Philosophical and Pragmatic Links Between US Foreign Policy and Immigration Policy

The Case of

Bridget O’Neill November 21, 2018 1

In the American imaginary, discourse surrounding both foreign policy conduct and immigration are parallel: both are vague and self-idealizing frameworks. Foreign policy decisions reduce global enemies to figures of external evil and posit American troops as saviors; military myths purposefully leave little room for criticism. There is a disconnect between self- idealizing rhetoric in American foreign policy and the specific and often covert violence carried out under broad, moralistic justifications. Similarly, despite the popular categorization of the US as a “nation of immigrants,” this glorified title implies a fictitious timeless homogeneity; it offers no historical texture to a constant renegotiation of who belongs and who doesn’t. The lack of specificity or consensus regarding an immigration philosophy (more concretely, the lack of any codified criteria to evaluate asylum applications with) is exactly what enables immigration policy to become deployed in specific and disparate ways. Within the nation of immigrants, immigrants exist in hyper-policed political limbo. The idealized version of American immigration and its violent reality are imagined as separate entities, even though the latter underpins the former. The same distance is used to avoid acknowledging that foreign invasion destabilizes countries and drives the emigration that Americans subsequently police: establishing a causal link implies responsibility. The ideological web is held intact only because the romanticized conceptualizations do not break down: historical reinforcement have posited these claims as crucial to American national identity. These myths are believed with sincerity -- by necessity.

There can be no admittance of culpability, the fact that the relationship between the two is not an apologetic one is what keeps this complex intact.

Existing between a cloudy idea of citizenship and immigration in the public sphere is a web of legal red tape. The relationship between foreign policy and immigration policy (and, in large part, the presence of immigration itself) is best demonstrated by a long history of invasion 2 and displacement in Latin America. The rhetorical distance maintained within and between these two philosophies can be traced in a particularly nuanced fashion by examining the situation of

Salvadoran immigrants in the 1990s, and the ways in which other Latin American immigrants were legally categorized comparatively. In other words, there is a relationship between how effectively a country is portrayed as host to an externally located threat and the degree to which its migrants are granted asylum. There is historical precedent for the lack of a cohesive American immigration philosophy, which creates space for propagating foreign policy justifications in written into immigration law.

Immigration as a Contentious Conceptualization

The construction of immigration philosophy as a self-glorifying myth--vague enough to enable personal projections to ease any potential cognitive dissonance--is traceable in legal precedent. In her essay Carved From the Inside Out, Elizabeth Cohen explains an internally- focused history of negotiating citizenship as the country grew. The process was largely ignorant of immigration because the conversation instead focused on how to exclude a diversifying populace as the US expanded territorially and later struggled to limit political participation to white, property-owning men. The painful toggling between integrating and excluding Native

Americans, Black Americans, and women, among others, created a norm of second-class citizenship. This debate took center stage, and “Americans did not produce a philosophy of immigration alongside their philosophy of citizenship.”1 Cohen anchors the legitimation for

1 Elizabeth Cohen, “Carved from the Inside Out: Immigration and America’s Public Philosophy of Citizenship,” in Debating Immigration, ed. Carol M. Swain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36.

3 preserving immigrants and marginalized native-born populations as outside the core American populace in the legal precedent of Calvin’s Case.

In brief, Calvin’s Case (1608) discussed the citizenship status of constituents after King

James, a Scot, claimed the British throne. The ruling granted citizenship to those born after the joining of the two kingdoms, on soil considered to be British dominion. Those born before the unification, before King James’ rule, were offered a newly developed naturalization process.

Thus, the case manipulated both jus soli (citizenship based on birth right) and jus sanguinis

(citizenship based on blood/ancestry) to selectively ascribe citizenship. Sections of the population were excluded despite birthright based on their previous nationality, “the Irish in particular were left in the netherworld between full and noncitizenship.”2 This arbitrary exclusion, now legalized, was what later allowed Chief Justice Taney to avoid granting citizenship based on birthright to free blacks in the Dred Scott v. Stanford (1857).3 In drawing an analogy between the status of the Irish after Calvin’s Case and the situation of free blacks in the

United States, the Supreme Court was able to circumvent jus soli (citizenship based on birthright) and instead institute a racialized conception of citizenship.

