A migration becomes an emergency — The Flight of Women and Children from the Northern Triangle
By: Roberto Suro
Tags: Central America, Immigration, Migrants, Migration, Asylum Seekers

A migration becomes an emergency — The Flight of Women and Children from the Northern Triangle and Its Antecedents

By Roberto Suro

Originally published in “Humanitarianism and Mass Migration” by the University of California Press

A Long-Standing Migration Evolves into a Humanitarian Crisis

In 2014, more than 2.8 million people born in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America — lived in the United States, a population that was the product of migratory streams that were already decades old in some cases. Then, that spring something extraordinary happened. In May and June, a sudden spike in the number of Central Americans crossing into the United States broke records and overwhelmed immigration facilities. Not only the numbers but also the composition of the flow was anomalous as it contained a preponderance of woman and children, including thousands of young children who entered the United States unaccompanied. Moreover, they made unusual demands, pressing asylum claims based on victimization by criminal gangs. Then, by July, the surge was receding as quickly as it had mounted.

Though it was a relatively small event in terms of its impact on the overall flow of immigrants into the United States and was strikingly short-lived, the 2014 surge of Central Americans had an outsized influence. It prompted a crisis response by the administration of President Barack Obama that included measures to deter future flows that are still in place, and it roiled political debates over immigration in ways that reverberated through the 2016 election. Two subsequent surges in 2015 and 2016, equally sudden but on a lesser scale, further stoked the reaction.

Developing an analysis of the Central American surges and their implications requires understanding them in the context of the long, ongoing migrations that involve the same kinds of people leaving the same places for the same destinations. Our contention is that the surges, including the extraordinary migration of unaccompanied children, are best characterized as an outgrowth or a mutation of the existing migrations rather than as an aberration or an anomaly. This perspective has important consequences not only for understanding these movements but also for explaining their impact on politics and policy.

Those preexisting flows developed out of a variety of circumstances but had settled into labor and family reunification migrations by 2014. The volume of these flows was relatively stable, and they operated through well-established channels that included both legal and unauthorized immigration to the United States. The migration system that facilitated those movements — the kinship networks, smuggling organizations, known routes, and so on — also made the surges possible. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how thousands of unaccompanied children could be transported clandestinely from Central America to the Rio Grande except via migration channels that had developed over decades and that had already moved many thousands of adults. Equally, the eventual settlement of the great majority of those children into family units in the United States is only conceivable when the children’s flight is understood in the context of a long-standing migration that had already created a well-established diaspora.

This perspective in no way minimizes the urgency of the surge, nor does it discount the Central Americans’ claims for asylum status. Ample evidence shows that immediate circumstances suddenly rendered migration a life-and-death matter for many of the Central Americans. Nonetheless, their flight to the United States in search of humanitarian protection was undoubtedly made possible by the labor and family reunification migrations that preceded them. We will argue that this combination of old pathways and new migrants is responsible for one of the most significant characteristics of this flow: the volatility so evident in the surges. Another key characteristic is the clandestine, unauthorized quality of this migration and the fact that it takes place across a border fraught with political contention. In our analysis, this too is a product of the evolution of a humanitarian migration out of a long-standing irregular labor migration. These two characteristics — volatility and unlawfulness — have contributed to the negative reactions the Central American children provoked among policy makers and the public.

Although this analysis is focused on the migration channel between the Northern Triangle of Central America and the United States, the conclusions can shed light on similar developments elsewhere. Some flows destined to Western Europe from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa have mixed aspects of labor, family, and humanitarian migrations, as have flows from Afghanistan and Iraq. While many elements differ from one case to another, understanding a sudden humanitarian flow as an outgrowth of a well-established labor and family reunification migration has important implications for the assessment and management of migrations involving refugees and asylum-seekers:

· Migration channels built up over decades by workers and their families can allow a new humanitarian flow to scale up rapidly and overcome numerous obstacles in transit to a protective destination.

· Public opinion in a receiving country may reject a humanitarian response no matter how compelling the case presented by refugees or asylum-seekers if they and the modalities of their migration closely resemble an irregular flow that has been the target of control policies.

· The association of a humanitarian emergency with an irregular migration can confound policy responses when the fundamental framework of those policies segregates migrants into discreet categories based on their motives for migrating and the modalities by which they travel.

This line of analysis draws on several recent developments in the study of migration that have broadened our understanding of what constitutes a humanitarian flow. In depicting what he terms “survival migration,” for example, Alexander Betts (2010, 361–82) emphasizes the degree to which large numbers of individuals who deserve protection on humanitarian grounds because of violations of their socioeconomic rights often do not fit the standards for refugee or asylum designation based on religious or political persecution. Similarly, research on mixed motives by Nicholas Van Hear (2009) and others emphasizes the blurring of the boundary between voluntary and forced migrations and the consequences of policies aiming at durable solutions to displacement crises. In both cases, humanitarian flows like those of the Central American children are assessed in terms of the aspects they share with substantially economic migrations and the consequences for policy regimes that insist on drawing sharp distinctions between them.

