Catching up with Central America

Pablo Lastra has a good post on Who Counts as a Refugee in US Immigration Policy—and Who Doesn’t for The Nation. He surveys some of the keys changes to US immigration law over the last thirty years as well as the multiple reasons why people from Central America are fleeing the region for the US and elsewhere.

Recent commentary on the border crisis has tended to caricature the reasons people migrate—It’s the violence. It’s jobs. It’s the permisos. In reality, people’s reasons are complex and multiple. Maria, for instance, was seeking economic opportunity, but she was also fleeing her partner’s abuse, and the looming threat of retribution by the gang if she couldn’t keep up with her “rent” payments. In Giovani’s case, he needed protection that his government and his father could not provide, but he also missed his mom; they hadn’t seen each other in almost half a decade.

And here are a few other articles held up in draft form these last few weeks.

Tim Johnson goes back to U.S. export: Central America’s gang problem began in Los Angeles. I'd say that the only thing that he left out was that California began deporting Central Americans en masse following the Rodney King riots. It's not clear that the federal government would have adopted this approach a few years later had it not been for those riots.

Gabriel Stargardter has another really good piece on E-coyotes use Facebook to track the people they’re smuggling into U.S.

Carlos Rosales looks at El Salvador's gang problem: the truth behind the truce.

Deborah Levenson writes about The Little Veins of Central America