now could be uprooted in a matter of minutes if they just simply say, “here’s a bunch of weapons, go do what that guy did.” Is that too hyperbolic to think that way?

Maureen: Two parts of that. One, the role of Congress. Right.

Max: We do have a Congress, you’re right. You’re right.

Maureen: Lots of things they want to do in part depends on who in Congress continues to control the purse, right? So how much they get funding for it, or how much Congress decides to allocate funding that they view as their own priorities. And so we’ll have to see what that composition looks like. We did a series at the end of the Trump administration on what has been the impact of that government on human rights and democracy in Latin America.

And I think it made clear that, because the administration had stepped away from having human rights and democracy as a center point of U.S. policy and was much more transactional in nature, and really gave the blank check to governments that were free to talk about criticizing the press as being fake news, to, if you look at Guatemala’s case, for example, during the Trump administration, the International Commission to Combat Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which had been working for almost a decade with the Guatemalan prosecutors to go after high level corruption cases—including organized criminal groups, government corruption, former President Pérez Molina and Vice President Baldetti and others. That was, in a sense, dismantled in part because the U.S. stepped back and wasn’t pushing on Guatemala to keep it in place anymore. And it’s like, well, that’s your sovereign decision. And yes, also Guatemala transferred its embassy in Israel to Tel Aviv. So they did things that the U.S. viewed as favorably.

So I think what you saw was, there is a damage when you have a U.S. presidency that doesn’t have, at a minimum a willingness to address human rights and democracy concerns. And it allows some of these anti-democratic forces to grow. And I mean, Guatemala is probably the best test case of that because you saw after the CICIG was dismantled, the persecution of justice operators, former CICIG officials—over 30 went into exile, mostly in the United States because they were going to get put in jail for working on corruption cases in their home country—to how hard it was for President Arévalo, who’s the current president of Guatemala, to actually even take office in January, because there have been so many efforts by the hidden powers and Pacto de Corruptos, corrupt pact in Guatemala, to make sure that he couldn’t take office.

I think there is a lot of concern of what that could mean in terms of both human rights and democracy, but as you mentioned, the authoritarian tendencies of governments who have the same playbook in terms of how they interact, how they behave. President Milei was also at CPAC and there’s a lot of the same advisors that all work together, and we are seeing a democratic backsliding in Latin America. Guatemala is probably the exception right now to what we’ve seen elsewhere; that is concerning in terms of respect for human rights, respect for the rule of law and how to rebuild, at some point, support for democracy in a region that’s very much less supportive of democracy, because it’s really failed in many cases to address their basic needs from security to economic development.

Max: You know, it seems that there’s almost like—or maybe you can actually help frame it for me, I feel like there’s almost no in-between in Latin American countries in the post, I don’t know, is it fair to say like the post-World War Two dictator model that it sort of came out of—like in the democratic era of the LAC broadly, that it seems that countries are either pushing really hard one way for social democracy, or they just tend to fall into authoritarianism.

And I know that’s painting it with—it’s not a monolith—it’s painting it with a broad brushstroke, but are there any examples of moderate governance consistent over time that is sort of like steady, set it and forget it kind of democracy that is building in a very stable way? Is that Brazil, taking Bolsonaro out of the mix?

Maureen: Even with Brazil, I think Bolsonaro is still very present. Talking to Brazilian colleagues, they’re very aware that President Lula is president now, but it’s not like those forces are not still around. But I think it does show that you can have a peaceful, more or less, transition of power, although they also had the January 8th incursion into Brazil’s capital building.

Max: Copycats. It’s your own insurrection.

Maureen: Yeah. You know, interestingly, because of the 50th anniversary, we’ve been in a lot of discussion with the Chilean government and the Chilean ambassador. President Boric was actually here last fall in the context of another anniversary, which was the killing of a Chilean former ambassador and a U.S. citizen. It was a bombing, one of the first terrorist attacks in the United States in 1973 here in Sheridan Circle in D.C. by the Pinochet regime.

The point is, Chile went from having Salvador Allende being democratically elected to a military coup, to having a transition after their no vote in 1990, I believe, that really then led to, we can get back to democracy. And the interesting thing talking to Ambassador Valdés—who’s the Chilean ambassador here who’s been around different times during this entire period—how essential it was to have the U.S. support both in the time of the dictatorship about, how do you make visible what was happening in Chile on human rights and democracy, but also supporting that transition back to democracy.

And so how does that look at how a country can recover and move forward? That said, I mean, if you look at Chile’s current political dynamics, the farther right groups, the presidential candidate Kast—who was the more conservative candidate the last time around—his party is still powerful. And it’s not like you don’t have different views in the country and you could go farther.

Max: Yeah, we’re not ones to throw stones.

Maureen: I don’t think anybody has the exact solution. I do think, though, the region, in part due to widespread violence, organized criminal groups are very present in many countries and are contributing to violence. The economic fallout from COVID continues to be severe. I mean, this was the region that was most impacted by the pandemic. It makes up 8% of the world’s population. I think it had 30% of the deaths. It’s a region that continues to have a lot of challenges.

And so when you look at those challenges, the population’s response is, “ well, things aren’t much better for me now, even with all these democratically elected governments, maybe we should try something else;” which I also think you see in Argentina’s case, where you’re just out of sheer desperation—given how economically unstable the country is—people are willing to cast their net to somebody different and see if it may be better this time.

And so it’s a challenge. I think as a human rights organization, we could really work to think, how do we support organizations on the ground? How can we look at what are models, or what how do you respond to get back to supporting democracy in Latin America.

Max: And I guess that’s always my fear is, when you talk about the hyperinflation that occurred, by the way, for years in Argentina. I mean, it has been spiraling out of control for quite some time. And how that begins to rip apart the fabric of any economy. I mean, there is no economy that can sustain that type of sustained hyperinflation.

But the willingness to just throw the baby out with the bath water and say, “okay we’ll go with somebody like Milei, or okay we’ll go with somebody like Bukele.” I guess my fear in these moments is that it becomes almost like a fever because it will—I mean there are things that Milei is doing that may work in the short term even if it’s optics only, that it just feels like something’s happening. And I think a lot of people in the United States felt that as well with the Trump administration.

They just feel like, “yeah, a lot of the stuff that I think I care about just suddenly is on the table and it feels like things are moving,” even though you can dig into the numbers and see it’s either not moving or it’s going backwards or backsliding, but democracy is eroding the entire way.

