State Sponsored Xenophobia in the Americas

Abstract

Us versus them. Americans versus foreigners. These divisive, contrasting terms seem to have become a national obsession since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his unrelenting war against immigrants. Trump began his presidential bid by going after Mexican immigrants, and once in office, he has made tough immigration policies a top priority for his administration. But Pres. Trump is not alone. Across the hemisphere, national leaders have taken a hardline stance on immigration, too (some even before Trump did). A hemispheric “wall” of rejection is being built to keep the immigrant Other away. Immigration has accordingly become the civil rights issue of our time. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found there are 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. To that number, one can add millions of migrants, mostly from the Global South, currently living in the United Sates. That means that a large segment of humanity in the rejoin—the largest since World War II—lives outside of their country of origin. Though most of the refugee population nowadays comes from the Middle East and Africa, the Western Hemisphere has more than its share of people on the move: thousands of Central Americans seeking to reach safe haven in the United States, at least three million Venezuelans that have fled the recent economic implosion of their country, and decades of large-scale emigration from most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to the Global North. As a result, the sheer number of migrants and refugees has altered the demographic landscape of the hemisphere since World War II. Some nations in the Americas have witnessed the arrival of immigrant waves for the first time in recent memory (e.g., Chile). Others have seen changes in the size, direction, and composition of historical flows (e.g., Argentina). There are also some countries in the hemisphere that have been taken by surprise by the sudden, unexpected influx of thousands of migrants/refugees in response to regional crises (e.g., Colombia, Ecuador, and arguably the United States). And then, there are those countries in which immigrants and their children are perceived (at least by a vocal segment of the population) as being on the cusp of reaching a demographic tipping point, thus threatening the dominance of natives (e.g., the Dominican Republic and the United States).