Thus, Calvin’s Case offered legal precedent for an arbitrary process of granting citizenship to those already living within the country. This “meshed effectively with our own commitment to racial and other internal classifications to produce an understanding of citizenship that was not attentive to questions of immigration.”4 While historically, US law has

2 Cohen, 43.

3 Cohen, 43.

4 Cohen, 33. 4 slowly moved toward more egalitarian constructions of citizenship, subtler efforts persist today to prioritize the rights of some citizens over others. Perhaps the most straightforward example would be efforts to restrict the voting rights of black citizens in the American South, where white

(and more likely conservative) voting rights are prioritized.5

Determining what it is to be American has not been the “nation of immigrants” mantra that is preached in the abstract. Instead, it has been an argument in which belonging is racially determined. Therefore, the most applicable legacy of Calvin’s Case was that:

A range of circumstances can change and, in so doing, alter the contours of the population considered eligible for citizenship…it therefore framed questions of citizenship for the British and Americans who looked to it in ways that paid more attention to idiosyncratic and internally generated racial distinctions than to immigration. This functioned well within the unique context of the British Empire and fed into a long- standing American tradition of legalized racial citizenship hierarchies.6

Calvin’s Case is thus not the cause of an American tradition of racializing belonging, but instead a key component in legalizing this uncomfortable ideology.

While this legal framework lends itself most readily to internal constructions of second- class citizenship, it must be noted that what is relevant here is a construction of quasi-citizenship and thus a precedent for degrees of belonging (or perhaps more appropriately, degrees of exclusion). For the purpose of this paper, it would be arrogant to assume that a conversation on citizenship can be conflated with one on immigration. Part of the preservation of American self- idealization is the belief that the rest of the world is vying for membership. It would also be

5 Russ Bynum and Christina A. Cassidy, “Tight Race in Georgia Shines Light on Voting Restrictions,” , November 10, 2018.

6 Cohen, 44-45. 5 ignorant to assume that quasi-legal status comes anywhere close to citizenship; the experience is one more akin to legalized modes of marginalization. Nonetheless, Calvin’s Case illuminates racial borders as integral to conceptualizing an American constituency.

This unpalatable, discriminatory structure is hidden under a public discourse on immigration that is romanticized and purposefully vague. This ambiguity, instead of questioning a pro-immigrant national mantra (the American Dream calls out directly to immigrants, the idea of the US as a “Melting Pot,” a country founded upon religious freedom, a land of opportunity, and so on), displaces the moral ambiguity onto the body of the immigrant. The questioning is directed to the individual’s moral character, origin, and legal status rather than questions about the moral obligation of the American host.

The empirical grounds for crafting the specifics of immigration policy are masked by a moral conception of a ‘nation of immigrants.’ Instead, immigration policy offers (often modest) refuge only to those who can perform as refugees within the American image on a global scale: it is here where immigration and foreign policy most notably intersect.

While we encouraged the world to give us their tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, we were not particularly interested in ferreting out anyone who might have been huddling voiceless in the dark recesses of poverty or political oppression. Only under the threat of appearing hypocritical, and with the incentive of weakening our enemies, did the federal government institute a policy of refuge, and the terms of that policy limited the right to those fleeing communism.7

The two narratives reinforce one another in tandem. Calvin’s Case, by establishing degrees of belonging along racial lines and circumventing national immigration criteria, enables hyper-

7 Cohen, 37. 6 policing to occur unchecked by any overarching philosophy. In its place, a romantic view of immigration elevates the US to the status of ‘savior’ regardless of contradictory policies. The policing would not be possible without such a mask; the policing is done in the name of the mask. It is the sincerity with which the myth of an American savior is believed that allows the hypocritical policy to exist.

As aforementioned, immigration and foreign policy are intertwined in their parallel structures of patriotic myths, which create a cyclical relationship in which American intervention helps to create refugees that must play into these myths should displaced people seek asylum in the US. Before this cycle itself can be traced, a better understanding of the corresponding military myths is necessitated.

American Militarism: The Counterpart of Building the American Savior

The scope and historicity of the US military give it a kind of gilded, elevated status--a symbol of the nation itself. The elevation is so fundamental to the functioning of the nation that it is sacrilegious to question it. While of course not every American believes in the religiosity of the military to such an extreme, there is sufficient support for this narrative to continue operating as a political tool. “Even among citizens oblivious to or rejecting its Christological antecedents, widespread, almost automatic support for this doctrine of American Exceptionalism persists. In that sense, the continuities of American history are striking and impressive…an abiding religious sensibility has informed America’s image of itself and of its providential mission.”8 The religion, here, is the utmost belief in American values (namely, western democracy) as universally true

8 Andrew Bacevich. The New American Militarism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122

7 and holy. Militarism goes unchallenged not only out of taboo, but due to an internalization of military myths:

Uniquely among the great powers in all of world history, ours (we insist) is an inherently values-based approach to policy…We have it on good authority that the ideals we espouse represent universal truths, valid for all times…To state the matter bluntly, Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.9

The measure of national greatness takes place largely outside national borders, keeping the details of the war abstract and the victories concrete, thus affirming rather than undermining patriotism.

