Foreign Affairs - 11.2019 - 12.2019

Nowhere to Go

November/December 2019 127

quarter o‘ this year, 46 percent o“ Iraqi asylum seekers received recog-
nition in Germany, compared with 13 percent in the United Kingdom.

Petitioners from failed or fragile Middle Eastern or sub-Saharan Afri-
can countries faced—and still face—a sort o‘ recognition lottery whose
outcome depends on whether judges and bureaucrats are prepared to
shoehorn today’s circumstances into Cold War categories. But few Eu-

ropean governments wanted to abandon the old terminology and cate-
gories. Governments led by right-of-center parties did not want to
open themselves up to possibly greater obligations; those led by left-of-
center parties did not want to risk jeop-

ardizing the 1951 convention.
A similar dynamic seems to be at
work in the Americas today, where out-
dated notions obscure the reality o‘ sur-

vival migration. Nowhere is this truer
than in Central America. In the Ärst
eight months o‘ this year, around 508,000
people left the so-called Northern Tri-

angle region, which consists o“ El Salvador, Guatemala, and Hondu-
ras, bound for the United States. This represents almost double the
number who made that trip in any single year since 2014, an increase
that has played a major role in the dramatic spike in U.S. border ap-

prehensions. Meanwhile, in the past six years, there has been a more
than tenfold increase in the number o‘ U.S. asylum applications from
these three countries.
The reasons Central American migrants have for emigrating are

often complex. Poverty levels are high across the Northern Triangle.
Drought has contributed to large-scale crop failure, undermining live-
lihoods and food security in these predominantly agricultural societies.
The ™£ has suggested that climate change is in part to blame. Mean-

while, weak governance contributes to pervasive corruption and vio-
lence in the absence o‘ public services.
The most visible manifestation o‘ survival migration from the
Northern Triangle has been the migrant caravans that have periodi-

cally tried to enter the United States through Mexico. A survey by the
International Organization for Migration o‘ 800 people in the Ärst
caravans o‘ 2019 revealed the complicated motives o‘ the Central
Americans who have participated in the northern exodus, with 45 per-

cent o‘ those polled indicating that they had moved mainly for better

The rhetoric of xenophobic

right-wing ¥gures in the

United States echoes the

pronouncements of their

European counterparts.