El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras recently filed a protest against the United States with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The protest petition alleges the Trump administration’s prohibition on illegal aliens applying for asylum violates the human rights of the petitioning states’ citizens. (Mexico has also joined in the protest but for reasons specific to its own political situation, which will not be addressed here.) Sadly, this is only the latest in a series of absurd legal actions connected with the migrant caravan.
Yes, you read that correctly. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – the NorthernTriangle countries – are complaining because the U.S. won’t allow people to lodge fraudulent allegations of political persecution against them. It’s roughly akin to a criminal defendant kvetching because the judge dismissed all charges and set him free.
So, what’s really going on here?
To begin with the nations of the Northern Triangle all have failing economies. All three countries could benefit from a further infusion of stable currency. And the best source for hard cash is remittance payments made by Northern Triangle citizens living abroad. Money sent home by migrants makes up 19.5% of Honduras’ GDP, 18.3% of El Salvador’s and 11.5% of Guatemala’s, according to Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean 2017.
A study by the Pew Research Center indicates that that 80% of Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran expatriates live in the United States. The inescapable conclusion: most of the money flowing into the Northern Triangle consists of American dollars earned from jobs in the U.S. economy.
In addition, all three countries are on the brink of political collapse. If you’re a sketchy leader trying to keep power in a failing state, the easiest way to avoid political change is to get rid of those willing to criticize the government. And encouraging immigration is a quick, bloodless way to export political troublemakers. That’s why most members of the migrant caravans are young men (the demographic that typically spearheads violent revolution) – despite the mainstream media’s insistence that there is a predominance of women and children.
The Role of the IACHR
The evidence that El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras care more about shedding surplus population than protecting the human rights of their citizens is unmistakable. Countries who care about their people engage in direct diplomacy when confronted with a legitimate crisis. They ask friends and neighbors for assistance, rather than filing pointless protests in kangaroo courts like the IACHR.
The IACHR is a component of the Organization of American States (a type of “mini-UN” for the Americas). Both entities are “consultative organizations” with no real power, relics of failed globalist experiments by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And the very notion that Latin American states with questionable civil rights records can call the U.S. – with the freest and fairest justice system in the world – to account for human rights abuses is absolutely ridiculous.
An Exercise in Political Theater
But, while the protest by the Northern Triangle countries is clearly an exercise in political theater, it demonstrates that parties both inside and outside the United States are intent on defeating the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda– for their own reasons. Those reasons don’t necessarily coincide with the best interests of the caravan members. Even more troubling, they run directly contrary to the best interests of the American people.
And that’s why U.S. voters should be pushing Congress to support measures that put Americans first – like a border wall, the mandatory use of E-Verify and ending abuses of our overly generous asylum system.