On a theoretical level, an assessment of the interactions among humanitarian and other forms of migration potentially adds to a literature that has focused substantially on the conditions and processes that initiate and sustain migration flows but that has placed less attention on the circumstances that produce changes, particularly sudden changes in the characteristics and volume of migration flows.1

The Antecedents

More than 2.8 million people born in these three countries resided in the United States at the time of the 2014 surge.2 That number was equivalent to nearly 10 percent of the populations residing in those countries, about the same as the proportion of Mexicans living in the United States. More than half of the Northern Triangle migrants in the United States dated their tenure to 2000 or earlier, according to estimates from the American Community Survey.3 By any measure, this was already a substantial and well-established migration when the 2014 surge took place.

It was also a migration that had gained entry to the United States through a variety of modalities and that reflected a variety of motives. About 1.5 million of the migrants from the three countries, slightly more than half the total, were unauthorized migrants, according to Pew Research Center estimates (Passel and Cohn 2016). Another 270,000 from El Salvador and Honduras held Temporary Protected Status. Meanwhile, more than 400,000 migrants had been granted legal permanent resident status during the previous decade, and the lion’s share of this green card migration — more than 80 percent in 2014 — was made up of family reunification migrants (US Department of Homeland Security 2016). Among all migrants who had arrived in the United States from Central America since 2010, the sex ratio was 1.32 — nearly a third again as many males arrived than females — compared with a ratio of 0.94 for Asian migrants and 0.99 for European migrants over the same period.4 Elevated sex ratios typically suggest a labor migration. And, finally, more than 6,000 migrants from the three countries had been granted asylum in the previous decade.

Not surprisingly, this migration developed robust transnational linkages most clearly expressed via remittances. According to World Bank estimates, the three Northern Triangle countries received a combined $12.8 billion in remittances in 2013. That money represented exceptionally large shares of gross domestic product in these small countries — El Salvador: 16.5 percent, Honduras: 15.7 percent, and Guatemala: 10 percent. In Mexico, by contrast, $22 billion in remittances accounted for only 2 percent of GDP (Cohn, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Cuddington 2013).

In sum, by the time of the 2014 surge, a large migration from these three countries was well established, and although the flow was predominantly unauthorized and bore the characteristics of a labor migration, significant numbers of migrants were also entering the country legally through family reunification and humanitarian channels. And the diasporas were contributing significantly to the economic well-being of their communities of origin via remittances.

Finally, each of these three nations had a distinct migration history, with singular characteristics and significant differences among them. A retelling of those histories is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a glance at some of their most salient features shows that prior flows prepared the channels for the migration of children and other humanitarian migrants during the surges since 2014.

Migration to the United States from El Salvador received a major stimulus from a civil war (1980–92) that was one of the last proxy conflicts of the Cold War. However, in contrast to most other migration flows linked to the Cold War — e.g., those from Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Nicaragua — the migrants who fled El Salvador were not explicitly identified with the side backed by the United States. On the contrary, the great majority of Salvadorans who came to the United States pressing humanitarian claims were victims of political violence perpetrated by military and paramilitary forces supported by Washington during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. While other Cold War refugees were welcomed with open arms, during the Reagan administration 97 percent of all Salvadoran asylum claims were denied. That explicit and formal hostility on the part of the immigration system led to the development of self-help organizations, legal aid groups, and alliances with progressive political forces in the United States that remain influential more than a quarter of a century later.

Guatemalan migration was also fed by a civil war (1960–96) that was much longer than El Salvador’s and was less ideological and involved less foreign interference but was no less brutal. Guatemalan asylum-seekers were also rejected en masse during the Reagan years and were subsequently participants in some of the same complicated litigation and legislation that eventually resolved the status of many Salvadorans. But the Guatemalan migration was distinctive in the degree to which it involved an indigenous population, the Maya, who had suffered what a truth commission later termed “genocidal violence” at the hands of government-supported forces. As such, the Guatemalan migration has been racialized in a manner and to a degree not seen among other Latin American source countries (Jonas 2013).

Honduran migration was jump-started in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch, which displaced nearly a quarter of the population. The number of Hondurans in the United States has nearly tripled since then to about 600,000. Given its relative newness, Honduran migration to the United States did not benefit from the various legalization and adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s that put substantial numbers of Salvadorans and Guatemalans on more secure legal footing. As such, more than three-quarters of Hondurans in the United States are believed to be out of status, making them highly vulnerable to immigration enforcement and producing weaker civic integration of them into the United States than that of other Central Americans. Nonetheless, something like a classic irregular labor migration channel developed in the 2000s even as the Great Recession was suppressing other migration flows. In a country with few economic resources that suffers from chronically weak, corrupt, and ineffective governance, migration and remittances have become survival mechanisms for entire communities in the most vulnerable sectors of Honduran society (Reichman 2011).