And so when I think about what’s, I mean, we should probably talk about the recent troubles with Ecuador and Mexico, and you see that with that fissure right there. You see these things flare up. These are not insignificant moments. And if you add enough of them together, that’s how fevers catch.

And so organizations like yours, I’m sure, have an ear to the ground and look at this stuff and say, “I don’t like this. I don’t like how this feels right now.” And some extraordinary measures are going to have to take place to sort of right the ship. Are those discussions happening inside WOLA and with your partners on the ground? Is there a sense that there’s like, okay, we need to act with a sense of urgency here because this could catch?

Maureen: I mean, the urgency is already there. If you’re talking to partner organizations from Nicaragua, most of which are now working in exile because the Ortega regime has expelled pretty much any civil society organization, canceled the permits of thousands to operate, has, as you’re probably aware, put on a plane—222 political prisoners that were being held in horrific conditions in Nicaragua—to the United States and stripped them of their nationality, which has created enormous difficulties, including for their families that are sometimes back in Nicaragua or even for those in exile. If your passport expires, how do you get a new passport when you have a government that doesn’t recognize you anymore?

I think we already have in Nicaragua as a case, Venezuela, which is, you know, with an authoritarian government, Maduro, with elections that there was some hope could be at least competitive coming this July, end of July. And there’s still a lot of doubt of whether that will actually happen.

So we’ve actually had a lot of exchanges now between colleagues from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela, Argentina. What can we learn from the past? What are some best practices? How can we share experiences, but how can we also work together on shared strategies to move forward?

And in that, what’s the role of the international community, which obviously includes the United States government, which has been a very big player for good and for bad in Latin America over the decades; and others in the international community, including the European Union. How can like-minded governments in the region speak out to express concern? We’ve seen that particularly with Chile. At times, other governments have raised concerns about democracy or human rights in the region, depending on which country we’re talking about.

So it’s very much part of the discussions. I think we’re also aware there’s enormous challenges facing the region and that we can’t any of us solve them alone. And so really the need to work much more regionally, and reflecting on what’s happened in different circumstances and what’s worked, what worked in Guatemala. How did you get from against all odds having, a democratically elected president who really has an agenda to restore rule of law, human rights, support economic development and address exclusion and economic inequality in that country?

Max: I have a couple more questions. I could literally talk to you all day because there’s so much I don’t know, and you’re filling in so many gaps for me right now. So I’m actually going to try to rein my own head in here and come back to a couple of points that I know are important to move the migration story forward, so I can actually let you do your job at some point today and get back to work.

The Alliance for Prosperity from 2014 seems to me that it was—so this is an Obama-era policy that seems to me to be I guess kind of reengaged under Vice President Harris; I don’t know if this is an official policy or loosely framed as the root causes initiative under the Biden administration. It seems to be chaired by Vice President Harris.

A lot of this looks to be what many advocates here on this side say makes sense. Like “hey, why are people coming here?” It’s almost like they began to ask the right question, “why are people coming here, what are the dangers that they face?” instead of always looking at it as something—instead of hitting everything with a hammer and the whole world to nail, let’s go back to the root and say, “okay, in this country, this is the circumstance. This is an economic situation here. It’s a climate change issue here. This is a gang issue here. Let’s go and address them one by one.”

One of my frustrations about the Biden administration is that it’s almost like the first person they should have hired was a publicist in the beginning, because they did a lot of good stuff in the first couple of years that just nobody knew about. And because it was all wrapped in policy jargon and omnibus bills, and it was hard to pull apart.

This seems to be one of those things where if you asked anybody who cares about immigration and thinks that’s why they’re going to cast their vote one way or the other in November in the United States and ask them, well, “what do you think about the root causes policy under the Biden administration that picks up on a lot of what was happening for the Alliance for Prosperity under Barack Obama,” they’d be like, “what are you talking about?”

So what is this initiative? Is it working? Is it right-headed? Can you describe it for us and then let us know what the failings might be or the benefits?

Maureen: Sure, and I think we could start out with the root causes strategy, it’s focused on Central America, addressing migration from Central America, which is undoubtedly important, but if you’re on the U.S. side of the border and you’re looking at who’s coming, the majority of migrants are not from Central America. I mean, 30%, a little bit over, continue to be from Mexico. And then you have everybody else.

And I think especially it’s important to think about that in the context of what we’ve seen in cities like New York with the high levels of Venezuelans and others coming, which are a new type of migrant in a sense, because if you look at Mexican and Central American migration, most people coming knew someone in the United States because you’ve had decades already of migration to the United States. So you’ve had this whole social support network.

I’ve been at the border a lot and you talk to Central Americans and ask, “where are you going?” And they say, “I’m going to live with my brother in North Carolina.” And you’ve had that network. You would ask Venezuelans where you’re going and they had no idea. And I mean, that will change as things go forward. But I think also if we look at who’s come recently, particularly the Venezuelan population, which is very rapidly rising and in a short period of time, had no real connections to the United States. So that just makes it harder for them to settle because they don’t have that friend, cousin, brother, any family member to stay with. And I think that’s also why it’s caused a lot more attacks on social service.

Max: Before you go there, before you continue on that thread though, do you not consider the normalization or the theoretical normalization of relations with Venezuela which might be more related to fossil fuels than anything, or our attempts to create a democracy or a more democratic election coming up. But do you not consider that part of the root causes strategy?

Maureen: So, yeah, we could get to that. I think that looking at how the administration originally looked at migration from the region, it was Central America because that was the highest number at the time. It’s important. I mean, no one’s going to say we shouldn’t address migration from Central America.

I think that the proposal for administration moving forward is we need to look at how do you respond to flows in a more dynamic way? Because right now there’s a lot of Ecuadorians coming, for example, people from Colombia, other nationalities. So what is the flexibility to also address how to support countries throughout the region, given what’s going on?

There’s now a partnership, America’s partnership, which is more on economic development that’s actually targeting a lot of these countries that are both in part sending countries, but are also hosting a lot of migrants. We should remember there’s almost 3 million Venezuelans living in Colombia right now, 1.5 million in Peru. It’s not like the U.S. is absorbing everybody that’s on the move in the region.

Max: Wait, Maureen, are you suggesting it’s not all about us all the time? We’re not the only ones impacted by this?

Maureen: 6.5 million Venezuelans are living in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Max: That is staggering.