In the Central American case, complicity was enabled by the American public’s increased distance from the war’s casualties; the use of surrogate armies meant that foreign policy decisions held no consequence in terms of American lives. There is an extension of

American militarism and its accompanying myths even if the troops are not deployed. Here, too, there is notable parallelism in the divides among the American populace and the practice of disposability with which American foreign policy strategists treat non-US citizens. The armed forces are sourced predominantly from underprivileged classes of Americans--even during the draft, those in school could be exempt from duty. An all-volunteer army has solidified this divide: “As with so many other aspects of life in contemporary America, military service has become strictly a matter of individual choice. On that score, beginning with the Vietnam War and continuing on to the present day, members of the elite, regardless of political persuasion,

9 Bacevich, 2. 8 have by and large opted out.”10 The expendability of the lives that feed America’s military machine has parallels in the expendability of the lives of non-US citizens—people, moreover, that the US claims to liberate from their tyrannical regimes.

The insulation of the military as voluntary has justified these bodies as willing to be put at risk; it has also created a military that the elite can circumvent. This disconnect makes it easier to keep war and its losses an abstract and thus glorifiable entity. The use of surrogate armies only increases the ease: without putting American bodies under fire, there is much greater leeway for military action. By avoiding an American death toll, the avoidance of public outrage is much easier.

Surrogate armies or otherwise, American militarism embodies an infatuation with the exertion of power as a measure of national superiority. This exercise portrays the military as an embodiment of pure American values. In other words, the evil that threatens it must be located firmly outside our borders. This dislocation of blame in wartime political rhetoric is omnipresent.

President George W. Bush, regarded as warrior-in-chief, blatantly vowed that the US would “rid the world of evil;” implicit in this simple statement is that the US is exempt from any contamination.11 Yet the way in which this purity is proven domestically is through wars fought abroad.

This militaristic flexing has consequences beyond abstract affirmation. The long history of US interventions has served to bolster a narrative of American hegemony at others’ expense, a pattern that notably repeats itself in Latin America. Among these consequences is often a

10 Bacevich, 27.

11 Bacevich, 2. 9 correlative spike in immigrants to the US, fleeing domestic unrest that American soldiers, or foreign policy, had a hand in creating. Therein lies the juncture of two vicious patriotic narratives: those suffering at the expense of American militarism are displaced and left to appeal to Americans’ sense of their own heroic hospitality. For those who do succeed in appealing to these myths and are granted asylum or the like, the result is often a confrontation with a hyper- policed reality. The policing intensifies for undocumented immigrants.

The more threatened American militarism is by those it displaces, the greater the efforts to exclude these immigrants. Salvadorans have historically been trapped in a double-bind, inadvertently challenging both narratives by occupying the gap between them.

US Involvement in El Salvador

Latin America during the Cold War became contentious ideological terrain between capitalist democracy and communism; the US construed leftist movements in Latin America as national security threats. The proximity exacerbated fear, and the US stopped at nothing to quell these movements. In the of the 1980s, leftist revolutionaries pushed back against the incumbent alliance of “countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades--with US support--keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war. More than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting, most of them victims of the military and its death squads.”12 The internal power struggle pitted the FMLN -- a coalition of leftist parties -- against the ARENA, the US backed right-wing opposition.

The Salvadoran war was vicious in and of itself, but its intensity is inseparable from US involvement. While the US posited their own ideological bulwark of liberalism in opposition to

12 . “America’s Role in El Salvador’s Deterioration: Many Salvadorans stayed in the U.S. after a devastating earthquake. But other disasters in the country were man-made,” The Atlantic, January 2018. 10 communism, authoritarianism was certainly a preferable alternative to leftist regimes. The

ARENA therefore appealed to the American goal of creating stable anti-communist governments in Latin America, regardless of their dictatorial nature. “In the early ‘80s, El Salvador was receiving more such aid than any country except for Egypt and Israel, and the embassy staff was nearly as large as that in New Delhi. For Reagan, El Salvador was the place to draw the line in the sand against communism.”13 Billions of dollars of military and economic aid were funneled into backing and militarily training the right-wing regime. The culture this created for

Salvadorans is harrowing.

Joan Didion, in her essay Salvador, outlines the consequences for Salvadorans living amidst the violence. She juxtaposes scenes of desensitization to violence with heightened paranoia to illustrate the psychological terrorizing that occurs alongside the murders.

It occurred to me that there was a definite question about why a man and a woman might choose a well-known body dump for a driving lesson. This was one of a number of occasions…on which I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror.14

The ‘body-dump’ here refers to the “daily dumpings of bullet- and torture-riddled bodies” of those who spoke out against the right-wing regime.15 Her long-form narrative style explains the omnipresence of this acrid environment acutely, looping back to the ‘mechanism of terror’s’ mirrored function within the state of constant unease:

13 Bonner, “America’s Role in El Salvador’s Deterioration.”

14 Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 21.

15 Micah Uetricht and Branko Marcetic. “Remember : Thirty-five years ago this week, El Salvador’s US-backed soldiers carried out one of the worst massacres in the history of the Americas at El Mozote,” Jacobin Magazine, December 2016.

