CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Immigration Debate Starts Too Late

One of the great evasions in American immigration politics is that the story begins at the border. The uncomfortable truth is that it begins decades earlier, in countries where the United States undermined democracy, protected corporate interests of influential Americans, funded violent regimes producing the instability that now sends desperate people north. Only by erasing that history can we turn migrants into criminals and ourselves into victims. That history matters because it changes the moral meaning of the border because if we believe migrants are simply arriving from failed countries, then enforcement can look like national self-defense. But if some are fleeing instability that American power produced, then the border becomes the place where the United States immorally converts its own history into someone else’s criminality.

That is the part we are trained not to see, because seeing it would make the flag feel less like a symbol of innocence and more like evidence requiring historical accounting. We tell ourselves the United States is democracy’s guardian, freedom’s defender, the country that protects the right of people to choose their own leaders. But in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile and elsewhere, the United States repeatedly undermined or helped destroy democratic movements when democracy threatened corporate profit, Cold War strategy or American dominance. (JUAN GONZALEZ, HARVEST OF EMPIRE 152-154 (2d ed. 2022)). Then, after helping make lawful life impossible in some of those places, we meet the survivors at the border with raids, detention centers, deportations and speeches about law and order.

That is not just a minor contradiction at the margins of American politics, but it is the great evasion in the immigration debate: we destroyed countries then criminalized many of the people fleeing the wreckage and taught ourselves to call that border security.

Donald Trump made this evasion brutally plain when he reportedly referred to non-European nations as “shithole countries” while contrasting them with places like Norway. The insult was obscene, but the deeper obscenity was the historical amnesia underneath it. The phrase invited Americans to look down at broken places without asking who helped break them, to treat migrants as evidence of other nations’ failures rather than as witnesses to our own, and to convert poverty, violence and political collapse into proof that desperate people deserve exclusion instead of recognition.

Consider Guatemala. In 1954, the United States helped overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected president whose land reforms threatened the........

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