Washington, DC – In a stark departure from the previous administration’s approach to immigration, US President Joe Biden, together with leaders of 20 nations in the Western Hemisphere, unveiled a declaration intended to guide a coordinated response to growing migration pressures in the region. The Los Angeles Declaration, announced on Friday at the end of the ninth Americas Summit, includes giving aid to communities most affected by migration, expanding legal pathways for migrants to enter countries, humane border management, and coordinated emergency responses. Migration experts have said the Biden administration’s focus on multilateral regional cooperation and its recognition that migration is a phenomenon that needs to be managed, rather than stopped, is far removed from the stance of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Still, experts have said, there are questions about how the terms of the declaration – which are non-binding – will be executed, and whether the migrant programmes that were announced will do enough to address the needs in the region. “There are more carrots and fewer sticks,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. “There are promises of investment in the region and trying to help countries that are hosting migrants with financial and other resource support,” Cardinal Brown told Al Jazeera. “But it’s one thing to promise more visas, and it’s another thing to process more visas,” she said, in reference to the US’s inflated backlog of visa applications. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has sought to reverse Trump’s legacy on migration. As a candidate on the campaign trail, Trump vilified migrants. As president, he focused on reducing migration in the US by slashing visa and refugee programmes, and building a wall along the US-Mexico border. In 2019, he threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico if it did not do more to stop migrants from travelling to the US. “In terms of the strategy, the goals and the manner in which migration is being undertaken, it is a light and day departure from the Trump administration’s bat-wielding unilateralism,” David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera. “But this administration does not want to spend a lot of time highlighting immigration domestically,” Bier said. “They haven’t found a way to make it a winner.” Republican leaders have seized on the topic of migration as an election issue, specifically at the southern border where numbers have reached record levels. The stakes are high for Biden as the US heads for midterm elections in November, where Republicans are vying for control of Congress. In a fact sheet published on Friday detailing the declaration’s main points, the White House laid out measures that the US has already implemented in recent months, as well as adding some new commitments.
The Biden administration said it was committed to resettling 20,000 refugees from the Americas during the next two years and to providing $314m in aid for countries that are hosting refugees and migrants, which includes Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. The administration also said it would resume efforts to reunite Haitian and Cuban families in the US. “It’s certainly a step up from what we’ve done in previous years, when only a few hundred or a few thousand refugees from Latin America have been admitted each year,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “But it is also about four days’ worth of border encounters,” Reichlin-Melnick told Al Jazeera. In the fiscal year 2021, just 11,411 refugees were resettled in the US from all around the world after Trump slashed the refugee admission programme. Meanwhile, Mexico has committed to integrating 20,000 refugees into its labour market during the next three years. While Costa Rica will give protection to migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela who arrived in the country before March 2020. “Each of us is signing up to commitments that recognise the challenges we all share and the responsibility that impacts on all of our nations,” Biden said during the ceremonial unveiling of the pact. “This is just a start, he said. “Much more work remains, to state the obvious.” So far, migrant groups have commended the commitments in the declaration, saying they echo some of their demands and provide a good starting point for regional cooperation. But they also voiced concern about implementation and funding, and whether there would be any follow-up before the next summit in four years. “It is unclear how these commitments will be monitored and evaluated,” Julio Rank Wright, deputy regional director for Latin America at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said in a statement on Friday. “Without long-term funding and political will to protect those displaced throughout the region, the IRC is fearful that the Declaration’s intentions will fall flat and leave millions of people in the Americas behind,” Wright said. A few days before the Summit of the Americas was set to open in Los Angeles, Martha Peinado grabbed some poster sheets and fistfuls of marking pens to send an enthusiastically unwelcoming message to the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.