11

I became abruptly aware, in the light cast by a passing car, of two human shadows, silhouettes illuminated by the headlights and then invisible again…Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror.16

Didion gives shape to her claim that “terror is the given of the place” in a way that other accounts of the atrocities fall short of. A backdrop of terror is the standard; it is the stage upon which the more dramatic scenes of the war play out.

The most famous among these is the , in which over eight hundred civilians died at the hands of the Salvadoran National Guard--militants trained and funded by the

US; a surrogate American army. The lack of overt US troops only made it easier for the

American public to disengage. Yet it is hard to overstate the American active complicity in these human rights abuses:

At its height, the was giving over $1 million a day to the Salvadoran government in various forms of training, arms, military advising, and other aid in an attempt to prevent a Sandinista-style takeover by the FMLN and its supporters. “By the late 1980s,” Walter LaFeber writes, US aid “approached 100 percent of the Salvadoran government budget.17

The right-wing force was essentially a tiny elite whose backing came entirely from the US on a ruthless anticommunism strike; its legitimacy was wholly dependent on foreign aid rather than popular support. El Mozote was a small town of mostly Protestant Evangelicals, who tended to be averse to communism and thus had no reason to fear that they might be targets of the right-

16 Didion, 26.

17 Uetricht and Marcetic, “Remember El Mozote.” 12 wing “death squads.” Nonetheless, the town was invaded, and the slaughter was systematic and complete: first, the murder of the men, then the repeated raping and killing of the women, and lastly, a massacre of orphaned children. More than forty percent of the dead were younger than ten.18

The FMLN guerrilla groups invited Raymond Bonner of to cover this particularly visceral event--one whose most disturbing quality was that it was unique only in terms of concentrated numbers, but no exception in terms of brutality. of arrived a few days later as well. On January 27, 1982, the story ran on the front page of the Times--at the bottom. The main headline for the day was Reagan Vows to Keep

Tax Cuts.19 The discomfort caused by this revelation amounted to essentially a minor lapse in the government’s claim of proportionality of the threat of communism and the institutionalized terrorism inflicted on Salvadoran civilians.

In response to outcry from the burgeoning Central American peace movement, Congress required the administration to certify that the Salvadoran regime was making progress on upholding human rights in order to continue to receive US dollars…Following the publication of the articles detailing the massacre, the US embassy sent an official, Todd Greentree, to collect evidence at El Mozote for their own report on the incident. At the time, the human rights certification was being discussed in Congress; Greentree openly admitted to Danner years later, “The primary policy objective at the time was to get the certification through” — apparently no matter what the human rights situation was like on the ground.20

18 Uetricht and Marcetic, “Remember El Mozote.”

19 Raymond Bonner, “Massacre of Hundreds Reported in Salvador Village,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1982.

20 Uetricht and Marcetic, “Remember El Mozote.” 13

In July 1982, President Reagan issued a “certification that sufficient progress was being made in specified areas (‘human rights,’ and ‘land reform,’ and ‘the initiation of a democratic political process,’ phrases so remote in situ as to render them hallucinatory) to qualify El Salvador for continuing aid.”21 Bonner and Guillermoprieto’s reports were dismissed under Washington’s insistence that they were “parroting guerrilla propaganda.”22 The El Mozote massacre happened at the war’s outset, in 1981. The reporting was sufficiently dismissed with slander of the reporters as Marxist sympathizers in 1982. The war continued for another decade, until 1992, when the United Nations pushed the Salvadoran government to make some concessions and sign a peace agreement and instill a shaky civilian democracy atop a country pitted with body-dumps.

Migration Responses to the Salvadoran Civil War and the Performance of Refugees

Those displaced from El Salvador over the course of the war often sought asylum as refugees in the US, with little success:

Salvadorans awaiting asylum hearings do not fit neatly into a standard category of international migrants….Salvadorans do not hold refugee status in the United States…Legally sanctioned migrant identity for many Salvadorans has instead been defined by this series of federal programs that granted temporary status as individuals and families applied for asylum.23

Granting migrants legal status as refugees and the associated privileges would entrap the United

States in a position of recognizing the violence condoned in El Salvador as significant enough to produce political refugees. Cohen’s notion of a vague immigration imaginary has enabled the US

21 Didion, 38-39.

22 Uetricht and Marcetic, “Remember El Mozote.”

23 Alison Mountz, Richard Wright, Ines Miyares, and Adrian J. Bailey, “Lives in Limbo: Temporary Protected Status and Immigrant Identities,” Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 343.

14 to stray away from establishing a more empirical set of criteria for asylum applicants.

Salvadorans certainly fit the definition of refugee in Article 1 of the United Nations Convention of Refugees and Refugee Act of 1980, yet the US easily evades complying with international guidelines.24 Instead, the legal situation of Salvadoran immigrants shifted to the domestic sphere and became a series of disjointed policies that the public is largely unaware of. These policies are more of an attempt to preserve the image of the American savior than they are a legitimate offer of refuge for displaced people.