And there is a fourth country with its own very distinct migration history that contributed genetic material to the new flows from the Northern Triangle — Mexico. The great majority of unauthorized migrants and asylum-seekers from Central America reach the United States by transiting Mexico and crossing the US-Mexico border. The vastly larger and older Mexican migration to the United States created the channels by which Central Americans now travel, especially the smuggling networks that manage the border crossing itself (Donnelly and Hagan 2014, 74–81). Indeed, the Mexican migration can be seen as facilitating the development of the Northern Triangle migrations prior to 2014, and it helped shape both the surge and the reaction that it provoked.

The New Migration

In fiscal year 2012, the US Border Patrol apprehended a monthly average of 926 individuals who were members of family units — at least one child under the age of eighteen with an accompanying adult — making unauthorized entries along the border with Mexico. Apprehensions of unaccompanied minors averaged 2,033 a month that year. Together, these two categories of unusual migrants totaled 35,519 for the year, just 10 percent of all apprehensions on the Southwest border.

The numbers bumped up a bit in the spring and summer of 2013 until monthly apprehensions were running about 50 percent or more than they had been a year earlier. Then, in spring 2014, something unexpected and unprecedented occurred. In March 2014, the number of family unit apprehensions topped 5,000, and in April it went over 6,000. That was just the front edge. In May, the number was 12,722 before cresting with 16,330 in June. The great bulk of the increase was made up of Northern Triangle migrants, and the number traveling in family units was almost matched by the number of children apprehended alone. The flow of unaccompanied minors — migrants 0 to 17 years old — followed a pattern similar to that of the family units, reaching 10,620 in June, five times what it had been two years earlier. Apprehensions of family members and unaccompanied minors totaled 136, 986 in fiscal 2014, accounting for 29 percent of all apprehensions that year (Johnson 2016).

The flow of mothers and children dropped off rapidly in the summer of 2014 after the Obama administration stepped up enforcement capabilities on the border and enlisted Mexico to deter Northern Triangle migrants before they reached the United States. A new migratory pattern then developed of ebbs and flows that included similar surges, though with smaller numbers of migrants, in 2015 and 2016.

After the 2014 summer surge, the number of apprehensions of women and children dropped back to the elevated levels seen in late 2013 and early 2014 but far below the summer peaks. Apprehensions of unaccompanied children, for example, fell by 80 percent from June 2014 to a trough in January 2015. The numbers picked up again in late summer and autumn of 2015, hitting levels in November and December of 2015 that were three times higher than the low point. The same pattern repeated in 2016 when apprehensions mounted through the late summer and then hit peaks in November and December that topped any marks set since 2014. In early 2017, the numbers fell back to lows not seen in several years. The pattern for family units was the same. In summary, the flow of mothers and children from the Northern Triangle, as mirrored in apprehensions, developed an extraordinary volatility marked by wide swings in the numbers of migrants, and that volatility has persisted for three years (see fig. 2.1).

[[Insert Figure 2.1]]

While the flows from El Salvador and Guatemala had included large numbers of asylum- seekers in the 1980s and 1990s, as noted earlier, the 2014 surge produced unprecedented claims for humanitarian protection. First, there were the extraordinary numbers. An estimated 121,200 asylum claims were filed in the United States in 2014, marking a 44 percent increase (+36,800) from the year before, according to United Nations estimates. And the Northern Triangle drove the phenomenon, with striking increases in asylum applicants: Honduras: +115 percent, Guatemala: +87 percent, and El Salvador: +77 percent (UNHCR 2015a).

Aside from the numbers, the surges marked a difference in the character of the humanitarian flow. Central American asylum-seekers of the 1980s and 1990s had been fleeing violence that was indisputably motivated by politics and that was carried out by state actors or organized groups countering the state. In 2014 and thereafter, Central American asylum-seekers claimed persecution at the hands of transnational criminal organizations, particularly the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the Eighteenth-Street Gang. These groups are themselves products of the previous Northern Triangle migration and make up another strand of the genetic material of the post-2014 flows. The gangs were founded in the United States by Salvadoran migrants in the 1980s and spread back to the sending communities after US law enforcement authorities utilized large-scale deportations as a crime control measure. Against a backdrop of generally weak and/or corrupt governments, particularly in Guatemala and Honduras, the gangs spread to the rest of the Northern Triangle and eventually became a much bigger presence there than they had been in the United States. Their techniques included the intimidation and extortion of whole communities, the forced recruitment of young men, and systematic violence against women and girls (Seelke 2016).

Although the civil strife experienced in the 1980s and 1990s undoubtedly drew from some of the same underlying social, economic, political, and cultural conditions as the violence of the 2010s did, they represented markedly different phenomena. Gone were the ideological components and the intervention by outside powers that marked the Cold War proxy conflicts of the past, and with them went the national security and diplomatic considerations that once influenced the United States’ treatment of Northern Triangle migrants. Instead, a new form of migration has emerged, and the three surges in three years have led some observers to speculate that this new form of migration has become an ongoing and enduring feature of flows from Central America (Chishti and Hipsman 2016).

