Improving conditions in communities where immigrants come from is the only effective long-term immigration policy.
Trump’s fear-mongering about the border helped get him elected in 2016. Seeking reelection, he regularly describes the U.S. as an “occupied country” that has been “invaded and conquered” by immigrant criminals. He promises screaming crowds that Election Day will be “Liberation Day in America,” at which point he will throw immigrants in jail or send them back home.
But the threat of mass deportation is designed to sow division, not to address the challenges posed by immigration. During his last presidency, Trump spent $15 billion on an unfinished and easily scalable border wall and millions of dollars on deportations. Meanwhile, rates of undocumented immigration actually rose during his presidency.
His new immigration agenda will do nothing to deter people from seeking a better life in a country that bears responsibility for creating many of the conditions that cause them to flee.
Over the past 20 years, I have worked as an anthropologist in a Guatemalan region where communities have been torn apart by U.S. immigration. Everyone has family members who have left, and almost everyone knows someone who has died or disappeared attempting to cross the border. My research examines U.S.-led health and development interventions, many of which have been designed to stem the flow of U.S. migration. I have learned by studying the history and contemporary deployment of these interventions that there are three things the U.S. government must do to address immigration. None entails policing the U.S. border, and none are prioritized by U.S. politicians today.
First: Support land sovereignty.
The U.S. government supported a decades-long ‘scorched earth’ campaign that destroyed land so that people would starve.
In Guatemala, many people leave because they have no access to land on which to grow food and, without land, they cannot sustain themselves and their families. But rather than encourage land sovereignty, the U.S. government has systematically undermined even modest agrarian reform.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the U.S. government helped to train the Guatemalan military to destroy agrarian movements. Emulating tactics drawn from the Nazis in World War II, the U.S. government supported a decades-long “scorched earth” campaign that destroyed land so that people would starve. In the decades since, the U.S. government has focused its foreign aid in Guatemala on strategies such as monocultural agriculture and pesticide use that disempower farmers while creating deep agricultural dependencies.
Today, soils are thoroughly saturated with heavy metals and forests have been ravaged to generate corporate profits. In large part due to this environmental destruction, Guatemala ranks as the ninth most vulnerable country to global warming in the world today. To address this damage, the U.S. government should support projects that support land sovereignty in the countries from which immigrants originate.
Second: Protect women’s reproductive autonomy.
At the end of the 20th century, it was mostly men leaving Guatemala for the U.S. Today, women are leaving too—due to poverty and illness, but also because of oppressive gender-based violence. Traditional midwives and community health activists, a critical source of care for vulnerable women, are routinely persecuted or murdered.
In 2010, the U.S. government launched a global intervention ostensibly to make women’s lives better by improving health in women of reproductive age. Yet instead of encouraging reproductive autonomy, the project legitimized a dramatic increase in the surveillance and monitoring of the bodies of teenagers and women. Guatemalan anthropologist Alejandra Colom calls the intervention a “forced motherhood” campaign. Not only was the intervention ineffective at improving health, but by 2015, after three years of implementation, women and children had begun to leave Guatemala en masse—a demographic shift in immigration that continues to the present day.
To reverse this trend, the U.S. government should back projects squarely focused on guaranteeing and expanding reproductive rights.
Third: Make it safer to cross the border.
I have met countless people who travel to the U.S. desperate to pay back debt that they or their families have accrued during their own difficult travel north. Impoverished farmers must scrape together the equivalent of $10,000—or more—to pay border smuggling fees. These fees often go to powerful people and institutions who ultimately force immigrants deeper into poverty. If apprehended, Guatemalans regularly find themselves with no choice but to take out predatory loans to pay bail bonds and other deportation-related expenses. Migration-related debt is a major driver of migration. While it may seem counterintuitive, making migration easier will allow more people to stay in their countries of origin.
Migration-related debt is a major driver of migration.
Trump has seized on the topic of immigration because it stirs resentment and anger that mobilizes people to vote—not because he is sincere in his desire to make the situation better. While Harris supports DACA and an “earned pathway to citizenship,” she has felt the need to answer Trump’s fear-mongering by reversing her previous support of decriminalization of border crossings while vowing to expand border security, and block asylum applications for most undocumented people.
Support of land sovereignty, reproductive autonomy and safe borders would do far more to address the problems accompanying U.S. immigration, than threatening expensive deportation and promising ineffective border walls. Bettering life in communities where immigrants come from is the only effective long-term immigration policy.
At Ms. magazine, our mission is to deliver facts about the feminist movement (and those who stand in its way) and foster informed discussions—not to tell you who to vote for or what to think. We believe in empowering our readers to form their own opinions based on reliable reporting. To continue providing you with independent feminist journalism, we rely on the generous support of our readers. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today if you value the work we do and want to see it continue. Thank you for supporting women’s voices and rights.