In the 1980s, the US Salvadoran immigrant population “increased nearly fivefold from

94,000 to 465,000.”25 With such a significant correlation between the escalation of violence in El

Salvador and the influx of immigrants, attempting to deny a causal relationship would be futile.

Ignoring this hypocrisy, “the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s denied the asylum petitions of 97 percent of Salvadorans and 98 percent of Guatemalans.”26 Guatemala was also enduring a 36-year civil war in which an incumbent oligarchy resisted leftist insurgencies. While the US did not fund their war efforts quite as drastically as El Salvador, the CIA was “intimately involved in equipping and training the Guatemalan security forces that murdered thousands of civilians” as a part of a classified operation. Guatemalan militant funding was increased during the Reagan administration, whereas it had previously been a hesitant due to the rampant human

24 Mountz et al, 343.

25 Aaron Terrazas, “Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 5, 2010.

26 Susanne Jones, “Guatemalan Migration in Times of Civil War and Post-War Challenges,” Migration Policy Institute, March 27, 2013.

15 rights violations.27 Thus, in many respects, the domestic situations were parallel, as were the subsequent emigration spikes and border policing.

By characterizing Salvadorans and Guatemalans as “economic migrants,” the US could deny asylum applications by denying that their respective governments’ human rights violations.

Due to the aforementioned congressional ban on providing foreign aid to governments carrying out gross human rights abuses -- and the insistence that the Salvadoran government did not qualify for this revocation of aid -- denying asylum applications became part of a larger foreign policy strategy. The administration relied on consistency in denying human rights abuses so that foreign aid could continue to fund a war against communism. Immigration law gave the attorney general and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials “wide discretion regarding bond, work authorization, and conditions of detention for asylum seekers, while immigration judges received individual ‘opinion letters’ from the State Department regarding each asylum application.”28 Asylum decisions under the Reagan administration had everything to do with advancing a larger anti-communism foreign policy agenda and little to do with the actual situations of the asylum applicants.

In the mid-1980s, amidst the mass denials of asylum applications, a group of Central

American advocates partnered with a coalition of American churches to sue the government. The immigration case rested upon the unjust influence of US foreign policy on the making of asylum decisions. The case did not argue that because the US had a hand in perpetuating the human

27 Douglas Farah, “Papers Show U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses,” Washington Post, March 11, 1999.

28 Susan Gzesh, “Central Americans and Asylum Policy in the Reagan Era,” Migration Policy Institute, April 1, 2006.

16 rights abuses that these migrants were fleeing, there might be a heightened responsibility to absorb those displaced by the violence. There was no claim of an additional obligation that might be considered in asylum applications, but merely a plea that political refugees be treated as such, regardless of the larger American investment in the war that created them.

The central claim was to decouple immigration decisions from foreign policy strategies.

In 1985, a coalition of American churches and Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants and activists launched American Baptist Church (ABC) v. Thornburgh, a class-action lawsuit against the INS and its patent agency, the Justice Department. The lawsuit rested upon a strategic framing of refugee identity:

Salvadoran immigrant activists realized it was not enough to educate North Americans about what was happening in El Salvador and US government complicity in the human rights violations…Central Americans’ organizing practices also had to be adapted to dominant US norms, values, and perceptions of how North Americans saw themselves and saw Third World “others.” (In essence, these practices had to appeal to liberal ideals.) The narrative construct of the “refugee” met these needs …The term “refugee” has a legal dimension that countered accusations of lawlessness and was therefore central to the movement’s claim to legitimacy. In other words, activists suggested that since the US government was failing to live up to its moral and legal obligations to grant political asylum to those deserving it (i.e. Central American refugees), then it was the obligation of congregations to set the moral example by doing so.29

To obtain the crucial support of Christian communities in the United States -- a force the federal government would have a much harder time dismissing -- Central American activists had to perform a kind of voicelessness in order to be heard. Central American migrants thus aptly read

29 Hector Perla and Susan Bibler Coutin, “Legacies and Origins of the US-Central American Sanctuary Movement,” Refuge 1, no. 26 (2009): 12.

17 the rhetorical narratives perpetuating their situation and occupied the space between foreign policy and immigration from the same religious, unquestionable stance that was used to justify the troops in the first place. This performance enabled the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, during which a community of American Christians opened churches as sanctuary spaces for

Central American political refugees that the government preferred to label as “economic migrants.”30

The above is not to say that Central American activists partnered with American churches because they consciously acknowledged that religiosity was a key component of the militarism ravaging their country. It is merely to say that religious and moral justifications were used to both propel and criticize US involvement abroad. These are internalized, unconscious, and genuine beliefs; a moral code intrinsic to American identity.

