Caribbean & Central America - September 2017 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Hondurans are not migrating north in the same numbers as previously, as evidenced by a sharp reported fall in deportations of illegal migrants from Mexico and the US in the first eight months of 2017. The government led by President Juan Orlando Hernández insists that the fall in returnees (or ‘retornados’) partly reflects stronger economic growth and improved internal security in Honduras, meaning that fewer people are leaving the country to seek opportunities elsewhere. 

The Honduran Consular and Migratory Observatory (Conmigho), a dependency of the foreign ministry, reported a 32% fall in deportations of undocumented Hondurans in the first eight months of the year. In January-August 2017, 31,705 were returned home, down sharply from 46,461 in the year-earlier period. Based on those figures, the annual figure for deportations could be in the region of 48,000.

That is still very high – but considerably lower than the almost 70,000 (69,370) deported in 2016. There was a fresh surge in migration from Central America’s ‘Northern Triangle’ (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) in 2016, as people sought to get into the US ahead of the November election (won by Donald Trump on a forcefully anti-immigration platform).

Of the total recorded returnees to date this year, 18,251 were sent back from Mexico and 13,337 from the US, with 108 from elsewhere in Central America (mostly Guatemala and Belize) plus a handful from South America (five) and Europe (four), according to the Conmigho data.

The Honduran government claims stronger economic growth is deterring migration. Presenting an expansive 2018 budget in early September, the finance minister Wilfredo Cerrato said the country was on course for real annual GDP growth of 4% this year, up from 3.7% in 2016. While things are better, the government admits that real annual growth needs to be higher, at around 7%-8%, so as to eliminate the entrenched poverty in the country. According to the World Bank, poverty still affected over 66% of the population (of 8m) in 2016, with unemployment of well over 8%.

María Andrea Matamoros Castillo, the deputy foreign minister, is keen to emphasise that the government is now more successfully reintegrating returnees, helping them to re-settle and remain, while simultaneously working on education programs to discourage others from making the same perilous journey.

Since the child-migrant crisis on the US-Mexico border in 2014, the Honduran government, with US support, has invested in new centres for returned migrants, known as Centros de Atención al Migrante Retornado. Along with family reunification, these centres also offer medical assistance, counselling, education, and employment advice, and other essential reintegration services. According to Matamoros Castillo, the government hopes to have 15 centres in all operating in the country by year-end.

Child migrants

The registered deportations from Mexico to August included 2,916 minors (children and adolescents aged under 17). Another 149 minors were sent back from the US, with 41 from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize, four from Europe and two from South America.

At the peak of the child migrant crisis in 2014, immigration authorities in the US and Mexico deported some 9,000 Honduran minors between them. In 2015, the figure was 7,000. On official Honduran figures, the Mexican authorities deported 8,968 Honduran minors in 2016, with 235 returned by the US, for a total of 9,151, a renewed increase, and in line with the general increase in migration last year.

That the majority of these youngsters were processed in Mexico underlines the fact that the US has succeeded since 2014 in pressuring the Mexican authorities to deal with the issue before it crosses the border.

If accurate, the latest figures for this year from Conmigho suggest a sharp drop in overall deportations of Hondurans – including minors - in 2017. Amid some economic and security improvements at home (albeit these improvements are marginal at best for many), and a hardening policy stance by US and Mexican authorities, there may be less of an incentive to migrate currently. Nonetheless, for many desperate youngsters subsisting in conditions of extreme poverty and violence, the pull factor will remain strong. Inevitably, Conmigho does not capture data on all illegal migrants; only those detained and processed. Some make it to the US; many more die or go missing en route.

An uncertain situation in the US

The Tegucigalpa government estimates that there are 1m Hondurans living in the US overall (both legally and illegally). Many of those affected by the Trump administration’s newly announced decision to end the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA, or DREAM Act) are young Hondurans who entered the US illegally at a very young age and who are, effectively, US citizens (see sidebar).

Honduran and other Central American migrants will also be disproportionately affected if the Trump administration decides to eliminate the so-called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of migrants. TPS is an immigration law provision that allows the US government to grant temporary work permits and protection from deportation to migrants (including otherwise undocumented migrants), from countries in which living conditions are considered ‘dangerous’. This includes countries caught up in armed conflict or civil war, suffering natural disasters or epidemics, or other ‘extraordinary’ conditions. While meant to be a temporary designation, the provision has been rolled over for nigh on 20 years. Honduran migrants in the US were among the first to be awarded TPS status, back in 1998 (just after Sudanese migrants in 1997).

The Trump administration is now considering putting an end to TPS – potentially affecting some 444,000 people in the US, including over 86,000 Hondurans and an estimated 236,000 Salvadoreans, many of whom fled the country’s civil war and economic chaos. Again, most of these migrants – who have been legally resident and legally working in the US for years now (including paying social security and medicare) – have raised and educated families and are fully integrated into the US, with their US-born children not knowing any other life.

An official US decision on the position of Honduran TPS beneficiaries is due in January. At a meeting in July with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the then-Homeland Security Secretary, John Kelly (formerly head of US Southern Command and thus well versed in Central American issues), was distinctly non-committal. Kelly, now President Trump’s chief of staff, is known to be keen to limit immigration, albeit his position on the regularisation of the 11m migrants already in the US is less concrete. President Hernández, along with his Central American counterparts, has been lobbying intensively in Washington for continuation of the TPS or, alternatively, for a pragmatic (and preferably permanent) solution for these vulnerable Hondurans in the US.

GDP

With a GDP of US$22bn, Honduras is the second poorest country in Central America. Honduran migrants remit some US$3.6bn a year to family members, mostly from the US – the equivalent of almost 17% of GDP.

Alex Ortiz

Among the largely critical US media response to the Trump decision, The New Yorker magazine in mid-September ran a profile of Alex Ortiz, a young Honduran brought to Memphis aged 10. Thanks to DACA, Ortiz noted, he was able to go to university and has since interned in the office of Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) in the US Congress – which, ironically, may now decide his whole future (Trump has ordered congress to resolve the matter).