Maureen: I think we do need to—there’s a lot that the region has done to step up its efforts. Even Mexico last year, they had 141,000 asylum requests. I mean, they’ve certainly continuously absorbed a number of asylum seekers. The number of Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica continues to be very high. So the region’s also dealing with a lot of migration flows that we should be supportive and also recognize their efforts.

On the root causes strategy, I think we supported it. It is a continuation, I would say, of what was actually termed the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) during the Obama years, and then continued with a level of assistance during the Trump years, although he cut it off completely for a year. He wasn’t happy with what was going on, you know, the root causes strategy with the administration had promised up to $4 billion in assistance. I’m not sure if we’ll get that, but I’m pretty sure we’ve had over $600–$700 million approved every year from Congress for supporting issues in Central America regarding rule of law, justice issues, public security, poverty, food security, climate, gender-based violence, a lot of the factors driving migration. So it’s a well thought out strategy.

Vice President Harris has paired that with, I think it’s partnership for Central America or Central America Partnership, which is also much more, how do you drive private sector investment into Central America with the idea that it creates more jobs. There’s a lot of questioning there of how much impact it’s really having, or are they well-paying jobs and also who are we working with? We have to be careful of, are we working with corrupt actors, or not in terms of some of the companies that form—

Max: On which side, ours or theirs?

Maureen: —well, I mean, in this case, which companies are we partnering with in Central America, and are they free of corruption and meet transparency standards? But I think overall, it’s well thought out. The flip side is the U.S. can’t do this alone. You have to have governments committed to it themselves in the region. So someone in the State Department once said they have to want it as much as you do, right? So the U.S. could have a great idea, we want to support you in structural reforms. And the government’s like, “well, maybe not so much.” And that’s part of it.

You know, if you have not the right partners, I mean, let’s look at Honduras, for example, which now there is more cooperation with President Xiomara Castro. The U.S. worked with former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has now been convicted of drug trafficking in the United States, as was his brother. So, you know, it’s complicated, too, because of who the U.S. is working with, which is why I think they’re really focused a lot on supporting Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala as the president, because it’s someone they think they can build relationships with.

So overall, yes, a positive strategy. A vision, I would say, for the region that’s not just the root causes, but also what was originally the comprehensive migration management strategy or collaborative migration management strategy was first for the whole region. That pretty much is what you see in the Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection that was signed at the Summit of the Americas that the U.S. hosted in June 2022 by 20 governments in the region, which is more like an integral approach to regional migration, including supporting countries of origin, transit, destination to migration management to protection issues to humanitarian response.

So I think the administration has a good idea. The challenge is how do you address a situation like what we see in Haiti currently? I mean, Haitian migration has been high. The administration has appallingly deported over 20,000 more Haitians back to a country that currently—they’ve stopped, they have no airports, they can’t send people back to Haiti—but to a country that has no government. So what do you do in a situation like that?

Or in Venezuela, where we saw last year the Biden administration extended temporary protective status and redesignated it to cover more Venezuelans in the United States because the conditions on the ground are merited of a humanitarian emergency as well as persecution. Venezuela is the only country that has an investigation open at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. There’s a lot to happen in Venezuela. And I think 10 days later, the U.S. announced that it was starting to deport people to Venezuela.

So I think a lot of mismatch of strategies and just the real challenges of how do you address root causes in a context where you have authoritarian governments that don’t have relations with the United States, and that there’s a lot of other broader challenges to the region that, I mean, the U.S. shouldn’t be the only actor involved in supporting, but does have an important role.

And I think for as much as the administration should put on the agenda, continually work with countries in the region, but more on these structural issues and not on, how much can we support your border agencies so they can stop as many migrants as possible from crossing your border.

But just to close, like for example, Colombia. So there are, I think, as I said, 2.9 million Venezuelans in Colombia currently. The Colombian government had offered Venezuelans like a temporary 10-year protective status in the country. It’s really important, but it’s not sufficient. And if you look at interviews with migrants crossing through the Darién Gap, a good chunk of them actually had status in another country, in Peru and Ecuador, in Colombia, and they couldn’t make it. And that’s because of discrimination, which is one thing that’s happened a lot with Haitian migrants, but also just like lack of economic support.

And so I think as the U.S. looks at root causes, it’s also how do you support countries that are now absorbing high numbers of people so that they don’t have to migrate again, because no one wants to take that journey. It’s dangerous. It’s costly. And the U.S. shouldn’t be the best destination. It isn’t for everyone. So how do you really support these countries in both their own development so that their own citizens don’t feel like they need to leave, but also for those that decide to stay there as migrants and how do you ensure that they have the ability to make a living without feeling that draw to come to the United States.

Max: My last is more of a statement than a question that I was hoping you could comment on, because I’m trying to draw out the logical conclusion and extension of this, and that is kind of an ironic twist that the influx of migrants into the U.S. economy has actually contributed to increasing the GDP and suppressing inflation—not controlling it entirely—but suppressing the inflation, because we’re leading the world in terms of inflation, even though we don’t feel like it right now. We have done a much, much better job of controlling inflation in theory. A lot of thoughts on that from a different perspective.

But when we talk about migration, that’s a real double-edged sword for the Biden administration in an election year. Because if you just suddenly shut off the spigot and go, I guess, 2019 or 2020 Trump on it, you just shut everything down and you disrupt that natural flow and take a lot of people out of the growth of this system, you risk curtailing GDP a little bit, maybe contributing to inflation because that puts wage pressures on, things like that.

And at the same time, with 70% of voters saying that migration and immigration is one of their top concerns all of a sudden. And I’m looking at people in Cleveland being like, is it really? Like stop. But the media has made this a circus. So that’s a really interesting double-edged sword that I hadn’t thought about. How do you think in D.C. now policymakers are looking at that instance in that moment and interpreting that in an election year?

Maureen: I think there’s two parts. The one is how do you sell this more, of showing that evidence demonstrates that the U.S. recovery even from COVID and the economics, we didn’t go into a recession is in part due to the influx of immigrants into the country. I think there needs to be more messaging about, and this goes to the broader of the positive economic contribution that migrants make to the country.

How do you pair that with, I think, what we’re seeing more and more with candidates on both sides of “we need to be stricter at the border.” And I think it seems hard to see how that’s going to shift in the next few months. I mean, Biden just came out in an interview yesterday saying, you know, “I’d close down the border if I was given the legal authority to do so, because it has become such a concern for the broader population.” Democrats have also sort of shifted to, there’s a lot of people here, maybe this is a bigger challenge for us.