Conservative Christians have conferred a presumptive moral palatability on any occasion on which the United States resorts to force. They have fostered among the legions of believing Americans a predisposition to see US military power as inherently good, perhaps even a necessary adjunct to the accomplishment of Christ’s saving mission. In doing so, they have nurtured the preconditions that have enabled the American infatuation with military power to flourish.31

The religiosity of the military in its essence has largely aided to legitimize foreign policy. The same religious justifications can be employed in the aftermath of military action: ABC v.

Thornburgh, as an immigration case that ultimately further enabled the imagined disconnect between foreign policy and immigration by protesting a discriminatory disconnect.

30 Clyde Haberman, “Trump and the Battle Over Sanctuary in America,” New York Times, March 5, 2017.

31 Bacevich, 146. 18

Accepting this obligation requires a denunciation of the militaristic approach to El

Salvador--it requires admitting that the threat of communism was insufficient, and insufficiently investigated, to legitimate the violence propagated by US aid. Instead, the ABC case was settled out of court five years later; there is no official legal precedent of separating foreign policy interests from immigration decisions. The lack of an official trial and the passage of time allowed the government to evade public scrutiny, and the case ultimately played into rather than challenged US narratives of superiority. The self-idealizing immigration imaginary, enabled by a disconnect with foreign policy, was weakly reinstated at the request of immigrants. The result was a reinvigoration of masking the cyclical relationship rather than any significant action beyond appearances. Furthermore, it is exactly the appearance of this disconnect that allows the interlocking of the two policy manifestations to continue. The legal and moral challenge to a contradictory immigration philosophy was quieted by a band-aid policy response.

Policy Evolution and the Institutionalization of Temporariness

The case was settled out of court in 1991, just after pressures (largely due to the ABC case and ongoing violence by the Salvadoran army) led to the passage of the Immigration Act of

1990. Included in this act was the creation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) which granted temporary protection from deportation to individuals unable to return to their home country due to a political or environmental catastrophe. TPS was essentially a concretization of Extended

Voluntary Departure (EVD), which had no established criteria for what qualified a country as sufficiently unstable for its citizens to be deported back to. This left space for politically motivated designations; the Reagan administration, for instance, had refused to grant

Salvadorans EVD despite the war. 19

In response to culminating pressures regarding the discriminatory treatment of Central

American asylum applicants, El Salvador was the first country to receive TPS and the only country to have been granted TPS by Congress, as their categorization was encoded into the

Immigration Act of 1990.32 The result of the ABC settlement was to allow some 300,000

Salvadorans and Guatemalans to apply or reapply for political asylum; these cases were left pending for years.33 Put simply, “immigration policy has institutionalized uncertainty for

Salvadorans.”34

The passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act

(IIRIRA) in 1996 made deportation a looming threat. An undocumented immigrant could be deported for something as inconsequential as a traffic ticket. 35 This effectively turned public servants into ICE agents, as any run-in with official services meant an investigation into the legal status of the person. Alienage law (protections of rights attached to personhood rather than citizenship) was nonexistent; the risk of being discovered and deported did not lessen after crossing the border. IIRIRA, in Linda Bosniak’s terms, effectively extended the border (and with it, the experience of crossing it) to cover the entirety of the country. 36 In this extremely hostile

32 Madeline Messick and Claire Bergeron, “Temporary Protected Status in the United States: A Grant of Humanitarian Relief that is Less than Permanent,” Migration Policy Institute, July 2, 2014.

33 Perla and Coutin, 14.

34 Mountz et al, 350.

35 “IIRIRA 96 - A Summary of the New Immigration Bill,” SISKIND SUSSER PC: IMMIGRATION LAWYERS, posted on November 30, 1996. http://www.visalaw.com/iirira-96-a- summary-of-the-new-immigration-bill/.

36 Linda Bosniak, “The Undocumented Immigrant: Contending Policy Approaches,” in Debating Immigration, ed. Carol M. Swain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87.

20 environment, the Salvadoran case continued to evolve. The next policy iteration made the 1991

ABC settlement claiming to separate foreign policy interests from shaping immigration application reviews seem laughable.

In 1997, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) was passed in response to the unforgiving political landscape IIRIRA created. NACARA instituted the possibility for the ‘cancellation of removal,’ which posited deportation as the default option.

To avoid it, a burden of proof was placed on the immigrant to “demonstrate ten years of continuous residence in the United States, good moral character, and that deportation would cause extreme and exceptional hardship to the petitioner’s US citizen or resident alien spouse, parent, or child.”37 Family ties to El Salvador, within this framework, were a mitigation of the hardship caused by deportation. This ignored the fact that the Salvadoran economy received over a billion US dollars in annual remittances, most of which was incrementally moved to support families in El Salvador.38 Yet making this argument in court would only further incriminate

Salvadorans, who could then be construed as economic migrants using asylum status to legitimize their undocumented status.39 All the while, the legal limbo of TPS holders provided the United States with an easily exploitable workforce:

The United States advocates immigration policies that work to its competitive economic advantage. Asylum applicants with TPS are a vulnerable labour force with few of the rights and privileges accorded to individuals with more stable forms of legal belonging.

