On the shifting forces driving people to migrate.

Excerpted from a multi-part interview on The Dig about developments in Central America. Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Daniel Denvir: I want to close by turning to the large scale migration from the [Central American] region.

Hilary Goodfriend: It’s not a unilateral push and expulsion, it’s a dialectical relationship. Migration is both product and premise of neoliberal restructuring. It’s central to accumulation patterns on both sides of the border. I’m including Mexico and the Caribbean basin more broadly in what we’ve seen since 2008, but especially since the pandemic, a total sort of fracture or unraveling of the prevailing migration pattern under neoliberalism that was characterized by the mass undocumented migration of mostly Mexican, mostly adult men who were incorporated into the lowest ranks of the US labor markets precisely through their criminalization. And that’s why the progressive criminalization of migration and the militarization of the border throughout the eighties and nineties and early two thousands [coincides with] a massive increase in the undocumented population.

It’s not until the financial crisis and the Great Recession that all of these indicators start to unravel and revert. The undocumented population in the US contracts for the first time, Mexican migration plunges, and the populations who are apprehended at the US southern border are increasingly comprised of, first, Central American women and children and families, and now post-pandemic, people from also across South America, the Caribbean, and well beyond this hemisphere. Not only that, but migrant repertoires have changed, no longer simply seeking irregular undetected entry. Many migrants began to organize into caravans and to present themselves to authorities to request asylum. And all of this is in response to a shift in the US from an enforcement logic of one of fostering deportability, that is, fostering illegality [i.e., closing off pathways to citizenship] in order to guarantee the subordinate insertion of these criminalized populations into the US economy to exploit them more than to expel them—a shift from that to one that favors mass expulsion and exclusion, while carving out these increasingly precarious and temporary and contingent and highly surveilled categories like TPS [Temporary Protected Status], DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], humanitarian parole and the like. 

So these shifts on three fronts—the composition of migrant populations, their mobility repertoires, and US enforcement logics—these are all indicators of this crisis of the neoliberal migration pattern, which I think we can say corresponds to this broader breakdown of neoliberal accumulation on both sides of the border, well beyond just Central America. Of course, Venezuela and Cuba, especially Venezuela, account for a disproportionate number of the people who are displaced in this period. And they’re very much casualties of direct US intervention through regime change policies. But of course, the growing numbers of climate refugees cannot be understood apart from these entangled crises of our political economy.

The US economy still demands immigrant labor both skilled and unskilled. What’s at stake in this so-called [border] crisis is rather, what are the conditions under which and in what proportions and into what sectors are people who are born outside the US going to be participating in the economy? And I think that question you ask about, not only what a more just migration policy would look like, but also a political economy that could accommodate both the right to migrate and the right to remain in one’s home and community—that’s a broader question for both citizens and non-citizens alike. The perpetuation of these trade and security regimes that drive uneven development and that siphon value from the periphery to the core, their reproduction will ensure that whatever comes next will maintain these inequities.

Jorge Cuéllar: The migration from Central America really takes off as Hillary mentioned in the mid-1970s to the 1980s, where you have what we talked about: the Central American wars taking place in the region, and the Reagan administration being challenged by this narrative of asylees and refuge that many people are seeking in the United States, fleeing from US-made forms of inequality and war-mongering that impacted most of the countries that today we try to categorize as the “Northern Triangle.” We have to be really specific about those three countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. 

Interestingly, we often forget that there were preexisting systems of people having mobility within the region, the Central American border agreement, CA4, that allowed many countries, including Nicaragua, to sort of “move in place” and find ways of living and making a dignified life across the different borders. Imposition of US-style border controls in the region is a policy of enclosure to keep a very super-exploited labor force quarantined in some ways in Central America, in order to service the call center economy, the maquiladoras, all these forms of flexible labor that Central Americans are being corralled into.¹ That also adds to the pressure cooker of migration that will explode in different kinds of ways over time.

What’s happening with the caravans, these are the poorest of the poor in terms of the migrants that are leaving these countries. All the well-to-do ones have left or would leave in more organized ways through visas and through other forms of paid mobility. Caravans are an expression of the incredible immiseration of Central American people that are leaving en masse for safety in numbers. And this also becomes a moment where you have on the U.S. side of the border that intensified xenophobic discourse, that this is an “invading horde of people.” And this not only begins to stimulate again the fear of the migrant “other,” that racialized, supposedly subhuman individual coming from the south, and also the militarization of these zones… You have the phenomenon of DACA-ization and TPS always being that perpetual problem for the belonging of Central American peoples, and increasingly Haitians and others in the United States. DACA and TPS are always on the chopping block. That creates these conditions of impermanence in the United States and that deportation cycle, where in many cases people get deported back to Central America to inhospitable realities impacted by insecurity at all levels—criminal insecurity or social insecurity, also climate insecurity, food insecurity. And all these different factors contribute to many of those people attempting to come back again.

In terms of what we might consider a resolution, it’s not what we have heard in the 2024 election cycle around attacking “root causes,” because the way that root causes are articulated by the US government is just more of the same: it’s an investment in the private sector as the only site for solutions and for fixing social problems. It’s propping up and legitimizing authoritarian regimes. This is always the way that the United States has dealt with the region. This is why figures like [President of El Salvador, Nayib] Bukele are tolerated by the United States because seemingly they’re stemming migration—even though statistically we know this is not true, because Bukele’s project is not addressing the fundamental inequalities that are longstanding and that are so deeply rooted ever since all these moments that we’ve been talking about, dating from the 1980s, where these things have simply gotten worse over time.

Source: Hilary Goodfriend and Jorge Cuéllar, “Crypto Dystopia or Popular Democracy,” The Dig, 2024.