And so I think, unfortunately, we’re going to see much more of this border security-focused rhetoric in the next few months, as compared to what really is needed, which is how do you create a better infrastructure at the border that is more orderly, that is more coordinated with state and local governments throughout the country and service providers of where people might be going, and that invests the money that’s really needed to have a better immigration legal system so that you don’t have three to five year backlogs for any immigration case, including asylum.

And so I think because none of that fits on a bumper sticker, we’re going to see a lot more of the rhetoric of “we need to secure the border, we need to look at controlling the situation at the border” versus, “and we need to expand legal pathways for migrants and asylum seekers.”

I think that there’s going to—as human rights and civil society organizations—we’re going to keep pushing on the need to have that focus on the right to access asylum, the right to enter the country in an orderly way to request protection here. And also the fact that, one, you can’t really close the border, but also none of those deterrence policies and enforcement-only policies have ever worked, because you have so many people that are fleeing for their lives and that are so desperate that they’re willing to run the gauntlet of risks between crossing the Darién Gap with threats of sexual violence, the elements themselves, to getting kidnapped and extorted in Mexico, sexually assaulted; people go through extreme measures to get here because they are so desperate to save their lives and the lives of their children.

And so I think we can’t lose sight of that because you can’t enforce your way out of the regional migration situation we’re seeing, and we really need to continue to look at this as a broader, more integral focus that’s on legal pathways, that’s focused on protection and is also clearly focused on why people continue to feel the need to leave their countries.

Max: The number of tributaries that we could follow from climate change to sexual violence to human rights, social justice, mass incarceration, LGBTQ rights, marginalization, are seemingly endless because this is a massive story. Ultimately, this is a story about humanity. This is humanity finding its place and doing it within the artificial construct of national boundaries, which is not something that is natural, period. These are real life issues.

I’m happy to know that people like you are representing us and doing the work. I congratulate you and the folks at WOLA on your 50th anniversary. I think it’s great stuff. We have on the docket for us later in the year is a piece about Mexico exclusively. And we’ll obviously be following the election in Venezuela very closely. So my great hope is that you didn’t have a terrible time today and that you will actually come back on the show to give us a little bit more perspective when those things come up. But I just wanted to thank you for your time, for your insight, and I really appreciate you coming on.

Maureen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

The first installment of this series covered the surge of migration to non-border state cities like New York and the impact it’s having on city services, agencies and the migrants themselves. We interviewed Marlene Galaz from New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) to help us understand the issue from both the social services perspective and the experience of migrant families and individuals who often find themselves in precarious situations. The second installment examined immigration from the political perspective of Latin American nations in particular. To help us work through this complex narrative we spoke with Maureen Meyer from The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Our third and final installment of Over The Borderline stays below the U.S. southern border to look at the economic factors that contribute to mass migration from Central and South American countries specifically. We look at the root economic causes of migration, the U.S. failure to meaningfully partner with LAC nations to promote mutually beneficial economic conditions and the expansion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Latin America and the geopolitical impact that’s having on our relationships.

---

Chapter One: Newsflash. We’re not the only America.

Sometimes it feels as though the only economies in the world that matter are the U.S. and China. At least, that feels like the dominant narrative on mainstream news and business reporting outlets. In fairness, U.S. GDP at the close of 2023 was around $27 trillion and China was $17 trillion. After that, the drop is substantial with Germany and Japan each reporting a little more than $4 trillion. So I’ll concede that there are levels to this economic game. If you add Brazil and Mexico together, they’re about the same size as Germany or Japan. To give an idea of scale, the entire LAC region—again that’s Latin America and the Caribbean—is somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5 trillion according to the World Bank.

This month, the World Bank released a comprehensive report on the LAC region that benchmarks its performance against other economies and speaks to some of the institutional challenges it faces post-COVID. Broadly, it shows that the LAC has recovered lost GDP since the pandemic, but that the overall recovery has been much slower than most other economies. It’s important to note that when we look at economic figures of the LAC in totality, Brazil and Mexico have a tendency to influence the figures due to the size and scale of their populations and economies. Brazil’s population is around 216 million and Mexico is about 128 million. For reference, the next most populous country is Colombia at 52 million.

Because Brazil and Mexico are projected to slow down in 2024, the overall forecast for the region was downgraded from 2.3% in September of 2023 to 1.6% as of March of this year.

One of the positive signs, however, has been the LAC’s ability to combat inflation, bringing it down to 3.6% as of the end of 2023 compared to a sustained average of 6% in the OECD nations. According to the World Bank:

“This encouraging performance is due to the dissipation of the supply shocks to food and fuel, as well as the easing of pandemic-induced supply chain congestion, and the energic monetary policy response of the monetary authorities.”

There are positive and negative stories to tell, of course. What’s tricky is that Brazil and Mexico really do have an outsized impact on economic data. For example, poverty has worsened since the pandemic in most LAC nations, but as a whole it improved because Mexico and Brazil have managed poverty programs better than their peers. This is particularly true in Brazil where Lula da Silva has reinstated the Bolsa Familia suite of public welfare programs that were a hallmark of his original tenure. In Mexico there was an increase in earnings and labor participation, which has helped bolster the lower end of the economic spectrum.

Conglomerates and Corruption

The report details some of the structural differences between LAC economies and perhaps what we’re used to in the U.S. and China by comparison. As much as the United States has seen its share of massive consolidation and giant companies—especially in the tech sector, protein manufacturing industry, the airline industry and media for example, and the PRC is still a dominant factor in central planning—Latin American industries are rife with large combinations and oligarchies that exercise control over economic and political decisions.

For example, the World Bank report specifically calls out the writ of amparo, which was designed to protect individual constitutional rights and really has no analogous feature in common law for us to compare. The report isolates amparo because powerful corporations have been using it for their benefit to tie up antitrust rulings. The World Banks says the practice is suddenly so widespread that consulting firms specializing in defending conglomerates are popping up all over Latin America. I suppose we could liken this to the impact of the Citizens United decision in the U.S. to protect corporate speech as a civil liberty.

This specific note highlights one of the biggest issues that pervades governance in the LAC. Special interest corporations have a far greater impact in the LAC than in other parts of the world, which has made many countries prone to systemic corruption. This corruption is expressed in different ways throughout the region.