37 Mountz et al, 344.

38 Mountz et al, 347.

39 Mountz et al, 348. 21

Meanwhile, like other Central and South American countries, El Salvador has grown increasingly dependent on remittances from US residents, temporary or otherwise.40

The intricacies of immigration law serve not only to perpetuate the American self-image as blameless and heroic, but also work to bolster the economy. These parallel metrics of US superiority come largely at the cost of immigrants.

The NACARA act (somewhat) eased the burden for Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants, reducing the qualifications to “seven years of continuous residence, good moral character or no criminal record, and extreme hardship upon return.”41 This slightly softer burden of proof made it harder for the US courts to cite family reunification (regardless of its potential to bankrupt) as a benefit of deportation. Nicaraguans and Cubans were heavily favored under

NACARA, which granted special privileges to those fleeing leftist regimes. Its original name,

The Victims of Communism Relief Act, was more blatant. While the US was certainly not uninvolved in Nicaragua and Cuba, their domestic situations at the time were more compatible to the American urge to vilify communism. Acting as a savior for those subjected to this “external” evil utilizes immigration policy as a narrative tool for foreign policy.

This ideological game, however, was played at the expense of Salvadorans. Despite the

ABC case six years earlier, the same rhetorical cycle was entrapping Salvadorans in a state of perpetual displacement. Salvadorans in 1997 were no longer easily construed as victims of communism; after the 1992 peace agreement, the US propped up a civilian democracy, complete with elections and sufficient indications of an American ideological champion. The first election

40 Mountz et al, 340.

41 Mountz et al, 344. 22 was won by a member of the right, installed, one again by US interference.42 The Salvadoran domestic situation was one the US had invested more than six billion dollars in to prove that communism could not infest the Western hemisphere.43 The key difference between Nicaragua and El Salvador originated in terms of US investment in rewriting the ideological score of the cold war.

Unlike Nicaragua, where American aid was withdrawn, US assistance in El Salvador rescued the official armed forces. This prolonged the conflict. “The principal reason for the extended nature of the war was the capacity of the junta to hold its piecemeal military apparatus together…to ward off guerrilla offensives [and hold] the population in a state of terror…it could only have achieved this or, indeed, survived for more than a few weeks with the resolute support of the US, which Somoza was, in the last instance, denied.”44

The differential treatment of Nicaraguans and Salvadorans immigrants hinged upon US

“success” in propagating these countries’ respective violent oligarchies. It was because El

Salvador was, paradoxically, a foreign policy success that the US restricted Salvadoran immigration. To accept these people as refugees would be to admit failure. In 2004, the FMLN won the election cleanly.45 The success of communism via democratic choice contradicts the steadfast American belief that communism connotes violent authoritarianism; the immense investment the US had put into disproving this possibility in the war was now quickly abandoned

42 John A. Booth, Christine J. Wade, and Thomas W. Walker, “El Salvador,” in Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion, and Change, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015), 153.

43 Booth, Wade, and Walker, “El Salvador,” 147.

44 Booth, Wade, and Walker, “El Salvador,” 147.

45 Booth, Wade, and Walker, “El Salvador,” 153. 23 in the shadows of American short-term memory. This was all too easily accomplished: by 2004, the US has shifted its demonization to Islamic extremists after the 9/11 terrorist attack. American militarism has no stake in El Salvador anymore, instead, its residual effects are seen in the corresponding component of American heroism: immigration. Salvadoran immigrants are continually legally marginalized with the complicity of the American public, who readily forget

American culpability.

Historical Amnesia and Post-War El Salvador

El Salvador has certainly faded from the limelight of US foreign policy discourse; yet its aftermath is still visible in terms of a perpetually evolving police-state for Salvadorans. The deportations of Salvadorans who had lived their entire lives as Americans created immense underground gang networks. The Salvadoran population, most notably in LA, was easily absorbed in significant numbers into an existing gang culture to avoid becoming targets of it.

Encased in IIRIRA, the Clinton administration made the deportation of gang members a priority.

These people were then dumped into a country foreign to them, the only existing connections being other deported gang members. This created a revolving door of Salvadoran gang leaders;

MS-13 metastasized all over the United States and throughout Central America, creating clandestine drug wars spiraling out of reach of the US government. Immigration policy to this day is ignorant of the fact that MS-13, the largest criminal transnational organization in the world, was born out of American policies beginning with the Reagan administration.46

While MS-13 began in the 1980s as a small and unorganized street gang in Los Angeles, some evidence suggests the group expanded in Central America after the United States began deporting illegal immigrants — many with criminal backgrounds — with greater

46 Sahil Chinoy, Jessia Ma, and Stuart A. Thompson, “MS-13 Is Far From the ‘Infestation’ Trump Describes,” New York Times, July 3, 2018.

