So it's really complicated oh absolutely i'm thinking of a book called uh deaths of despair which really looks at places like appalachia the in rural america in general where when the companies came in they raised the standard of living but then when they leave then you leave behind basically suicide alcoholism drug abuse domestic violence and and that those deaths which aren't microbe based right not they're they're not infectious diseases they're just as deadly and the social fabric ends up being completely disrupted how do you get that back is such a difficult uh question and the central american people now to kind of turn it around to the the end topic of your book which is about central american immigration,
Coming up to the united states um it seems like that's really their only other option is to well you know they could come to mexico maybe work there but that's not going to be the best option and so they go through mexico up to the u.s to have some type of an economic option even though this started with the war right they started leaving because they're fleeing violence but now there's been this continuous stream of people and now they're leaving because of violence and economic problems can you go into detail about some of those yeah so i mean i think that there's two ways in which the wars really led directly to today's migration one is by disrupting violently disrupting rural life um destroying communities uh destroying land uprooting,
People fleeing to the cities communities being destroyed um so this massive population upheaval that destroyed the the fabric of of rural life that that you were talking about a little while ago um a couple minutes ago when i changed the subject and never answered your question um and the other way is that by destroying the left by destroying the revolutionary movements the united states opened the floodgates to full-fledged neo-liberal reform and that's like the fourth conquest of central america so and that has taken place in nicaragua as much as in el salvador and guatemala and even costa rica so the tattered remains of the social welfare state being destroyed the free trade agreements this huge influx of u.s investment now in things like the maculadora industries,
Which have taken over central america new export crops what they call non-traditional exports palm oil uh to help us uh have greener gasoline in the united states what they call biofuels or agrofuels um so the removal of the last vestiges of state support for workers for the natural environment for the poor for small farmers um have uh really you know it took the wars to destroy uh the the social movements that were opposing this and then the the floodgates were just opened so the degree of economic despair and dispossession um again it's like a quantum leap since the end of the wars so we have even more more people fleeing now than we did during the wars um but the wars i think really set the groundwork for what's happening now they also laid the groundwork in terms of chain migration,
This is a phenomenon um you know trump tried to kind of demonize chain migration but chain migration has been going on um as long as we've been able to record history that is um when one person from a family or extended family or community migrates um that opens the possibility for other people to migrate because they send back remittances they send back news people know somebody in the place where they're going to they can tell them if there's jobs um this is something that's been going on for for centuries uh so um so the refugee generation also laid the groundwork um for subsequent generations to to follow them and that's a whole other aspect that would take a long time to go into and you explain a lot in your other books and undocumented about the refugee or immigrant life in the united states too,
But the kind of to to finish this off what kinds of policy changes do you think would be i mean i know you as as a historian it's hard to say well what you do in the future but i know you have some ideas about about some of the flaws in our uh immigration policy what kinds of changes would you think would improve the situation i you know i do definitely think we need to change our immigration policies but also you know the situation is bigger than our immigration policies it's also the policies that we're imposing on central america that are forcing people to migrate so um you know biden talked a lot back in the days when biden and harris were talking about immigration now they're not anymore but back in the days when they were they talked about addressing the root causes of migration,
But they never identified what are actually the root causes of migration but i think we do need to think about the root causes of migration which are things like the central american free trade agreement like the waze uh the um neoliberal structural adjustment policies forced on central american countries by international financial institutions um debt so uh you know really fundamentally rethinking our economic relationship with central america uh i think would be one basis to looking at the root causes not pouring more money into policing and military and promoting foreign investment in central america but letting central american governments actually implement policies to create more equal and more just and more democratic countries,
In terms of immigration policy per se obviously the punitive criminalization of immigrants that has been a democratic as much as a republican uh set of policies at least since the 1990s um has not stopped migration it's only served to make migrants more exploitable um and create huge amounts of human suffering both in central america on the border and among immigrants in the united states so treating immigrant rights as human rights and grant uh eliminating this issue of status that gives some people rights and other people not rights and just following the basis basic uh tenet that everybody has rights everybody has rights doesn't matter where you're born you still have rights um i think has to be the basis of our immigration policy,
That means very concretely and specifically rolling back one by one the uh the policies that have been put into place over the last 30 years to criminalize and um oppress immigrants that's very well said and i would encourage listeners to read undocumented as well as they take our jobs and and then central america's forgotten history to get a much deeper and more detailed sense of the kinds of the ins and outs of why people immigrate to the united states and how people are distinguished between legal and illegal to how these are kind of invented terms by humans as you point out and how and that also means that these uh laws can be changed and in fact there are you know people like milton friedman even was in favor of open borders,
So this is not something that necessarily has to be a left-wing or a right-wing thing but that the way that the narrative has been shaped for a long time i'm thinking going back to like governor duke magen's uh campaign in california and and uh and so much of the other discussions that have taken place in the past three decades as you say then uh then they're just very flawed and they're not helping people, people dying in the desert in arizona by the thousands over this period of time this is as a result of these higher levels of restrictions and they're just not helping to stem the flow and it's also not helping the people on either side of the border well i really appreciate you talking to us today dr aviva chomsky and i uh really look forward to reading your future work as well if um anybody out there is interested in and giving us a review please do so and we will talk to you guys another time thanks a lot.
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