The Recombination

The surges of 2014, 2015, and 2016 were sudden migrations of significant size by individuals whose departure from their home communities was substantially coerced and who sought humanitarian protection in their country of destination. The surges marked a clear departure from the labor and family migrations already well underway but did not supersede or replace them. Rather, this chapter argues for an understanding of the flow of minors and mothers as an outgrowth of those long-standing migrations that, after all, involved the same communities of origin, even the same families, travelling via the same channels to the same destinations. However, the differences in the flows appear to be substantially responsible for the differences in the ways in which the surge migrants were portrayed in the US news media and perceived in US public opinion, and those same differences in the patterns of flow, the characteristics of the migrants, and their motivations for leaving are responsible for the distinctive policy response they provoked.

The challenge, then, is to understand how one kind of migration spawns another. In this case, a stable and steady migration produced one that was volatile. What had primarily been a voluntary labor and family migration generated a coerced humanitarian migration. A movement heavily weighted with working-age males produced an offshoot dominated by women and children. These developments deserve to be assessed for the degree to which they support or challenge the various theories we use to explain migration dynamics, but there are other more compelling and immediate reasons to explore the surges as distinctive migration phenomena.

In 2014, a relatively small labor and family migration set off a humanitarian emergency, a political crisis, and a lasting policy change. If the same dynamics had developed with a much larger migration — for example, the flow from Mexico to the United States — the consequences would have been vastly greater. Although there are numerous examples of humanitarian flows morphing into economic migrations with refugees who make a second move after finding initial protection, this is a different case. Here we have the opposite — an economic migration that produced a surge of humanitarian migrants. In other words, we are familiar with coerced migrants who become voluntary migrants after initial settlements, but we have little experience with a voluntary flow that produces a powerful stream of coerced migrants. Given the size of the Mexican migration to the United States, even a relatively small eruption of asylum-seekers would have substantial consequences in the United States.

In seeking to explain how a long-standing and stable migration can suddenly produce a variant that differs so distinctively from previous flows, we have found that the biological concept of recombination can serve as analogy. Among the most common applications of the term recombination in biology is the process by which DNA molecules are broken and fragments are rejoined in new combinations. This event can happen in nature in processes of cell division, and it can also occur in vitro through processes of cloning in which strands of genetic material from different sources, even from different species, are combined to create genetic sequences not found in the source organisms. This latter process generates what is broadly known as “recombinant DNA” and is used to produce genetically modified organisms (Alberts et al. 2007).

For our purposes, the concept is most useful as an illustration of mechanisms that can produce new creatures — unique and novel entities demanding assessment on their own terms — that are generated from materials that characterized their predecessors. The new creatures are certainly not offspring. This is not a reproductive process in that the new entity differs fundamentally from the parent. Nor is it a form of evolution based on the adaptation of an organism to new circumstances. The existing organism — the long-standing labor and family migration — has continued uninterrupted. Recombination involves a process in which the existing entity is disrupted, broken apart at least temporarily, and pieces of it are put back together again to form something new.

Applied to the migration of Central American minors, the concept of recombination yields the portrayal of a migration flow that draws content and characteristics from preceding migrations and yet is an entirely new organism with its own alimentation, behavior, and life cycle. The genetic code came from prior flows that were driven primarily by family reunification, labor market dynamics, or flight from political violence. The new organism combined aspects of all three and made use of the migration channels that had been laid down by them. But the surges of mothers and children involved a newly volatile flow, a different mix of migrants, and a highly distinctive set of motives.

This model gives us access to two aspects of the Central American surges of potentially broad significance. First, it points us to the disruption of a well-established and stable migration as the origin of a sudden appearance of a new and highly volatile flow. And it helps explain why this new kind of migration can have disproportionate impacts on the politics and policy of a receiving society.

In this case, the disruption was violence directed at vulnerable populations, especially women, in the Northern Triangle countries. It served as a major precipitating factor in the surges of 2014 and thereafter, according to numerous accounts (GAO 2015). In El Salvador, the intentional homicide rate was 59 percent higher in 2014 than it was in 2000, according to United Nations data (United Nations 2017). For Guatemala, it was a 26 percent increase, and for Honduras, it was 46 percent. In the years leading up to the new migration, these countries competed for the dubious distinction of being the single most criminally violent countries in the world, while all three also consistently ranked among the most dangerous nations for women and girls. A 2015 UNHCR (2015b n.p. [foreword]) report aptly titled Women on the Run described the Central American surge as “unique in its complexity” because of the genderized violence both prompting the migration and then preying on the migrants in transit.

In addition to the violence, the migrants of the surge were also fleeing a sudden worsening of economic conditions in societies that were already among the most impoverished and underdeveloped in the Western Hemisphere. The surges occurred as Central America experienced the most severe drought in decades during this period, with relief agencies counting 3.5 million people in the region as food insecure at mid-decade (Chishti and Hipsman 2016). Simultaneously, the region was struck by the coffee rust fungus that devastated production of the top cash crop for small farmers, causing 300,000 people in Guatemala alone to need food aid in 2014 (Malkin 2014).

