The world has sadly grown accustomed to photographs of people fleeing violence, war, drought, famine and a bleak future. Americans have been the faces in those photos twice in the memory of some still living: the northward migration between 1916 and 1970 of 6 million African Americans, and the mass movement of hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl residents to California and the Northwest during the Great Depression.
Now migrants are moving north from Central America to the United States, and the faces in the photos are primarily brown. A caravan estimated at between 6,000 and 7,500, organized by cellphones and social media, could be just the first wave. Most caravan members are Honduran. Many, deservedly or not, hope to receive asylum in the United States, but because most appear to be economic migrants they are unlikely to qualify under current U.S. law.
America has been protected by oceans from the kind of mass migration Europe is struggling with and caravans of Canadians are unlikely to pour south over the U.S. border. Central and South America is a different story. Both are listed by the 172-member International Organization for Migration as among the locales from which people in large numbers will be driven to flee by climate change and accompanying strife. The U.S. is a member of that organization, but perhaps only because President Donald Trump doesn’t know the group exists.
Global warming will move Americans around in large numbers as early as 2050, according to some estimates. Rising seas could drive people away from low-lying coastal areas; heat, drought, forest fires and a lack of water could force people out of the arid Southwest. A major global reshuffling of where humans live could occur. But that’s a subject for another day. Meanwhile, with an important midterm election less than two weeks away, people from the south are on the march. What should America’s response be?
First, it’s important to understand the facts as best they can be known. For that, no one should look to the nation’s demagogue-in-chief, Donald Trump. He’s his usual fountain of fog and lies.
The caravan’s members, who are under constant surveillance, are not known to contain any members of ISIS or other terrorist groups, as Trump alleges. They are not being funded by billionaire George Soros or marching north so they can vote as Democrats. On foot it would take the caravan members a month or more to reach the U.S. border and, as Trump well knows, non-citizens can’t vote. The caravan’s arrival at the border would not be, as Trump says, “a national emergency” or an “assault on America.” The migrants are not coming, as Trump claims, because Democrats have thwarted efforts at immigration reform. All reasonable, humane reforms have been killed by Republicans.
Even before the march, Trump responded to the economic and humanitarian plight of Central American nations by reducing aid to them in his budget. He’s now threatening to eliminate aid unless the caravan turns back. It’s exactly the opposite of what the U.S. should do. U.S. assistance should instead be increased and routed around corrupt politicians so it gets to the people who need it, with America’s name on it. The wisest course is to give people the help they need to remain in their home countries.
There’s no stopping immigration from places that climate change has made uninhabitable. That’s not the case in Central America, whose people, if given hope that their lives might improve, would probably decide a long march with an uncertain result is not worth the risk.