August 6, 2008 9:55 AM
This series, marking the 25th Anniversary of the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) looks back at the early days of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island.
When I started working at CARECEN in 1983, I was a young law student at Hofstra. Although I had hoped that the recently passed Refugee Act of 1980 could be used to protect the growing Central American population on Long Island, I was quickly disabused of that notion. The Refugee Act provided for asylum for people showing that they had a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries. It did not set a political litmus test and should presumably protect those fleeing right-wing dictatorships as well as left-wing ones.
But that was not how the law was administered. I represented refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua during the 1980s. The asylum approval rate for Salvadorans was about 2%, and for Guatemalans it was about 1%. The approval rate for Nicaraguans at times rose as high as 77%. All three had governments that engaged in human rights abuses, with Guatemala clearly being the worst. So why the big difference in approvals?
Nicaragua was ruled by the Sandinistas at the time, a leftist movement that had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship. Granting refuge to persons from Nicaragua, whatever its other merits, was part of a Reagan Administration effort to convince the world that the repressive nature of the Sandinistas was driving people out of the country. Ed Meese, the Attorney General and head of immigration during the Reagan years, referred to the Nicaraguans leaving their country as "foot-people", evoking images of the Vietnamese and Cuban "boat-people", people who risked everything to try to escape tyranny.
Unfortunately for the image Meese was trying to generate, there were even more people fleeing El Salvador and Guatemala. The refugee flows from these countries were many time that of Nicaragua. I say that this was unfortunate for the Reaganauts because tiny El Salvador was the fourth largest recipient of United States aid in the world during the 1980s, and Guatemala was so important to the Administration that the President's men developed an illegal chanel to funnel support to the military regime.
Finding that refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador faced persecution in their homelands would be tantamount to finding that the United States supported outlaw regimes that violated human rights.
Accordingly, asylum policy was set in direct controvention of the Refugee Act's non-partisan standard. Those fleeing Communist or leftist governments would be granted. Those fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and the U.S.-supported dictatorship in Haiti would be, in the words of a human rights report, detained, denied, and deported..
Find out about CARECEN25 Dinner
Here are other articles in this series tracing the early years of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island:
CARECEN's 25th Anniversary
Teaching English/Learning about immigration
In the beginning
Refugees without recognition