24

intensity in 1996. Experts have described this process as “exporting” American-style gang culture to Central America.47

The escalation in gang violence in the United States has graver consequences for Central

America, a phenomenon that parallels US deportation practices. El Salvador, Guatemala, and

Honduras consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world. El Salvador became the most violent country in the world in 2015, when gang violence raised its homicide rate to 103 per hundred thousand people.48 Salvadoran homicides drive migration by 188%.49 Thus, the deportations--rather than the immigration--are what have most directly created violent international gangs; the resulting immigration and increasing violence serves only to justify increasing deportations.

For instance, the murders carried out by MS-13 within American borders are tokenized as an anti-immigration political tool. The Trump administration has simplified the legacy of gang violence and immigration to an alarming degree, shifting the rhetoric to be an exercise in displacing blame onto immigrants that goes so far as to dehumanize them: “We have laws that are laughed at on immigration. So when the MS-13 comes in, when the other gang members come into our country, I refer to them as animals. And guess what — I always will.” President

Trump went on to complain that the United States has “the dumbest laws on immigration in the

47 Chinoy, Ma, and Thompson, “MS-13 Is Far From the ‘Infestation’ Trump Describes.” 48 Rocio Cara Labrador and Danielle Renwick, “Central America’s Violent Northern Triangle,” Council on Foreign Relations, June 26, 2018.

49 Manuel Orozco, “Central American Migration: Current Changes and Development Implications,” The Dialogue: Leadership for the Americas, November 2018.

25 world.”50 While he would justify this claim differently, the hypocrisy inscribed into US immigration policy has certainly caused significant harm.

The disaggregation of the Salvadoran civil war, American intervention and a hell-bent approach to anticommunism, immigration narratives that demand a performative victimization and perpetuate legal modes of displacement, and the violent consequences of this displacement, have allowed all of these pieces to be examined in isolation, as though they exist in a vacuum.

These cycles are undermined by the louder iterations of American heroism that supersede them and are kept separate by a nation dependent upon historical amnesia.

The Consequences of Preserving a Vague Imaginary on Immigration

While El Salvador has a unique and particularly enmeshed history regarding US policy, the larger phenomenon of a cyclic and hyper-policed relationship in terms of migration and intervention is only reinforced and complicated throughout Latin America. The history is particularly notable in the eras of the Monroe Doctrine and the Cold War, both of which positioned Latin America as a turf for global hegemonic power struggles. Yet the implications for US militarism and immigration are bound up across the globe. After the 9/11 attacks, the evil the US sought to extinguish shifted from communism to terrorism. Despite the shifting ideological terrain, the mechanisms remain constant: there is a scapegoating of external evil and a parallel scapegoating of immigrant Other, often displaced by unrest at the hand of American militarism. This is all enabled by its rhetorical packaging in patriotic and abstract imaginaries of

American exceptionalism.

50 Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Defends ‘Animals’ Remark, Saying It Referred to MS-13 Gang Members,” New York Times, May 17, 2018. 26

In today’s politics, racialized politics of belonging and the utilization of immigration as a political tool is perhaps more overt, but it is in no way new. In many respects, the Muslim ban mimics the perpetual iterations of legal dispossession of Salvadorans. It is merely a continuation of nationalism unhindered by any kind of cohesive immigration philosophy--or one of citizenship. The result can be seen most clearly in the dramatization of the border. As the symbolic site of intersection for both protective militarism and delineations of (dis)belonging, the border becomes a stage for hyper-policing. This is clear in the formulation of policy--Clinton announced three new militarized border patrol efforts in the 90s that included intentionally funneling immigrants through deserts and mountains, resulting in a spike in border-crossing fatalities, mostly due to dehydration. President Trump’s most iconic campaign promise was to build a wall along the Southern border, a bulwark of American nationalism and an insulation of white nationalism in particular. Today, dialogue on immigration is fixated upon a caravan of

Central Americans marching toward the southern border. President Trump recently attacked the principle of jus soli to mitigate ‘anchor babies’ and further exclude Hispanic immigrants from the possibility of American citizenship.51 In doing so, he explicitly (although unknowingly) reiterated the legal convolution of citizenship established by Calvin’s Case that has laid the foundation for the modern political terrain of racialized hierarchies of belonging.

This preoccupation has resulted in the neglecting of a cohesive immigration philosophy and a hyper-policed state with no regard for rights of personhood rather than citizenship. In blanketing the American immigration imaginary in vague and heroic terms, Bosniak’s

51 Julie Hirschfield Davis, “President Wants to Use Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship,” New York Times, October 30, 2018. 27 metaphorical trope has been actualized: the entire national geography is blanketed in an inescapable border.

28

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