Ecuador, for example, has been infiltrated by international drug cartels most notably from Albania. Few countries in the LAC escaped the corrupt labor and environmental practices of large corporations such as the notorious United Fruit Company, one of the most ruthless monopolies in modern history.

Figures like Carlos Slim loom large over Mexican economic affairs, though Slim appears to have had a reasonable working relationship and understanding with the Obrador administration. In Mexico there is a delicate dance between tycoons like Slim, the powerful drug cartels, administrative state and increasing influence of the Mexican military over civilian affairs.

And then, there’s the hundred year miss on the part of the United States to fully appreciate and recognize the potential of the Latin American economies and natural resources on our own economy.

And that’s what brings us to the matter at hand.

We’ve spoken at length about our nefarious interventions and colonial behavior in nearly every Latin American and Caribbean country over the past 100 years. Suffice it to say, we’ve been a terrible big sibling. Not since the brief experiment of dollar diplomacy under the Taft administration has there been a coordinated and comprehensive economic policy toward Latin America. And, no, NAFTA doesn’t count.

It’s impossible to say what the state of affairs in Latin America would be had we pursued true partnerships rather than a combination of neocolonialism and neoliberalism. And that doesn’t touch on the ideological-based military interventions during the Cold War era, which destabilized much of Central America and the Caribbean and parts of South America; a philosophy that pervades State Department thinking today as evidenced by our sanctions policy toward Cuba and Venezuela—though the latter is beginning to thaw—and our tendency to intervene in electoral politics.

Old habits die hard.

Conditions for Economic Success

If you think about the extraordinary conditions required to make an economy like the United States perform so far beyond every other nation on the planet, it’s quite remarkable. You need:

• A competent labor force.
• An educated population.
• Diverse natural resources.
• Robust transportation infrastructure.
• Access to ports and waterways.
• A stable government.
• Competent bureaucrats.
• A reliable legal system.
• A universal regulatory framework.
• And an established banking system.

My feelings on the abuses of the capitalist system aside, the U.S. economy is a complex marvel. Outside of these internal building blocks upon which any economy rests is an equally complex web of human and financial transactions that facilitate the movement of goods, capital, labor and services. It’s here the United States and other mature so-called liberal economies have gorged themselves and where our story takes hold.

---

Chapter Two: Conquest.

In A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, author Alan McPherson encapsulates the U.S. relationship with Latin America.

“Economic goals were present in almost all interventions, but sometimes in abstract, indirect ways. In the Mexican War and filibustering expeditions, land acquisition was a central motif, and large U.S. landowners and slaveholders were cheerleaders for war. But most U.S. citizens were more concerned with national greatness and racial hierarchies. The ‘liberation’ of Cuba in 1898 was even less economic, since sugar producers were divided and would only later recognize the advantages of acquiring Cuban lands. Cold War interventions, meanwhile, were economic only in that they aimed to protect capitalism - but, with the exception of United Fruit in Guatemala and copper companies in Chile, not specific capitalists. The apex of U.S. economic motives came with the rash of small interventions and large occupations in the first third of the twentieth century. To be sure, this speaks to the importance of economic motives such as land purchases, tariff revisions, acquisitions of markets abroad, and extensions of Wall Street loans. But even in that overtly imperialist era, interventions such as the Punitive Expedition had next to no economic rationale.”

I love this explanation because it describes the imperial and paternalistic relationship between the U.S. and the LAC. Looking back it seems so obvious that a coordinated regional and hemispheric effort to build mature and fair trade relationships would have inured to the benefit of both the U.S. and Latin America. Instead, we largely ignored it and built a Rube Goldberg network of economic relationships constructed around false foreign policy narratives, racialized world views and exploitation.

Much of the focus of this piece is on Central and South America, leaving the Caribbean nations to the side. Through an economic lens, the contributions of the Caribbean nations to trade tend to be small and narrow. Exports such as sugar, gold, certain alcohols and fossil fuels and industry drivers like tourism and financial havens are all sectors of influence in the Caribbean. But again, the impact on the regional or global trade infrastructure is minimal.

So let’s zoom out to examine the economic characteristics of some of the larger Latin American nations to understand exactly where they fit into the global economic portrait.

Brazil

As the largest economy in South America, Brazil’s export profile is diverse. Its primary exports include agricultural products like soybeans, beef, poultry, and coffee. Additionally, Brazil is a significant exporter of iron ore, which is vital for the steel industry. The country also exports aircrafts, automobiles, and other manufactured goods.

Honorable mention goes to the whole of the Amazon, largely located in Brazil for generating one of the most important natural resources for the planet: Oxygen.

Argentina

Another agricultural powerhouse, Argentina’s top exports include soybeans, corn, wheat, and beef. Additionally, Argentina is known for its automotive industry, exporting vehicles and automobile parts to various countries.

Chile

Chile is one of the world’s largest producers of copper. Other important exports include fruits (such as grapes, apples, and avocados), fish and seafood, and wine.

Mexico

Mexico has a diverse profile. Its top exports include automobiles, electronics, machinery, and petroleum products. The automotive industry is particularly significant, with Mexico being a major exporter of vehicles and automotive parts to the United States and other countries. Additionally, Mexico exports a substantial amount of crude oil and refined petroleum products.

Colombia

Colombia is known for its exports of coffee, which is one of the country’s most iconic products. Other important exports include petroleum, coal, and cut flowers. Colombia is also becoming increasingly known for its exports of fruits such as bananas, avocados, and tropical fruits.

Peru

Peru’s economy is heavily dependent on mining, with copper, gold, and zinc being some of its top exports. The country is also a significant exporter of agricultural products such as grapes, avocados, and asparagus. Additionally, Peru exports fish and seafood, particularly anchovies and fishmeal.

Costa Rica

While smaller in comparison to some of its neighbors, Costa Rica has a growing high-tech manufacturing sector and is known for its exports of medical devices, microchips, semiconductors and electronic components. Additionally, Costa Rica exports agricultural products such as bananas, pineapples, and coffee.

Bolivia

Also on the smaller end of the scale you have countries like Bolivia, which has enormous lithium deposits and is grappling with the regulations and infrastructure involved in bringing this critical mineral to market to satisfy our growing demand for lithium batteries.