Peinado, 38, who immigrated to California from her native El Salvador in 2015, and two fellow activists whipped up a dozen posters that they plan to brandish next week at the L.A. Convention Center, which will host the five-day gathering of hemispheric leaders beginning Monday. “Nayib Bukele, US justice awaits you,” forewarned one greeting in black ink on orange poster sheets. Peinado, originally from the Salvadoran province of La Libertad, was a member of the New Ideas party that brought Bukele to power riding a populist tide of disgust with El Salvador’s two-party status quo. But in the three years that Bukele has ruled the Central American nation, Peinado said, democracy has withered while corruption and insecurity have festered, partially as a result of the government’s secretive negotiations with gang leaders. “We are going to protest because what was promised has not been fulfilled,” said Peinado, who immigrated to California in 2015 and runs a Mid-City cleaning business. “We want to show that what the president says, that the country is safer, is not true, and show that behind him there is great corruption.” For the first time since its inaugural session in 1994, the summit will take place in the hemisphere’s richest, most powerful nation. But much has changed in the nearly three decades since those days in Miami. Boosterism over the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA, has all but disappeared on both sides of the Rio Grande. China, pushing its aggressive Belt and Road initiative, is threatening U.S. hegemony in Latin America dating from the Monroe Doctrine. Then-President Trump skipped the summit’s previous session, in 2018 in Lima, Peru, sending Vice President Mike Pence in his stead. As of Wednesday, the Biden administration had yet to confirm the official guest list, and it wasn’t clear whether Bukele would attend or join the heads of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and other countries that are either uninvited by the U.S. or are boycotting the event. But whichever countries show up in Southern California may find themselves at the center of bitter political battles they thought they’d left back home. Few disputes within L.A.'s Latin American immigrant circles are fiercer than that pitting Bukele friends versus Bukele foes. Critics of the bitcoin-loving, media-bashing autocrat have vowed to assemble at the Convention Center at 9 a.m. Monday. César Fuentes, a political activist and founder of the Libertarian Movement, put out the call to action in a live broadcast on his Facebook account, where he has more than 17,000 followers. “The summit would be an opportunity for President Bukele to return to the rule of law, something that he has run over so much, and for him to redirect his efforts toward democracy,” said Fuentes, one of Peinado’s poster-making colleagues. “If he doesn’t come, then he’s just going to close the doors, because he’s going to be practically isolated.” Since its inception, the summit has served as a gathering for the Western Hemisphere’s nations to address challenges as a region, promoting economic growth and prosperity “based on common democratic values and the promise of increasing trade to improve the quality of life of all peoples,” as its goals are optimistically framed on the U.S. State Department website. But whatever transpires inside the Convention Center, there are signs that dissent and disharmony may surface next week in L.A. neighborhoods such as Westlake-MacArthur Park, a frequent staging ground for Latin American political manifestaciones. Germán Peña, president of the Nicaraguan American Opportunity Foundation, or NAOF, an entity formed in 1996 and headquartered in East Los Angeles, said that his group will be resurrecting and displaying years-old banners next week reading “Rescatemos Nicaragua” (Rescue Nicaragua). “We are going to dust them off,” said the native of the Nicaraguan city of Masaya, a longtime opposition bastion that has made it the target of brutal crackdowns by Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s former leftist guerrilla leader and now its autocratic president. House Democrats and immigrant advocates called on the Senate to vote against any legislation that would make pandemic-era asylum restrictions permanent, after a court ruling Friday that keeps the border controls in place for now. The Biden administration had planned to rescind the public health-related directive known as Title 42 on Monday, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined it was no longer needed. Instead, Judge Robert Summerhays ruled that the policy should be maintained nationwide while two dozen Republican-led states pursue a lawsuit that challenges the Biden administration decision. Title 42 has allowed border agents to rapidly “expel” migrants without considering their asylum claims for more than two years. On a call with reporters Monday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., described the ruling from a Trump-appointed Louisiana federal judge as “a decision driven by politics and not facts.” Jayapal said the court order means Title 42 will be in place regardless of congressional votes, so it is important for Democrats not to vote in favor of any legislation that “demonizes immigrants,” either a stand-alone bill or an amendment to a larger package. “This will have to play out in the courts, because we will not allow immigrants to once again be cruelly thrown under the bus,” Jayapal said.
A handful of Senate Democrats, including those soon facing tough midterm races, have joined with Republicans and raised concerns about the Biden administration’s plans to lift Title 42. Some have signed on to bipartisan legislation that would keep Title 42 in place until the public health emergency is lifted. Jayapal and other Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders last week announced they would oppose any legislation that would extend the Title 42 directive, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has done the same. Jayapal on Monday also indicated the CPC would focus its efforts on educating members of the Democratic Party. She noted that Republicans will likely continue to attack Democrats on immigration ahead of the midterm elections. Democrats sometimes feel a push to “outdo Republicans on immigration,” Jayapal said, but it “doesn’t bode well in the elections.” “I think we just have to continue to educate our own party, frankly, about how immigration works and the politics of immigration so that people don’t rush to try to, you know, ‘out-Republican’ Republicans on immigration,” Jayapal said. |