Migrants had left these three countries in the past to escape civil wars, political persecution, genocide, and environmental disasters; to find work; and to reunite with their families. In 2014 and during the surges that followed, all of these push factors or their legacies combined with the precipitating effects of violence and collapsing local economies to prompt the flight of women and children. The surge migrants met the criteria of a survival migration as described by Betts (2010). He defines this as “persons outside their country of origin because of an existential threat to which they have no access to a domestic remedy or resolution” (361). Surely the prevalence of violence directed against women and children in the Northern Triangle constituted an existential threat, and no one disputes that the governments of these three countries had failed in their responsibility to protect the safety of their citizens.

Betts advocates the concept of survival migration as a way of broadening the definition of migrants deserving humanitarian protection, a matter that has been under debate since the 1990s. The Central American surges renewed debates in the United States about the appropriate criteria for protection (New York Times Editorial Board 2016, n.p.). The 1951 Refugee Convention, which serves as the foundation of US refugee and asylum policies, set the standard as a well-founded fear of individual persecution on ethnic, religious, or political grounds. However, how the standard is interpreted by governments has been disputed frequently, particularly since the end of the Cold War, which provided much of the moral and political framework for the treaty. On the Convention’s fiftieth anniversary in 2001, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed concern that some countries were applying a strict interpretation of the document in order to reject protection seekers who claimed they had suffered persecution by nonstate actors or who were facing generalized rather than individually targeted violence (Feller 2001). According to Betts (2010), survival migrants, no matter how dire their circumstances, might not meet the legal tests if they were strictly applied. Rather than having been persecuted in the traditional sense, these migrants, Betts (2010, 362) notes, have moved “because of serious deprivation of socioeconomic rights related to the underlying political situation” or because of “slow onset environmental displacement.” Both conditions apply to the surge migrants from the Northern Triangle, and indeed they challenge the application of the 1951 Convention and the criteria for protection that derive from it.

Aside from its policy applications, the concept of survival migration illuminates the ways that multiple factors can be compounded to constitute a form of coercion that obliges people to leave their homes as surely as if they were physically threatened by an agent of the state because of their political beliefs. At a certain threshold, economic deprivation combined with generalized violence and a breakdown of the social order can constitute a life-threatening circumstance for individuals, especially for vulnerable populations like women and children. The Central American surges certainly provide evidence of multiple factors combining to precipitate a sudden migration. Moreover, the surges constitute an extraordinary kind of survival migration that is capable of achieving speed and scale because it grows out of a long-standing labor and family migration. The Central American women and children displayed all the desperate urgency of migrants who have trekked through deserts to escape famine and violence, but they were able to travel well-established routes that carried them to the welcoming embrace of family members.

Following the 2014 surge, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO 2015) conducted a study of the causes of the sudden migration by unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle in order to better assess policies and programs designed to address those causes. The primary data collection took the form of surveys of officials of the Department of State and other US agencies stationed in those countries who were dealing with prospective migrants. The subsequent report found that the cause most commonly cited by US officials for migration from the region was criminal violence, including extortion and forced conscription at the hands of gangs and drug cartels. However, economic concerns, including livelihoods suddenly lost to the coffee rust fungus as well as the effects of chronic poverty, were also cited by all the officials polled. And the two were seen as deeply intertwined with gang violence that limited economic opportunities and with deep poverty that contributed to the criminality. Just behind concerns about safety and economic survival, the US officials reported family reunification as a driving motive, particularly for children.

The twin concepts of mixed migrations — meaning migrations encompassing individuals with a variety of motives — and mixed motives — meaning migrants who individually embrace multiple motives — have gained increasing salience as scholars and policy analysts have examined the increasing variety in the forms and types of migration evident around the world (Van Hear 2011). This discourse has relied substantially on the view of migration decisions as falling on a continuum. At one end are proactive choices selected from among multiple options, and at the other are reactive choices that are entirely compelled by circumstance. In one influential formulation of this idea, Anthony Richmond (1994, 61) suggests that between the extremes is “a large proportion of people crossing state boundaries who also combine characteristics, responding to economic, social[,] and political pressures over which they have little control, but exercising a limited degree of choice in the selection of destinations and the timing of their movements.”

Numerous migrations in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Africa involve people who are forced from their homes by combinations of political, social, and economic factors but who then make choices based on economic and family considerations about where to settle. This blurring of distinctions between forced and voluntary migration exercised an important influence on the development of policy agendas by some European governments and United Nations agencies in the early 2000s that attempted to combine humanitarian protection and the management of labor migrants (Castles and Van Hear 2005). For example, the concept of an asylum and migration nexus appeared prominently in UNHCR documents attempting to deal with the rejection of migrants with valid humanitarian claims by governments that perceived an abuse of asylum systems by voluntary economic migrants who would otherwise face sanctions for having crossed borders without permission (Van Hear 2009, 4).

The idea of creating a single policy architecture to deal with migrations that covered the spectrum of voluntary and coerced movements never gained much currency in the United States and has faded substantially in Europe and in United Nations venues. Instead, the rigid logic of the 1951 Refugee Convention, with its sharp juridical distinction between migrants worthy of protection and those who are not, has been substantially reified even as the number of migrants who defy that distinction has exploded since 2010. The Central American surges represent by far the most significant instance of a mixed migration arriving in the United States since the concept gained salience more than a decade earlier. They represent an important variant in the concept of a mixed migration both in how the phenomena are described and how the policy consequences are assessed.