Point being, Latin America is a source of abundance with its own dynamic and complex architecture that are challenged by systemic corruption and the influence of unchecked conglomerates. These circumstances have been exacerbated by U.S. attitudes towards Latin America as a whole, seeing it as some underdeveloped region that exists to exploit rather than partner with.

Interventions

When we think about economic policies and circumstances that factor into the root causes of migration, there are a few obvious ones. We can argue about causation versus correlation, but there’s a serious discussion to be had about the impact of U.S. foreign policy and trade policy in the Americas. How much did NAFTA contribute to inequality in Mexico? What were the long-term consequences of U.S. sanctions against the Chavez-Maduro regimes in Venezuela. Or our obsession with Cuba since the ‘59 revolution? Why did we pursue industrial relationships with China across the world instead of fostering them closer to home? Did our interventions into elections in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama and Nicaragua create permanent barriers to building a comprehensive industrial and trade policy throughout Latin America?

The best parts are the fun names we come up with:

• Operations Mongoose and Zapata - Cuba, 1961.
• Operation Power Pack - Dominican Republic, 1965.
• Operation Urgent Fury - Grenada, 1983.
• Operation Blast Furnace - Bolivia, 1986.
• Operation Just Cause - Panama, 1989.
• Operation Uphold Democracy - Haiti, 1994.
• Operation Secure Tomorrow - Haiti, 2004.

That’s just a smattering of the interventions, funded guerrilla operations and outright coups we’ve carried out or participated in over the years.

Point being, whether it’s through economic warfare or outright war, U.S. neoliberal policies have contributed to economic outflows and destabilization in developing nations throughout the world. A study by Pablo González Casanova showed that 41 African nations, 23 Asian countries and 32 LAC nations have all experienced net capital transfers to developed countries throughout the so-called neoliberal period. We see, we extract.

Washington Consensus

Carol Wise, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, recently published a book titled Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out on) China’s International Development Strategy. In it she examines the impact of Chinese investments into the LAC and how this relationship has begun to transform the economic outlook for several nations, albeit to varying degrees. It’s fascinating to think that the United States has ceded this territory to the PRC considering the basic geography. But as Wise notes:

“Not only would there be no equivalent of the Marshall Plan for Latin America, but also, from the early 1950s on, US attention toward the LAC region would turn narrowly on the imperative to block the spread of communism to the Western Hemisphere.”

The intense myopia of U.S. Cold War foreign policy essentially turned the entire LAC into a giant economic blind spot for the United States, with the possible exception of NAFTA and the reimagined version under Trump, the USMCA.

This lines up with previous episodes we’ve done on Latin America, most specifically on the so-called Washington Consensus. Recall this was the term coined by economist John Williamson to describe the U.S. overarching policy toward the LAC comprised of ten main points:

1. Lower borrowing to keep debt to GDP ratios low.

2. Move away from subsidies to long-term investments like education, healthcare and infrastructure.

3. Tax reform to broaden the tax base.

4. Allowing interest rates to be determined by the markets.

5. Allowing currency to float freely under a unified exchange rate.

6. Opening up trade by lifting restrictions and utilizing standard but nominal tariffs instead.

7. Allow direct foreign investment.

8. Privatizing state owned and controlled enterprises.

9. Abolish regulations that restrict competition but allow for prudent oversight.

10. Develop and secure property rights.

The analysis we offered previously was that Williamson wasn’t offering a policy prescription, rather he was broadly describing attitudes that informed our general policies throughout the neoliberal period; policies that benefited U.S. corporate activities by exploiting LAC markets to our advantage.

Much in the way the IMF has been criticized for incentivizing social austerity programs in return for debt service, U.S. economic policy has been intertwined with our foreign policy, which is to say that we basically impose our will through bi-lateral agreements to extract the resources we need, preferably through the auspices of multinational corporations. And if we don’t get what we want, we simply look elsewhere.

It’s a trade policy that amounts to “my way or go fuck yourself.”

Author Tad DeLay, whom we interviewed in last week’s Phone A Friend, offers a current example of our exploitative policy toward Latin America in his book Future of Denial where he talks about zones for employment and economic development in countries like Honduras.

“ZEDEs are subject to Honduran military authority, but they are, as the immigration researcher Todd Miller explains: ‘Autonomous zones run by a technical secretary appointed by a committee that is in many ways separate from the sovereign country from which it was carved…zones each have their own laws and judicial systems, and their own government, serving the principles of free-market capitalism.’ Overseeing the creation of these zones stood a committee of right-wingers including Grover Norquist and Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, who predicted ‘Central America could soon become—as southern China has been—the fastest-growing economic region in the world.’”

These autonomous zones are the perfect allegory for our entire approach to the LAC. Give us what we need, do not interfere. Exploit whoever and whatever you need to and we’ll look the other way. No rules. No regulations. No problem. If your government gets too involved, let us know and we’ll back the opposition in the next election.

---

Chapter Three: Belts, Roads and Blinders.

One of the things that makes Latin America ripe for exploitation is an economic phenomenon known as the Resource Curse. Because much of the LAC was subjected to colonial exploits throughout its history, even before U.S. interventions, political and economic infrastructure was slow to develop. The economic conditions that we described in Chapter One that undergirded the success of the U.S. and European economies, never fully materialized under Latin American regimes that developed in fits and starts. While there are ongoing efforts to create a unified trade and tariff architecture to streamline economic growth as a region, most of the LAC nations still operate on bilateral agreements and are subject to convulsions depending upon the political regimes in power.

Thus, many of the major economies relied heavily on their primary natural resources such as fossil fuels, agricultural products and minerals. Sole sourced economic models such as these develop in a paradoxical fashion that are extremely price sensitive. For example, oil rich Venezuela has thus far failed to develop a diverse economy that might otherwise insulate it from commodity price shocks. This is what is meant by the Resource Curse. A corollary to this phenomenon is often called the Dutch Disease, though there’s a slight difference between the two.

Resource Curse: The concept of Resource Curse usually extends to formerly colonized countries that were unable to develop holistically and independently, with much of the gain from commodity extraction going to a small fraction of elites in the home country and the economic benefit to the colonizing forces that extract them. This results in a fragile nation state almost exclusively reliant on the whims of both the colonizers and the elites that run the country.

Dutch Disease: Basically, an extreme focus on a single commodity within an underdeveloped economic and political structure robs other industries from much needed attention, regulation and investments required to foster growth. For example, pouring resources into extracting fossil fuels robs the manufacturing and agriculture sectors of capital and attention.