Reflecting on the experience of European governments, Nicholas Van Hear (2009, 17) concludes, “at some point[,] then, forced migration may transmute into economic or livelihood migration, and it is this recognition that forms the basis for the discourse on ‘mixed migration.’” Applying the framework of recombination as we have presented it here, the transmutation of the Central American migration went in the opposite direction: an economic migration transmuted into a forced migration. Moreover, it was a very large and well-established economic migration, and it operated substantially through irregular channels that were equally large and well established. This genetic origin shaped the size and character of the migration that then emerged when social and economic conditions precipitated the sudden flight of tens of thousands of women and children seeking protection in the United States. And, in turn, the size and character of the surges conditioned the responses they provoked in American politics and policy. Unlike deracinated refugees who must rely on the kindness of strangers, the Central Americans of the surges had family and friends already in the United States prepared to offer safe havens, and they had highly efficient and very familiar migratory channels for reaching them. Arguably, all these circumstances would have been far different if those women and children had represented an entirely new migration whose origins, mechanisms, and claims for protection derived de novo and unambiguously from circumstances of coercion.

The degree to which the surges represented an outgrowth of the preceding largely voluntary migration is evident in the fact that most of the surge migrants, especially the children, were reuniting with families here. A 2016 US Government Accountability Office report examined the handling of 51,984 unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle who were apprehended in 2014 by immigration authorities and transferred to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 31,000–60 percent of the total — were released to parents who were already residing in the United States. Another 25 percent were released to siblings or to an aunt or uncle living here. Once grandparents and other relatives are taken into account, fewer than 9 percent were released to nonfamily sponsors, and that group includes 8 percent who went to sponsors identified by relatives as family friends (GAO 2016).

The fact that these children had relatives waiting for them undoubtedly facilitated their migrations, and so too was the situation similar for the children who came with their mothers. And relatives here did much more than provide a destination. According to estimates by the Inter-American Development Bank, remittances to Central America surpassed prerecession levels in 2011 and kept growing robustly up until the time of the surge. During the same period, remittances to Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America were flat and stuck at or below the peaks reached before the downturn (Maldonado and Hayem 2014). While it is impossible, of course, to link the remittance flows directly to the migration surge, extensive research has shown that family members’ financing of migration is one of the common uses of such funds. According to the Obama administration’s estimates, between 75 and 80 percent of the unaccompanied minors migrating to the United States from the Northern Triangle relied on human smuggling networks (White House 2014). The trip from Central America to the US border costs several thousand dollars in smuggling fees and expenses. It stands to reason that nearly 52,000 children under the age of eighteen did not come up with the funds on their own or that families facing existential threats did not have such money in savings.

Moreover, the women and children of the surges of the past few years have traveled to the United States using the same transit routes, self-help networks, shelters, and smugglers that have facilitated travel by the much larger and ongoing labor and family reunification flows (Villegas 2014). Much of the migration system serving the Central Americans, in turn, is based on the same system that has facilitated the vastly larger and older Mexican labor migration to the United States. The Central Americans must transit through Mexico and must use the same channels that carry Mexicans north. Indeed, the criminal organizations that control much of the irregular human traffic across the US-Mexico border have extended their reach all the way to Central America — especially the drug cartel known as the “Zetas,” which claims a territory that extends along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico all the way from the Rio Grande to the Yucatan (Martinez 2014). And even as the women and children of the surges were traveling along these routes, so too were other Central Americans and Mexicans whose motives lay at various points across the continuum from forced to voluntary migration.

The women’s and children’s reliance on smuggling networks established to facilitate a labor migration might not seem exceptional or even noteworthy at first glance, but it helps to highlight one of the distinguishing characteristics of this migration: its volatility. The trip from the Northern Triangle to Texas is about 1,500 miles by land and requires crossing two or three international frontiers as well as jungles, mountains, and deserts. The sudden movement of many tens of thousands of women and children on that route simply would not have been possible as a logistical matter unless the means of transportation were readily available at the onset. The migration channel was an integral element of the preexisting labor migration that then became a critical aspect of the surges. Indeed, the smugglers appear to have played an explicit role in producing the volatility that defined the surges. Following the 2014 surge, US officials reported that “human smugglers have increasingly influenced the rate of migration through more aggressive and misleading marketing approaches” (GAO 2016, 5). While in 2014 and 2015 the surges were in part driven by smugglers’ claims that a deadline loomed for a legalization program, in 2016, fear of a crackdown by then President-elect Donald J. Trump helped drive the numbers (Partlow and Miroff 2016).