In both cases, when commodity prices—which are global and out of the control of the producing countries—experience negative volatility it has a drag on the entire economy and all the functioning tributaries that flow from such activity such as social services, education and other sectors that rely on revenues and taxes generated by the primary activities.

The paternalistic and colonizing attitude inherent in U.S. foreign policy, both political and economic, means that we haven’t been as much of a productive and consistent partner as we could have been in building the necessary infrastructure to promote positive trade. One nation that understood this and deliberately took advantage of this attitude is China.

Belt and Road Initiative

The PRC’s interest in the LAC predates Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, which usually garners the most attention. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the BRI is a “vast collection of development and investment initiatives…originally devised to link East Asia and Europe through physical infrastructure. In the decade since, the project has expanded to Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, significantly broadening China’s economic and political influence.”

But these are the more recent eye-catching investment projects that have begun to worry the U.S. state department and put foreign policy hawks on the defensive, manifesting in the anti-China rhetoric we see today. Infrastructure investments under the BRI sometimes take the shape of classic infrastructure projects like bridges, tunnels and roads, but often they facilitate transformational energy and mining projects. Dollars and debt is one thing. Natural resources is another entirely if you’re looking to get the attention of policy makers in the United States.

It’s important to understand the economic arrangement between China and the LAC because it further clarifies how inept the United States has been for a hundred plus years in fostering authentic partnerships in Latin America.

In fact, Chinese investment into Latin America is so long standing that it’s beginning to cool off. As Carol Wise writes, “As the process of deepening China-LAC relations has now entered its third decade, outflows of Chinese FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) to the region have leveled off. Some of this leveling is due to China’s own slowing growth but also to its weak record of due diligence. Environmental transgressions, conflicts with local communities, and numerous allegations of old-fashioned corruption have also caught up with Chinese investors.”

So China’s experience hasn’t been all wine and roses. But it’s fascinating that the United States has only recently awakened to the reality that our supposed primary competitor on the other side of the world has been investing heavily into neighboring countries right under our noses for three decades.

Reading state department position papers one might have the impression that China has suddenly invaded our territory and is acting nefariously and with ideological motives. Another example that we’re incapable of breaking from the Cold War mindset. In fact, China appears to have very little interest in fanning ideological flames when it comes to their investments. And this goes back quite some time.

Again, as Wise notes, “When a homegrown Maoist guerrilla insurgency openly launched its own people’s war in Peru in 1980 Beijing wanted nothing to do with it.” And more recently Wise writes, “The bottom line is that China has brokered loans-for-oil deals with Ecuador and Venezuela but does not intend to spend political capital in support of their anti-US follies.”

There are a couple of important concepts related to Chinese involvement in Latin America to unpack before we close with a conversation about immigration.

First off, China does not have a one-size-fits-all approach to investing in Latin America. Sometimes they come to the table with low interest rate loans that have fewer strings attached than the ones offered by the IMF. That has made China a de facto global infrastructure development bank. Other times they are investing into physical infrastructure projects that lean heavily on imported Chinese labor, which is a double edged sword for their partners but at least the money flows. The one thing every investment shares in common, however, is the requirement that the partner nation recognize China over Taiwan. That’s the price of admission all must pay to do business with the PRC.

Some of the more stable nations such as Chile, Costa Rica and Peru have worked diligently to reform and regulate the capital markets and streamline trade agreements, tariffs, labor protections, environmental regulations and intellectual property rights. Essentially modernizing their economic systems and aligning them with the expectations of the U.S. and China. The results, according to Wise, are evident. “Ironically, the biggest overall gains have been achieved by the three small open economies considered here, two commodity exporters (Chile and Peru) and one aspiring export-led industrializer (Costa Rica).”

Wise and other observers note that the one thing that separates Costa Rica from the rest of Latin America is its insistence on the highest environmental standards.

Ironically, the country with the most potential upside that hasn’t been able to capitalize on FDI from China and an extremely close relationship with the United States is Mexico. In fairness to the latter, NAFTA and the USMCA were extremely favorable to U.S. corporations. The former, however, is a bit of a head scratcher.

Despite the proximity to the largest consumer base on the planet, Mexico somehow allowed China to crowd out Mexican exports. Wise attributes this to China “actively deploying public policy in the expansion, upgrading, and infusion of technology into its manufacturing sector.” Essentially, NAFTA could have been a clear victory given the inflow of investment and desire among U.S. corporations to exploit the Mexican labor force, but it failed to scaffold the opportunity through public policy and simply allowed U.S. corporations and Mexican oligarchs to line their pockets.

---

Chapter Four: The Economic Causes of Migration.

Mexico has had a center left administration under Obrador and is likely going to continue this way in the upcoming election under Claudia Sheinbaum. It has the largest inflow of migrants into the United States. Venezuela exists under the autocratic rule of Maduro and has forced hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans to flee to Colombia, the United States and other locales. Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru are mostly conservative. Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras are considered liberal.

Point being, there is no direct correlation between political ideology and migration, broadly speaking.

Climate change, however, is certainly having an impact on migratory patterns throughout the world and Latin America is no exception. According to the Congressional Research Service:

“Some rural families already had been selling off land and migrating when the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck the region in 2020. Those crises contributed to gross domestic product (GDP) contractions of 9.0% in Honduras, 7.9% in El Salvador, and 1.8% in Guatemala in 2020. According to the World Food Program, the number of food insecure people in the Northern Triangle nearly tripled from 2.2 million in 2019 to about 6.4 million in late 2021; an estimated 5.5 million Guatemalans and Hondurans were food insecure as of late 2023.”

Climate change is arguably more of an economic crisis than a political one, though there are overlaps to be sure. But climate change is indiscriminate and many of the Latin American and Caribbean countries are precariously situated to receive the brunt of severe changes in weather patterns and extreme conditions.

The World Bank provides the most comprehensive economic analysis of the LAC each year in a report referred to as the LACER report, which stands for Latin America and the Caribbean Economic Review. The most recent LACER reveals that the region is the most violent in the world, which is “an impediment not only to the welfare of citizens, but the instability discourages investment, both domestic and foreign. Further, much of the violence is being driven by illicit trade, especially in narcotics, which is expanding into countries previously immune.”

It also cites tax policy, the cost of capital, poorly educated workforce and immature infrastructure as major reasons that nearshoring—i.e. partnerships with the U.S. manufacturing sector—hasn’t produced the type of growth that China experienced over the past three decades.