The recombination meant that a survival migration was able to achieve much greater mass and speed than would have been possible if it were not an outgrowth of a long-standing and very substantial labor and family migration. When it reached the US border, that mass and speed had a substantial impact on the ways in which the women and children were perceived by the media, the public, and policy makers. Those perceptions of the new migration were additionally shaped by one of the key characteristics of the previous migration: its unauthorized nature. This strand of genetic material also deeply colored the ways in which the new migrants were seen. Women and children fleeing hunger and violence were perceived as a sudden and large influx of illegal border crossers.

Recombination and Response

In 2012 and 2013 (fiscal), a total of nearly 90,000 women and children were apprehended on the US southwestern border, and barely anybody noticed. There was no significant media coverage, no political rhetoric demanding either acceptance or rejection of these migrants, no notable change to immigration policy. Nearly 7,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended in May and June of 2013 as the US Senate was in the midst of a debate that resulted in the adoption of the most extensive immigration reform bill in history. The kids hardly merited a mention. However, all of that changed in the late spring of 2014 by virtue of a single new factor: in May and June of that year, the numbers surged, and 21,000 children were apprehended.

As with many other areas of public policy, sudden events in immigration can have an outsized effect. Often the speed of change is more important in determining public responses than the actual dimensions of the event. Even a casual assessment of the news coverage of the surge demonstrates the impact. In 2014, the Associated Press averaged 94 stories a month with a major focus on immigration on its national wire. In June there were 139, and in July, 169. And along with the volume came the characterization of an emergency. In July CNN used the headline “Crisis on the Border” 72 times during its prime-time broadcasts. Not surprisingly, the share of respondents listing immigration as the “most important problem” facing the nation surged from 5 percent to 17 percent between June and July 2014 and remained elevated through the fall.5

When the surge migrants arrived at the Rio Grande, many Americans saw another wave of newcomers from the South determined to settle in the United States whether they had permission or not. The spectacle of children packed into holding cells at Border Patrol stations and the skyrocketing numbers reported breathlessly in news accounts stoked the impression that the migrants had simply overwhelmed all the barriers and personnel that were supposed to have been put in place to control the border. Rather than understanding the women and children as harbingers of a new kind of migration, many Americans responded with déjà vu and dread. Negative perceptions focused on the characteristics that the surge drew from its antecedents in the long history of irregular migrations in the very same place by the very same kinds of people.

At the beginning of July 2014, President Obama asked Congress for $4 billion in emergency funds to increase both enforcement and humanitarian efforts in response to the surge. Republicans responded with harsh critiques of what they saw as Obama’s failure to secure the border and announced plans to amend a 2008 law that they claimed gave Central American children unnecessary legal protections in pressing asylum claims. Protestors in California and Arizona blocked buses carrying children to detention facilities. And amid the rising anxieties, Obama postponed his already promised announcement of executive actions to benefit unauthorized immigrants until after the midterm elections. At Obama’s urging, Mexico stepped up enforcement in the region of its southern border, immediately blocking migrants from stowing away on northbound freight trains, a favored mode of transit. With Washington’s tangible support and political encouragement, Mexico subsequently adopted a package of policing measures along transit routes known as the Plan Frontera Sur that has had two effects. The forced repatriation of Central Americans from Mexico has now exceeded the number removed from the United States, and to avoid apprehension, migrants have been forced into more remote and more dangerous routes and even greater dependency on smuggling networks controlled by the drug cartels, especially the notorious Zetas (Arriola 2016).

Long before the first surge, the long-standing Central American and Mexican migrations had generated a deep and highly negative political discourse about the border in the United States. In 2014, public opinion surveys showed clear majorities of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, favoring legislation to provide a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants, but there was equally substantial support for measures to tighten security at the border. And on a key issue in policy debates, Americans were almost evenly split on the question of whether security improvements had to come before any legalization.6

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic nominee, Hillary R. Clinton, backed the Obama administration’s policies and supported the forced return of child migrants as a deterrent measure that would “send a message” to others considering the trip. She encountered little resistance within her party on this point. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump made extreme immigration enforcement at the border a hallmark of his ultimately successful campaign.

Meanwhile, as of March 2017, since the first surge some 165,000 unaccompanied children have been released into the custody of sponsors. The great majority are awaiting the dispositions of their cases in hopelessly backlogged immigration courts.

Conclusion

The surges were warnings.

The United States is unique among the world’s prosperous receiving states in that it sits at the terminus of migration channels that are decades old, that allow for continuous transit by land, and that have already carried many millions of unauthorized migrants north in defiance of the government’s efforts to shut it down. The surges demonstrated on a small scale what can happen when conditions in the sending communities deteriorate to the point that migration becomes a matter of survival. Tens of thousands of people, including children travelling alone, can move north all at once via large and efficient channels. They travel with the intent to not merely ask protection but to walk into the country and find safe haven, regardless of how the US government views them. And as they arrive at the Rio Grande, the migrants know that they will be welcomed by family, friends, and compatriots who have traveled those channels before them. They just need to get past the US authorities.

No matter how severe the conditions that precipitated the surges were, worse are coming. As Jeffrey Sachs (2017) tells us, we will soon see much more severe environmental disruptions across Central America, southern Mexico, and northern South America. The vulnerable populations in close proximity to the migration channels are vastly larger that the population that fed the surges. The dynamics of climate change alone foretell with certainty that the United States will face future migrations from its near abroad that will occur suddenly and involve large numbers of people who can readily avail themselves of robust migration channels. And there are many other social, political, and economic factors likely to contribute to the conditions for this unique form of survival migration.

As the surges demonstrated, the United States is ill-equipped to handle such episodes. The 1951 Refugee Convention and other policy frameworks developed in the aftermath of World War II imagined humanitarian migrations as discreet events prompted by specific and temporary dislocations. US immigration policies, like those in other Western democracies, established criteria for humanitarian protection that do not readily encompass migrants fleeing from the kind of generalized social collapse and predation by criminal gangs that pushed many Central Americans from their homes. Over the past two decades, many voices have been raised to argue for a redefinition of those criteria to reflect the realities of forced migration today rather than the politics of the Cold War era. However, merely broadening the criteria will not suffice for the kinds of crises the United States is likely to face on its borders in the years ahead.

The recombinant nature of the surge migration poses more fundamental challenges than other humanitarian flows do. For example, refugees applying for resettlement from a safe haven camp have options even if they are rejected. Typically, they can at least remain where they are. On the other hand, a Central American who has already arrived on American territory before seeking asylum either gains admission or is forcibly repatriated. The zero-sum system either rewards them with a visa for life, or it sends them back to the place they came from, regardless of the depravations awaiting them. Moreover, the surge migrants enter these proceedings at a disadvantage. They are seen as violators who have arrived via illicit channels and must prove their worthiness against a presumption that their claims are false.

Since the last great reform of US immigration laws in 1965, the most common way to be admitted to the United States as an immigrant is through a process that judges individual merit based on humanitarian need, employment, or family relations. The characteristics of the surge migration are exquisitely ill-suited for that sort of individual selection process that is based on narrow categories of fixed criteria. First, the application and adjudication system is not designed for this kind of flow. These migrants arrive suddenly and in large numbers. They include significant shares of unaccompanied children who are incapable of making their way through a complex legal process and may even be unable to provide information about themselves. And second, they present a dizzying mix of motives covering the spectrum from coercion to choice. Over the years, there have been any number of substantial exceptions to the process of individual adjudication that have granted admission to whole categories of people arriving from nearby with claims not easily resolved. Cubans, Haitians, and the Central Americans themselves have benefited from an array of policies that grant various forms of mass adjustments or temporary reprieves on something like an ad hoc basis.

Of course, a substantial long-term effort to find durable solutions to the causes of forced migration should be part of any US policy toward its sending regions. But, given the feeble state of civil authority due to corruption by criminal organizations and the certainty of severe climate disruptions, it seems unlikely that even the best-intentioned and best-funded development plans could fully mitigate the prospects of surge migrations in the future.

When those surges happen, mass grants of admission may become a practical necessity. The alternative might be the creation of camps, either in Mexico or in the southwestern United States, that would rapidly produce a humanitarian crisis that would be twenty-four-hour news for as long as it lasts. Under such circumstances, the rationale for admission to the United States might emerge from the very history that makes this such a difficult form of migration to manage. The surge migrations are the result of past migrations. They are the product of deep relationships between communities of destination and of origin. Those are intimate linkages that bind the United States to Central America and to Mexico, powerful linkages that will be difficult to deter.

But beyond the practical considerations, there is a humanitarian obligation at play here. It is the unique humanitarian obligation that arises between people who are connected by a migration channel. Once this relationship has achieved certain dimensions, it acquires a moral authority of its own. If people at one end of the channel face an existential threat, those at the other end of the channel have an obligation not to let them perish. The channel itself enforces that obligation by bringing the victims, in this case children, to our very doorsteps. Those dimensions have undoubtedly been achieved between the United States and the people who live along the massive channel that runs south through Mexico to Central America. The obligation has been created by the acceptance, sometimes tacit and sometimes grudging but nonetheless real, of millions of migrants who have created homes in the United States for decades. When their relatives and neighbors arrive desperately in need, they cannot be turned away.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Originally published in “Humanitarianism and Mass Migrations” by the UC Press

Notes

[1]. See, for example, Massey et al. (1993) and Castles, Miller, and de Haas (2014).

2. “Place of Birth for the Foreign-Born Population in the United States. 2014 American Community Survey: One-Year Estimates.” Table B05006.

3. “Place of Birth by Year of Entry by Citizenship Status for the Foreign-Born Population. 2014 American Community Survey: One-Year Estimates.” Table B05007.

4. “Sex by Place of Birth by Year of Entry by Citizenship Status for the Foreign-Born Population. 2014 American Community Survey: One-Year Estimates.” Table B05008.

5. Story counts are based on the author’s calculations based on electronic archives maintained by LexisNexis.

6. See, for example, “Public Divided over Increased Deportation of Unauthorized Immigrants.” Pew Research Center. Feb. 27, 2014. http://www.people

-press.org/2014/02/27/public-divided-over-increased-deportation-of-unauthorized-immigrants/.

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