Regardless of politics and ideology, myriad structural economic factors plague the LAC and have prevented it from fully realizing the potential of its vast natural resources and labor pool. These conditions have made it susceptible to a level violence and corruption that forces populations to uproot and move. It’s never just as simple as the headlines make it out to be. And the United States is largely, but not entirely to blame for this phenomenon.

Capitalism’s Refugees

Latin American nations went from colonial properties to independent states gradually over two centuries only to wind up back in a neocolonial economic trap called neoliberalism. But let’s take a step back from our clinical diagnosis of economic conditions to take a wider view. Latin America failed to follow the global capitalist model example set by the United States and Western Europe. And it’s too segmented to have crafted a centralized planning model like we see in China.

So let me be extremely clear about this point.

Just because the LAC failed to follow the liberal trade rules established then abandoned by the U.S. and the U.K. in particular doesn’t mean it failed. Nor does it suggest that it’s somehow separate and apart from the capitalist model. It just hasn’t fit the capitalist oppressor model.

Recall Rosa Luxemberg’s keen economic observation about Marx’s capital model. Marx hypothesized that if labor was the central ingredient in creating the exchange value of a commodity then displacement of workers due to industrialization would therefore reduce profitability for owners. Luxemburg, however, foresaw capitalist imperialism. She understood that capitalists would forever pursue cheap labor and thus partner with nation states to exploit global labor through corporate colonialism. She was right. In this way, Latin America has been the perfect partner for U.S. and now Chinese capitalist tendencies.

Climate change, violence, repression and instability have contributed to excessive immigration. They are also the natural and necessary byproducts of capitalism.

The influx of migrants on the streets of New York City that we covered in Part One are refugees of capitalism. In Part Two we spoke of the workers in Mexico who flee violence and financial hardship.

These are refugees of capitalism.

The poverty stricken families that try to escape the cartels in Ecuador, the state sponsored violence in Venezuela, or gang violence in Honduras…

These are refugees of capitalism.

The World Bank, the IMF, the U.S. Congress, Biden and Trump administrations, European Union and PRC would all have you believe that the answer lies in the free markets. And they’re right to the extent that it could work for countries like Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico. They’re big enough to open their markets to the corporate class and pursue the buzz words of the Washington Consensus in their own right. But it would be at the expense of other nations as Luxemburg so rightly predicted. And in doing so it will shift the refugee and asylum seeking crisis to other parts of Latin America and the world.

Because that’s what capitalism demands.

Perhaps the conditions are indeed ripe for an economic revolution in Latin America. It’s just not the market revolution the global institutions insist upon. The resources required to transform the global economy and energy infrastructure are beneath the feet of Brazilians and Bolivians. Costa Rica has developed a high tech sector while maintaining its environmental protection standards. Put another way, a social democracy, democratic socialist state and environmental beacon are lighting the way. There is no immigration crisis tied to nations that put people and the planet before profit.

Here endeth the series.

Resources

• U.S. Government Accountability Office: U.S. Immigration Courts See a Significant and Growing Backlog
  
• Associated Press: With beds scarce and winter bearing down, a tent camp grows outside NYC’s largest migrant shelter

• Associated Press: With beds scarce and winter bearing down, a tent camp grows outside NYC’s largest migrant shelter
• NYC.gov: NYC Shelter Information
• The City: What Exactly Is a Sanctuary City and What Does That Mean for NYC?
• Gothamist: Nearly 80% of New Yorkers back right to shelter, poll finds
• New York City Police Department: NYPD Announces January 2024 Citywide Crime Statistics
• The New York Times: National Guard and State Police Will Patrol the Subways and Check Bags
• NYC.gov: Seven Major Felony Offenses
• City & State New York: As migrant families receive 60 day eviction notices, advocates rally to ditch the policy
• New York Immigration Coalition
• WNYC: WNYC's Suds & Civics project brings political dialogue to laundromats across the NY metro area
• American Immigration Council: CBP One: An Overview
• Pew Research Center: Migrant encounters at U.S.-Mexico border hit record high at end of 2023
• Human Rights Watch: Venezuela: Events of 2023
• Migration Policy Institute: Shifting Patterns and Policies Reshape Migration to U.S.-Mexico Border in Major Ways in 2023 
• The Baffler: Enigmas of Ecuador | Pablo Ospina Peralta 
• WhiteHouse.gov: FACT SHEET: The United States and Central America: Honoring Our Commitments
• Forbes: 2024: A New Age For Venezuela-U.S. Relations 
• Gobierno de Mêxico: México y Venezuela estrechan cooperación en materia migratoria
• El País: United States reactivates mass deportations of Venezuelans to relieve pressure on the border with Mexico 
• Council on Foreign Relations: Central America’s Turbulent Northern Triangle 
• Council on Foreign Relations: Climate Change and Regional Instability in Central America 
• Congressional Research Service: Central American Migration: Root Causes and U.S. Policy 
• Vice: The Violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by the US
• Time: Welcome to the Immigration Election 
• Pew Research Center: How Americans View the Situation at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Its Causes and Consequences
• Brookings: The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed
• The Hill: Manchin: Failed border bill factored into decision not to run for White House
• DW News: Ecuador raid on embassy in Mexico
• Yahoo Finance:Border crisis might be boon for economy 
• WOLA: Migration in the Americas: 'A root causes strategy only for Central America falls far short of addressing the type of migration we are seeing'
• Congressional Budget Office: Director’s Statement on the Budget and Economic Outlook for 2024 to 2034 
• WOLA
• El Pais: Mexican Tycoon Carlos Slim Takes Stock of the last six years…
• Congressional Research Service: Central American Migration
• U.S. State Department: Dollar Diplomacy
• World Population Review: Country Rank by GDP
• World Bank: Latin America and the Caribbean Economic Review (LACER); April, 2024 
• Council on Foreign Relations: China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative

Book Love

• Alan McPherson: A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean
• Carol Wise: Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out on) China’s International Development Strategy
• Tad DeLay: Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change
• Imperialism, Neoliberalism, And Social Struggles in Latin America

UNFTR Episode Resources

• Immigration Nation: A Crisis of Our Own Design.
• Quickie: Fox in the Outhouse. Invasion, Immigration & Inflation.
• The Washington Consensus: Consensus is not consent.